New travel site offers more than cheap airfares

March 12, 2008|Michelle Higgins, New York Times News Service

You thought you got a good deal when you booked that $200 flight from New York to Fort Lauderdale after scouring various websites to find the lowest fare. But after suffering through a long delay, a cramped flight on an old plane, and the airline's losing your bags, that flight may not have felt like a bargain, after all.

Most travel sites, like Expedia and Kayak, do a good job of digging up the cheapest airfare for a given route, often giving you dozens of options. But when it comes to key factors that can help determine whether a flight is worth the money or is one to avoid - like how much legroom you get, a flight's on-time performance, and mishandled luggage rates - travel sites tend to fall short.

In fact, satisfaction with online travel agencies fell 1.3 percent for the second year in a row, according to the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index, released in February.

Enter InsideTrip.com, a new travel site that debuted recently. Headed up by Dave Pelter, a 17-year veteran of the travel industry who most recently had a hand in inventive sites like Farecast.com and Yapta.com, InsideTrip.com, which is undergoing testing, promises to take airfare searches to a new level.

For each search, InsideTrip provides not just fares but also evaluations of what Pelter calls 12 "pain points." These include the amount of legroom in a cabin, how often the flight is on time, the aircraft type (larger jets get higher ratings), how crowded a specific flight typically is, and if you can walk to your connection. It even considers how long it usually takes to get through the security checkpoint nearest the gate.

Each flight is given an overall trip quality rating, which is displayed on the right side of the search results as a score out of 100. There are also Consumer Reports-style symbols rating speed, comfort, and ease in five levels, from poor to excellent.

For example, a recent test search on InsideTrip.com for round-trip flights from New York to Denver pulled up a list by price. The cheapest option - a $310 flight on American Airlines that took more than six hours each way, including a change of planes in the massive Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport - had a trip quality score of 62. Speed and comfort were rated "very good," and ease of travel as "good."

The top pick, highlighted by a purple flowerlike symbol, was a nonstop flight on Frontier Airlines for just $12 more that offered more legroom, less travel time, and had a better lost-bags rating. Its overall trip quality score was 89, with "excellent" speed and comfort marks and "very good" ease of travel.