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Agents Versus Internet
Cheap Charlie · September 25, 2000

About this time last year I tested travel agents against the best that the Internet travel services had to offer in terms of finding the lowest fare from Boston to London over Thanksgiving. There was no comparison, travel agents won every time. That was what I reported then.

Today, it seems that travel agents still normally win when it comes to finding the lowest fare, but more importantly, they win by providing a far more level playing field than found in the Internet. The Web weasels are having a great time in the Internet travel world.

On Friday, September 8, 2000, I decided to search for an airfare between Boston and Los Angeles. I set up the departure date as leaving September 14th and returning on September 17th. There was a Saturday night stay in there.

I started the experiment in order to test the mettle of a new discount site, Savvio, against Travelocity, Expedia and ITA. I actually wanted to test Hotwire as well, but could never get it to funtion properly.

In terms of price Savvio came out on top, but the pickings were very slim. They offered a round trip flight for $511.79 on ATA with four seats left and the next best price was on TWA for $1,649.18 with a similar number of seats available. These prices didn't sound like much of a deal to me. I checked further.

I went into Expedia where they listed the lowest fare as $888 on Frontier Airlines followed by a $1,063 fare from Midwest Express and then $1,539 from United.

Next came Travelocity. Here an interesting thing happened - every time I punched in my request, the first flights to be listed were American Airlines flights for the tidy sum of $2,263. I then conducted a search again indicating that I was willing to leave at any time and the screen indicated that there was an ATA flight for $677 on these dates. I then clicked on the button which indicated "more fares" and the next screen I saw was displaying the same American Airlines $2,263 flights.

It seems that Travelocity is setting their system to default to American Airlines and thus sell more American Airlines tickets. I am not a technical wizard, but when the computer constantly displays American Airline flights every time I don't make a specific request, there is something rotten in the online world.

In the old day American Airlines got in trouble doing what seems to me to be this same thing with the Computer Reservations Systems (CRSs) used by travel agents. It eventually took government intervention to get things fixed and level the playing field between airlines.

Some people never learn. Though Travelocity and Sabre were ostensibly "spun off" from American and AMR, there still seems to be some kind of insider hanky panky. Unfortunately, in this case it is entirely legal since the Internet hasn't been regulated. But just you wait.

The very people who scream about regulation seem to be those who abuse deregulation every chance they get. I have heard that Travelocity executives claim they can affect the number of tickets sold by various airlines merely by changing the way that their fares are presented on the Internet. That is exactly what they are already doing. Big Brother Sabre is controlling what you see in their system.

OK, back to the airfares. I then went into ITA Software to search for their lowest fares. Here I had a selection of a hundred or so. I don't really know since I only scanned the first 69. ITA displayed the lowest scheduled service as the same ATA flight costing $677. This was the same as the lowest fare found through Travelocity and on the same flight that Savvio was selling for $511.79.

Interestingly, ITA listed 69 different airline and fare combinations that were less expensive than the second lowest price, Midwest Express for $1,063, listed on Expedia. ITA had a Northwest flight for $743 and a Frontier flight for $776. On Travelocity I only found the ATA $677 fare and then fares jumped to AA at $2,263.

Go figure.

The winner on price was Savvio. The winner on numbers of options was ITA. The loser was Expedia - no matter what way I tried to get fares, the lowest fare available was through Frontier for $888.

But the biggest loser in this fiasco is the consumer. Every site flashes in garish banners that it offers "Lowest Fares." Unfortunately the "lowest" to which they refer is their own pricing and in most cases does not compare to any other online service, CRS or airline reservation system.

The moral of this story - don't trust online reservation services to provide the lowest fares. Make sure to check several because it seems the online world has developed a bad anticonsumer infection.

Not only are most of the online reservation systems a complicated pain in the AQQ to use, they are not honest except according to a Clintonian definition.

Next week Cheap Charlie will be filing from Sydney where I'll be looking for Olympic bargains. If anyone has any suggestions on good restaurants in Sydney, I'd appreciate them. Send them along.

Charlie Leocha is the Boston-based author of Travel Rights: Know the Rules of the Road and the Air Before You Go. Cheap Charlie appears every Monday on this site. E-mail him at cheapch@aol.com or access his Web site.