Where are the Travel Comparison Engines?

by Brian Smith, on July 13th, 2005

I’ve received many e-mails from readers asking why I haven’t been covering travel comparison engines in greater detail.

It’s definitely my intention to cover these companies as many of my readers work at online travel agencies (OTAs) and travel comparison engines or are just generally interested in the industry. My coverage of these companies hasn’t been great (I’ve only talked with SideStep and Mobissimo) because I’ve been trying to work my way through the major shopping comparison engines – still have to talk with Shopzilla, MySimon, AOL Shopping, and MSN Shopping – and truthfully, I don’t think I understand the travel industry well enough to talk intelligently about it. At least not yet.

I’m currently reading ‘Hard Landing : The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines’ by Thomas Petzinger as a primer. If anyone has any other suggestions for books or publications to read to bring me up to speed, I’d appreciate your feedback.

I’m working on releasing the June 17 Thomas Weisel Partners report: ‘ETravel: Air Pricing Survey’ which performed some great analysis of the OTAs and travel comparison engines, but TWP is not being that responsive.

As I spend more and more time on this blog and related services (YES, I have a real business model. NO, it doesn’t include putting up PPC ads on this site.), you will definitely see more content related to the travel comparison engines…and more.

Thanks for your support!

Tags: Comparison Engines


brian harniman said

Brian,
We talked a while ago — I think you were job hunting. If you want to talk about travel search, give me a call and we’ll chat. I have a pretty good background in that. Also you MUST read Nuts: the Southwest Story and Revenue Management by Robert Cross to understand the airline industry.
BH

July 15th, 2005 at 7:53 am |

Ufly4less said

Brian,
If you want to get a true picture of European Budget airline prices, then it may be useful to take a look at http://www.ufly4less.com

Ufly4less searches 13 European Airlines at present; this will rise to approximately 30 by the end of the month.

Airlines currently searched are:
Easyjet, Ryanair, Jet2, BMIbaby, Flybe, Thomsonfly, MyTravellite, EUjet, FirstChoice, Monarch, FlyThomasCook, Aer Arann & HLX

Ufly4less is a windows desktop application that searches the budget airlines in real time. We like to refer to it as What You See is What You Get & NOT what you see is what you might have got.

Pat

July 18th, 2005 at 12:15 am |