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Occasionally, I dedicate my column to information services that are not STM (scientific, technical, or medical) databases but are still very useful for information professionals of all stripes. In this case, my topic is travel-related sites where you can save hundreds of dollars on a simple trip and more than a thousand bucks on complex trips. The first pick is my long-time favorite, ITA Software. The name is odd, as it is much more than software, which is licensed by several airlines (Continental, Hawaiian Airlines, Alitalia) andWeb travel agencies (Kayak, Orbitz). My pick, however, is the native site. My other pick is the AsiaRooms Web site, which, in spite of its name, also offers a wide range of hotels beyond Asia. Its services and prices are the best in the Asia-Pacific region.
The pan is the Expédia travel service, which usually has good airfares and hotel prices. However, its service is so incredibly ill-designed and ill-implemented and its staff so incompetent and impotent when you need them the most - when your outbound flight is canceled from a country with a single airport and very limited alternative flights to your destination - that it deserves the ultimate pan. In my overall experience, the largest Web travel agencies (e.g., Expédia, Orbitz, Travelocity) seem to focus exclusively on competitive pricing, resulting in customer care services that are grossly inferior to the hotel or airline services or that of a traditional travel agent. This is apparently because of outsourcing the postpurchase services to vastly undertrained people, probably in places with cheap labor, perhaps in the great country of Kazakhstan.
ITA SOFTWARE
ITA Software (www.itasoftware.com) is actually a directory database. It does not sell tickets directly, but it often provides the best airfares - and always provides the most useful information about flights. Its compact grid format for search results is ideal.
Results from a search for flights from one city to another can easily be sorted by airline, flight times, and airports. The default sort is price, broken down by number of stops. Note that a fare can be the cheapest in more ways than one. Pricing a flight from Honolulu to Taipei, ITA shows that flying with Philippine Airlines costs $16 less, with one plane change, but...