Fare Dancing with SideStep
(May 25, 2002)
While plotting the annual family summer pilgrimage to
Reno/Lake Tahoe, I was dismayed to discover airfares from Chicago to
Reno had literally gone sky high from previous years. Knowing the
complexities of airfare pricing, I knew there had to be a better
deal out there—it was just a matter of finding it.
Fare
Game
I began my fare search on all the large online
travel sites, including Travelocity, Expedia, OneTravel, and Orbitz.
The lowest fare offered was $405 per ticket on Delta. No thanks,
especially since I paid $250 per ticket last year.
Next I
tried Southwest; however, when I tried to search, I got a message
stating that the requested flight information was for a date that is
beyond their current booking schedule. Southwest only books within a
five-month span.
While I searched the aforementioned online
travel sites, SideStep was searching too. SideStep is a nifty
little tool you can download for free that searches over 120 travel
suppliers' inventories in real time while you are searching on other
sites. It displays the results in an easy-to-understand format where
fares can be sorted by airline, price, flight times, or number of
stops.
SideStep offers not only "Web only" fares, which it
pulls directly from the airlines' sites, but also
negotiated/consolidator fares on some airlines. It obtains these
negotiated/consolidator fares from other travel intermediaries. For
example, it will find OneTravel's "White Label" fares if they are
offered in your specified search.
It's important to note that
SideStep is not a computer reservations system like SABRE,
Worldspan, or Apollo, nor is it affiliated with them. SideStep is
totally unbiased, and makes its profit via a "finders fee" if you
book. When you're ready to buy, SideStep sends you directly to the
seller's site.
For my search, SideStep ferreted out the best
fare: $221 (including tax) on Frontier Airlines. Knowing this was as
good as it gets, I decided to buy. The only glitch was that I had a
little trouble getting four tickets at that
price.
SideStepping
Initially I only searched
for one ticket, and when I went to purchase four tickets, the fare I
wanted disappeared. In fact, four tickets turned into $333 per
ticket for the exact same flights. Apparently, there weren't enough
seats at the $221 fare. But, why didn't the system offer me the
seats that were available at the $221 fare? I thought this was odd
and changed the search to three tickets—the $221 fare came back.
Again, I tried to purchase four tickets at $221—the fare went back
up to $333.
This was frustrating, the fare was obviously
available, but it wouldn't let me purchase four tickets. Being an
experienced Internet geek, I then decided to open two browsers on my
computer and try two simultaneous searches, one for three tickets
and the other for one ticket. Sure enough, the $221 fare was offered
in both searches. Eventually, I ended up making two separate
purchases. I got my fare, but most people wouldn't have thought to
open two browsers. I contacted SideStep to find out what
happened.
I spoke with Phil Carpenter, SideStep's vice
president of marketing, who seemed amused by my two-browser method
for getting the fare. He stated that Frontier likely had only three
tickets left in the lower fare bucket, a term used by travel
suppliers to denote a block of seats at a certain price. Carpenter
thought the reason I was not offered the remaining tickets at the
lower price was that Frontier's website wasn't sophisticated enough
to simultaneously sell me three tickets at one price and one at
another.
So how did I get four tickets at the price I wanted
if there weren't enough seats available in the lower fare bucket?
Carpenter suspects that when I ran two searches at exactly the same
time, each of the different SideStep browser sessions pulled back
the lower fare for me. The two-browser sessions captured the lowest
fare, allowing me to purchase four tickets at the $221
fare.
"When you bought tickets three and four, although the
Frontier website didn't technically have ticket number four
available within that fare bucket, the site let the sale slide
through, as that's the fare that had been displayed in SideStep at
the initiation of our session with the Frontier website."
Stepping Around
After years of booking online
reservations, my advice is never stop with the first search. Play
with the system, because after all, computers aren't perfect
thinking machines. In another recent incident, I found a great rate
for a Cape Cod hotel, but the rate disappeared when I entered my
hotel membership number. I took my membership number out and the
lower rate came back. How this happens, I have no idea. One thing I
know for sure, if you are searching for travel deals for hotels,
cars, and airfares, have SideStep on. The chances of it finding a
lower fare make it worthwhile.
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