The 8,000 Ton Gorilla of Travel Sites Comes Online: or Save Today, Lose Tomorrow
Written: Jun 08 '01
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The Bottom Line
I'll use Orbitz to check for lowest fares, but will buy elsewhere. Here's why...
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Web-based travel agencies, like Expedia and Travelocity, as well as the smaller cut-price ticketing sites, like flycheap.com and Cheap Tickets, are running scared these days now that the Federal Government has decided to take no action about the airline industry colluding to monopolize the online travel business with their new web site Orbitz.
In the short term, that probably means consumers like you and I will benefit from easier access to discount airfares, but in the long term it is almost inevitable that the travel industry is right -- Orbitz spells MUCH higher fares for all of us just as soon as the site succeeds in driving a few competitors out of business.
Meantime, I'd suggest that online travel agents take a look at Orbitz. They do a lot of things right, and that spells consumer acceptance regardless of how much it hurts us in the long run. (After all, consumers never act based on long-term benefits, only on short-term savings.)
Easy to Use This Interface! Grade: A
Orbitz did a lot of things right when they designed this site. There's no registration forms until you actually buy, it's very easy to find flights and fares (and to modify searches), it's got a pretty comprehensive flight database, and it has some great features that other travel sites don't always have.
My favorite feature is the ability to find cheaper fares by using nearby airports. While it isn't on the Quick Search tool on the site's home page, it is on the bottom of results pages, and you can always get to it by clicking the "Flights" tab. "It" is that little pull down box that lets you set a distance from the specified destination or departure airport. This is a great tool if you're flying someplace that has several airports.
Going to New York? Go ahead and enter your destination as LGA or JFK, just like you always do, but set that pull-down thing to 50 miles, and you'll also find out if you could maybe save a couple hundred dollars by flying into Newark, or even Islip. If you really like saving money, this little widget is a dream come true! (By the way, good travel agents have always been able to do searches like this, which is one of the reasons they could often save you money over web sites.)
Some of the other things I like about the interface are the cleanly designed tables that show the bottom line at a glance. Airfares are listed in a table by airline and number of stops with the best fares at the left side of the screen. Hard to beat that kind of intelligent layout! Sure beats scrolling....
Airfare Search Pretty Good Grade: B
Orbitz does pretty darn well at turning up low fares. When I searched five different itineraries and then compared results with what I got on Expedia and Travelocity, I found that Orbitz delivered the lowest fare 3 times out of 5 and came within $10 of the low fare on a 4th.
On one of my proposed itineraries (IAH-LGA), Orbitz returned a low fare of $145 round-trip on USAirways. That was $65 less than the $210 fare on Delta that I got when searching Expedia (which was still a pretty decent price).
I like that the searches return lots of options, and I like that it's possible to constrain searches to favorite airlines.
The pull-down list of available airlines lists lots of airlines (not the scant handful you get on Expedia), but there are still some notable airlines missing in action. I don't see Southwest listed as an option -- nor Frontier. Yet it does list some low-cost carriers that I do want included in searches: like Sun Country and AirTran in the U.S., Aviacsa, Aerocalifornia, and Aeropostal for Latin America, and Condor in Europe (no big surprise that easyJet is not available).
Even though you might not be able to search specifically for those discount Southwest flights, they are still in the Orbitz database, and the fares do pop up in the list of available flights. Same with Frontier.
Hotel Search Stinks! Grade F
Orbitz might be doing well in making airfare searches easy, but when it comes to hotel searches, they are useless!
I started out searching for hotels in Baltimore. I entered BWI into the destination, and up popped a list of chain hotels that were fairly near the airport. Okay as far as that goes, but no rate information was displayed! I want to compare hotel prices the same way I compare airfares. Can't do it with Orbitz!
The worst part about the hotel reservation part of the system is that it contains extremely limited information with next to nothing for most major international destinations.
I typed MEX into the destination field, looking for a hotel near the Mexico City's Juarez International Airport. Up popped 7 hotels (although I'd asked for 20), only 3 of which were anywhere near Mexico City! One of the hotels listed was in Taxco, the other three in Oaxaca! Incredible! That's like typing L.A. into the destination field and having hotels in New York City and Chicago pop up. And that's why Orbitz deserves no higher than an F in this category.
I tried several other cities in Latin America and Europe and found that except for a couple of big capitals, most returned zero hotels. For people like me who like traveling, that's zero usefulness.
Take the Money and Run!
Overall, Orbitz is a fairly good site for finding cheap airfares -- it's got a great interface and it's fairly reliable. The car rental search is also excellent, but the hotel search feature is unreliable and lacks useful information.
Although Orbitz is a fairly well-designed and implemented site, I am not going to use it, and I don't recommend it. I'm a firm believer that honest competition is the best guarantee of cheap travel over the long run. Because Orbitz is owned and operated by the world's biggest airlines and is aimed at putting web-based travel agencies out of business, I feel a moral duty to stay away from them. It may cost me a couple of dollars in the short run, but if Orbitz succeeds in putting Expedia, Travelocity, and all the Cheap Tickets type online services out of business (as it is intended to do), then we are all going to pay a lot more in the long run.
If you really like traveling cheap, please consider doing business with anybody other than Orbitz!!
Recommended:
No
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