Organized Shopping Blog: Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?

I recently won a little poker tournament that included a trip to Las Vegas. Now, if you have won any of these types of trips, you are familiar with the old saying, "what the big print giveth, the fine print taketh away." Specifically, the big print said, WIN A TRIP TO LAS VEGAS! Meanwhile, the fine print said something about no travel on weekends or "really fun days" (my words) and a voucher for up to $400. Technically, $400 is not a trip to Vegas. For two people flying from St. Louis, it is only a fraction of a trip. Unless, of course, I want my lady's first memory of sin city to be a stay at Circus Circus. But she is not fond of clowns. They are a little creepy, come to think of it. But I digress.

The point here is that I can travel virtually any week in the next eight months. I've got a free frequent-flyer ticket that we can use, so $400 starts to look a little more do-able, or at least within the realm of possiblity. If I can find a sweet spot on the calendar when the price is right, maybe we can get lucky and upgrade from the outhouse to the penthouse. So... with all the travel search engines thumping their chests and proclaiming to be The Greatest, who is going to provide the complete solution to my situation? I'll try to make things easier by limited the search to one month, February.

Several sites provide airfare-search options for flexible-date travel. It is a good thing, too, because even among the lowest daily fares, 3-day roundtrip airfare to Vegas in February ranged from $203 to $358, depending on the departure date (see chart below). Note: I don't remember the exact date of these searches, it was sometime late last month when I had planned to post this piece, probably January 22nd-ish.

Expedia.com: Flexible-Date Flights
Look to heading #2 "Are your travel plans flexible?"
Click the circle next to "My travel dates are flexible (popular US routes only)"
Select a month under heading #3.

Orbitz.com: Flexible-Stays: Options #3
Look to the box labelled "Optional: US & Canada only"
Click the link that says "Find low fares for weekends or 30-day periods"
Select option #3: Flexible Stays.

Now for the bad news. I could not find a similar tool for search hotel deals. The closest thing was doing a 30-day search on Hotels.com and scanning their detailed results layout for large price dips. This might be the best method for now, but it leaves much to be desired. First, there is no way to scan the page as quickly or as accurately as a computer could do. Also, hotels which do not have availability for all days are excluded, so while you will find the best rate on some hotels, you might miss the best rate on other hotels.

Here is the data from researching this post:
(note: all hotel prices are for the Aladdin.)

	Airfare	Airfare	Low Airfare	Lodging	Low Lodging
Date	Expedia	Orbitz	Expedia or Orbitz	Hotels.com	current day + next day	LOW TOTAL
1	243	245	243	89	178	421
2	203	307	203	89	178	381
3	262	305	262	89	388	650
4	358	415	358	299	598	956
5	223	277	223	299	598	821
6	239	245	239	299	488	727
7	243	205	205	189	378	583
8	223	205	205	189	378	583
9	242	236	236	189	378	614
10	223	215	215	189	398	613
11	302	286	286	209	418	704
12	243	215	215	209	358	573
13	243	245	243	149	298	541
14	223	205	205	149	298	503
15	223	216	216	149	338	554
16	243	245	243	189	378	621
17	239	285	239	189	378	617
18	282	348	282	189	378	660
19	243	283	243	189	298	541
20	296	205	205	109	218	423
21	214	205	205	109	218	423
22	243	216	216	109	268	484
23	243	245	243	159	318	561
24	249	215	215	159	368	583
25	311	313	311	209	418	729
26	213	215	213	209	338	551
27	249			129
28	213

Wishful Thinking, Part I - with so many new travel search engines, it would be swell if they all aspired to do more than simply aggregate a bunch of prices. Every time I need to fire up a spreadsheet for comparison shopping, someone is missing an opportunity to make their e-com site an indispensable destination. Does any travel site want to scoop up this very targetted traffic? It sure beats having to compete with the big boys on the generic searches. Heck, you can still register flexibledatetravel.com.

Wishful Thinking, Part II - for now, it would be helpful if Hotels.com had an option to highlight every result that was less than "x" amount of dollars. Even better would be if the "Find" bar at the bottom of Firefox had an option to evaluate numerically. Instead of simply matching text strings, you could highlight values on a page that were great than or less than than a certain number. Optionally, you could specify a currency to restrict the numeric search as currency-only. It might look something like this:

Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?

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Posted by Sean O'Rourke on February 4, 2005 at 3:17 PM
Archived at Travel

February 04, 2005

Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?

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