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February 4, 2005Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?Here is a real-world travel search problem in need of an elegant solution: 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. Flexible-Date Airfare = Yay! 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 Orbitz.com: Flexible-Stays: Options #3 Flexible-Date Hotels = Nay? 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:
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?
CommentsHave you tried travelaxe.com? I found them via MSNBC and they have seem to have the nitch on Las Vegas Hotel rooms. Posted by ANITA at February 9, 2005 5:51 PM No, but I'm curious after seeing this screenshot: I'll be sure to include it in an upcoming review of shopping software. Thanks Anita! Posted by Sean O'Rourke at February 10, 2005 8:53 AM |
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