Ah, the problems budget travelers used to have. Hours on the phone with the airlines trying to pin down the cheapest fare. A bargain B&B that looked great in the brochure – if only there were a way to access feedback from previous guests. I wish there was a way to tell the world in 140 characters or less that I made it to the top of this Mayan temple!
How quaint. But there are still plenty of problems out there, just waiting to ensnare the traveler. Below are five, along with relatively new Web sites that are trying to solve them. Note: "trying." None of them work perfectly and some have a long way to go before they become household names. But they all get an A for ingenuity.
1) Business travelers on expense accounts pay the same airfares as penny-pinching leisure travelers.
It's that old economics problem: one group of consumers would pay more than another – if only companies could create separate markets. Airlines have made attempts (by creating business class, for example), but for the most part, business and leisure travelers are lumped together. The booking site GetGoing has a clever solution for flexible travelers called "Pick Two, Get One." It is similar to a normal booking site, with one major catch: customers must select two flights – to different cities – and reserve with a credit card before finding out where they're heading. The idea is that business travelers, presumably with appointments scheduled, can't leave to chance whether they'll be landing in Istanbul or Beijing.
Of course, not every leisure traveler can either, but for the more flexible ones, the savings are significant. To test it, I entered dates for a weeklong European getaway from New York in June. Given a choice of 20 major cities, I picked Venice and Athens, and for each got a long list of flight options and prices, with airline names hidden. (I could have also chosen more proximate destinations, like Barcelona versus Madrid or Frankfurt versus Berlin.) Ruling out flights with too-long layovers, I picked the cheapest options left: Athens for $1,114 and Venice for $1,166. (Those prices were about 15 percent less than what I found doing the same search for each city on Kayak.com.) I put down my (fake) credit card information and soon got the result: Athens, on Delta, for $213 less than the best Kayak price for a similar flight. Pretty impressive.
2) You have a day in Paris (or Seattle or Bangkok), but don't have the time or patience to piece together a sensible itinerary from the standard sources.
Mosey lets you browse itineraries, walking tours, favorites lists and more created by fellow users. It's not the first site ever to let travelers share tips, of course, but the format is compellingly concise, attractive and useful. At their best, these "Moseys" provide step-by-step agendas accompanied by photos and a map with all locations already pinpointed. The site is new, and the entries are still quite hit-or-miss. But when I plugged in São Paulo (the city I know best, aside from New York), I got a daylong itinerary I thought was pretty darn good. That said, the site is far from ready for prime time: it needs more content (get to work, readers) and some way to rank them by quality and filter them by length and type (get to work, Mosey).
3) It's extremely difficult and time-consuming to book flights for a multicity international trip.
If you've only ever booked flights for simple routes like Washington to Paris or Los Angeles to Cancún, you probably think sites like Kayak, Expedia, Hipmunk and the like work pretty well. But if you are making multiple stops or need to search regional flights elsewhere in the world, they tend to fall apart. (This was confirmed for me recently in China, when a youth hostel staff member found me a one-way Chongqing-to-Shanghai price for half the price I had found using the usual suspects.) Flightfox provides a crowd-sourced solution: For $24 for a one-way trip, adding on $5 for each leg and more for business class, users plug in an itinerary and receive responses, typically from three to five "experts" who attempt to find the cheapest, most convenient options. Of course, this is precisely what travel agents do, but good luck finding just the right agent to book your flight from Senegal to Bhutan with a three-day stop in Kazakhstan.
4) When you do book flights yourself, it's hard to keep track of all the options you find along the way before you can lock down your dates or confer with your travel partners.
You should see my desk when I'm researching flights: dates and times and prices from search engines and airline sites end up scattered across notepads and random scraps of paper. By the time I'm ready to book a few days later, I often can't read my own handwriting (if I can find my notes at all).
Pintrips has a cool solution. You set up an account and give the site permission to infiltrate (probably not the technical term) the booking sites you visit. From then on when you do searches, "Pin" buttons appear alongside each flight option. Click on the ones you like, and they are saved to your Pintrips account. Move on to other sites, look there for better prices or more convenient itineraries, and "Pin" those too.
When you come back an hour or a day or a week later and open Pintrips, all those options you "Pinned" are neatly organized – and their prices automatically updated. (Guess what, they went up.) Click on any of the options, and you're taken right back to the booking site — no need to re-enter any information. You can also share the list with travel partners.
Pintrips does not work with all major sites (yet), though the biggest American carriers are on board, as well as sites like Kayak, Expedia and Orbitz.
5) I know what I like in my home city — too bad I can't leverage that knowledge to figure out what I'd like in the city I'm visiting.
In other words, say you like (or hate) Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and want to find a similar neighborhood in London so you can spend time there (or avoid it like the plague)?
Zofari tries to do for cities what Pandora does for music or Netflix does for movies: take neighborhoods (as well as restaurants and bars) you know you like, run your picks through an algorithm and spit out other places you'll (theoretically) like just as much. For restaurants, for example, it uses publicly available data like cuisine, price, attire and the like to assign attributes to restaurants and match them with similar restaurants in other cities.
It's not quite there yet. The cities are limited, and the results a bit disappointing: Williamsburg renders London's Soho because it is "so, so chic," features "The Drinking Crowd" and is a "Scene." (At least for now, actual humans seem to do this much better.) And the site is optimized for mobile browsers, so it barely functions on a regular computer. (Or, at least, on mine.) But it's one to check back on.
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