Along the same lines of FareCompare, FareChase claims to help you select when to buy your airfare based on historical trend data on airfare rates. FareChase seems to have a cleaner approach with a look and feel that more resembles a commerce travel site.

FareChases’s results page (limited to just a few cities in the beta version) gives a easy-to-read fare history graph, flight times with prices and a great fare prediction tool that gives you tips on whether you should buy now or wait for rates to go down. It’s perfect for those of us who have some flexibility when we travel and are price conscious.

in a the spirit of 2.0, you can currently cast your vote for your home airport to be included in the next release. What a great way to decide the order to add airports to their data… OH, and to collect your email address too. (-;

Airfare Predictions, Find Cheap Airline Tickets – Farecast

Most success stories, be they personalities or businesses, involve someone or some entity reinventing itself to stay relevant.  Everything from Apple to Madonna.

I think the writing is on the wall and online travel agencies better do something rather quick to stay relevant in the eyes of traveling consumers.  And it’s not new technology, it’s a shift in their attitude and thinking in regards to their place in the buying cycle, their place as content providers and even their revenue models.

I, for one, have been using the method mentioned in the following San Francisco Business Times article for some time now:

“The Orbitzes and Hotels.coms of the world continue to be useful for price shopping, but more and more customers are going straight to the source to make reservations.”

Why book a United airline ticket and a Hilton hotel on Expedia when I’m “guaranteed” to get the best price by booking directly with the supplier.  I have to punch in my credit card number twice?  Big deal.  Plus, if I’m part of the suppliers loyalty program I can usually get some bonus points/miles by doing so.  Expedia does have some great shopping tools though; so I use their site, but they don’t get my business.  Add to that a collection of “Travel 2.0” sites that are in the works and suddenly using agency sites to shop price starts to lose its draw as well.

The San Francisco Business Times piece quotes Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hospitality as saying:

“Third-party sites ‘have to go out of being a Wal-Mart and low-price leader and become more of the Consumer Reports for hotels.’”

Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best answer either.  There are a few good travel review sites out there now and I don’t think there is room for many more on a macro level (niches, however, yes).  The newest trends on the internet are collaboration, community driven content, etc.  Those are the angles that the agencies needs to be thinking about.  The challenge is turing that into a real revenue model, however, even if the hotel and air reservations go away (or play second fiddle).

Right now the agencies are pushing packages as something that the suppliers can’t offer and of which they may still hold a price advantage.  This seems like a band-aid solution to me.  It’s only a matter of time before the supplier sites are packaging too and undercutting the agencies once again.  There are no easy answers for the agencies, and they tend to move as fast as a herd or turtles.

Another interesting bit from the article linked below is Conley’s analysis of how the agencies got into this predicament, which I think puts it in terms that any of us working in online travel in the late 90′s already understands (I made my living selling inventory that the hotels considered distressed; and I once stayed at the Bellagio 3 nights for $70)…

“The travel downturn came at the same time (third-party Internet sites) tried to build their business, and they were able to rocket to the moon overnight,” Conley said. “Everyone was looking for a travel deal, and they thought of these web sites as the place to get the best price.” Hoteliers have made sure that is no longer the case, and have invested to improve their own company web sites.

Read the entire article here:

As business clicks, hotels unplug from travel sites – San Francisco Business Times

Online Agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc.) do one thing really well, allow you to shop for the best price.  I would be interested to find out, however, how much money these agencies leave on the table from consumers who shop price on the agency site but then buy direct from the supplier.

I can’t remember the last time I actually booked on one of the big agency sites; but I regularly use Orbitz to shop for the best airline prices.  Orbitz has some great tools, like one that allows you to search all the rates in any given 30-day period.  For me, that tool allows me to plan travel when the rates are lowest and has saved me hundreds of dollars.  However, as soon as I find the rate I always go to the airline’s own site to book the ticket, which then saves me enough money for a Starbucks in the terminal.  I understand that there’s not much margin available on stand-alone air tickets for the agencies, but I also have similar methods for hotel rates and rental cars.  And very seldom to I buy packaged offers, which puts in the majority along with 60% of of all travelers (according to JupiterResearch).

These seem like big challenges to me…  Are agency sites going to go away as supplier sites get more sophisticated?  Probably not.  If you combine the fact that package purchases are on the rise (JupiterResearch) and that consumers are much more likely to use an agency for combination purchases than supplier sites (PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Eighth Edition), it appears that agency sites are in a good place if they can continue to offer packaged products at unbeatable prices.

But it’s not going to be easy, especially if supplier sites catch up with them from a technology standpoint (ability to build and buy packages with products from different suppliers).  And, they HAVE to compete on price.  All of the research points to this as being the number one factor – over brand, selection, convenience, loyalty programs or pretty colors.

comScore just released a new analysis of the online travel market based on data from 2005.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Nearly 150 million consumers visited a travel Web site in 2005, a 35-percent increase over the previous year.

• Annual online travel revenues exceeded $60 billion in 2005, representing a 20-percent increase versus 2004.

• Consumers have been slowly migrating from online agencies to branded airline, hotel or car rental supplier sites. However, both online agency and supplier sites are growing, with agencies posting a 19-percent gain versus 2004 and suppliers recording 21 percent growth.

• Branded supplier sites captured approximately 57 percent of online travel dollars in 2005, up from 55 percent in 2004.

• Supplier sites, which accounted for 53 percent of airline ticket sales in 2003, have grown in popularity in recent years to capture 58 percent of airline ticket sales in 2005. A similar pattern has emerged in the hotel segment, where supplier sites have grown from a 52 percent share in 2003 to 59 percent in 2005, with the growth from 2004 to 2005 being particularly strong.

• When people begin the process of researching travel services online, 46 percent indicated that the first site they visited was either Expedia, Travelocity or Orbitz — nearly double the proportion of people who reported starting their research at a branded airline, hotel or car rental site (24 percent).

For more information:comScore Study Finds 35-Percent Increase in Number of Consumers Visiting Travel Sites

Here is an interesting piece on a company creating mp3 walking tours of major cities. They’re doing it with the “iPod Generation” in mind (complete with a “motley crew of punk rockers, exotic dancers, tribal leaders, and FBI agents” as narrators, which strikes me as a generalization of the so-called iPod generation). But, a number of other young companies are beginning to do this for other types of self-guided tours and different demographics too, I’m sure.

I don’t believe that this technology is only useful to the young and tech-savvy. People of all ages seem to be able to use the audio guide devices at art museums. That’s really all the more complex it needs to be.

Imagine taking a walking tour of a city like Santa Fe, NM. You order your walking guide ahead of time or buy it at a kiosk downtown or at the chamber office. It comes in multiple languages and with various content choices (art galleries, architecture, culture, etc.). Then, you can choose from audio only – loaded to your mp3 player – or a preloaded device that is a simple mp3 player and headphones. In fact the device could be a simple flash device that the user could keep and plug in via USB to their computer at home to put their own music on later, or simply throw away. The amount of flash memory needed for a tour is nearing disposable prices now; after all, we do have disposable cell phones. Maybe a drop box at the airport would allow them to get a small deposit back…

Who knows exactly… But, my point is that this will not be limited to the young iPod carrying crowd, and the company that’s most successful will appeal to all ages and all demographics.

iPod, therefore I travel