InsideTrip made its debut into the airline ticket search scene this weekend, joining the likes of Kayak and Mobissimo among several others.
As with these startups and more established players such as Orbitz and Expedia, InsideTrip wants to help you find and purchase the tickets for your next trip. However, instead of focusing entirely on surfacing the cheapest flights, the service intends to help you identify those flights with the highest levels of quality.
Quality is measured by factors spanning 3 categories (speed, comfort, and ease) and addressing 12 so-called “pain points” (such as number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type, connection time, and gate location). As a user of InsideTrip, you can indicate which of these pain points are most important to you and the service’s algorithms will generate a unique TripQuality score for each ticket result. These can be used in conjunction with the ticket price to find just the right itinerary.
Founder Dave Pelter says the company has collected information about the quality of trips from a variety of sources, some publicly available online and some devised by InsideTrip itself. Information about how long it usually takes to get through security at a particular airport, for example, is provided by the Transportation Security Administration. Other information is scraped from airline and airport websites themselves.
As someone who has bought into an itinerary that provided insufficient time to connect between flights, I can appreciate a ticket search engine that takes more into consideration than just price. However, price will always remain the predominant factor for most consumers. Pelter argues that prices don’t actually vary much across search sites these days and so its focus on quality is justified. InsideTrip actually pulls its flights, and their prices, from Orbitz and sends users there once they are ready to purchase.
Among other helpful features touted by InsideTrip include a visual itinerary bar that lets you more easily compare the legs of various trips. The system will also flag trips that it thinks have particularly high quality.
Note: when I tried using the service this evening, I kept getting a fatal communication error; hopefully this will get fixed soon. The site also doesn’t support Safari yet, so Mac users should try it with Firefox.
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Ok attempt but still a far away from Kayal, FareCompare and FareCast
I like it; a nice twist on the flight aggregator approach. Eventually travel has to become about more than just price and these are definitely the factors that influence most customers with their choices.
Unfortunately, the site would not load for me using Internet Explorer (not a good thing — did anyone else have this problem?).
Based on the above description, I think the site is heading in the way of the future. After all, that is how many hotel Web sites are run these days. Many people might not book a cheap hotel room if they read the room is going to be dirty, and the staff rude.
Nevertheless, I am still one to look at price overall. For $40, I may be willing to book with an airline that has a better quality of service, but for $100… I don’t think so..
Its a nice feature, but is not a theme of its own and won’t be enough to bring customers over - especially when competitors could (and would) copy the feature themselves.
It should be put in the same category as Farecast, but with a feature that is even less of a ‘deal breaker’ or generates new type of revenues (which would be the game in the category).
novel - but not enough to compete versus the others in this space - deadpool in 12 months.
Site would not work for me either in IE7.
super buggy. type in the airport location and then once you choose the dates, it re-set the airports to blank again.
Oh boy…
I think the next evolution in this space needs to come from the airlines themselves - i.e. my favorite idea -
weigh and pay
ticket price paid for by the kilo.
))))
interesting
I think OZ Har Adir makes a great point. There is no reason why the other travel sites won’t go and do the same thing since most of the info is publicly available. Plus, when I am searching for a flight I am already looking to fly direct and fly Virgin/Jet Blue/Alaska if at all possible.
It is an interesting concept. But this field is so competitive now that I expect it will be bought out soon.
We think it’s a great idea but as stated above, if it takes off Kayak will certainly do the same and most likely continue to reign. Recently, we went on a trip where the ticket was an amazing price but there was a reason for that — the connection was awful at the airport, so this idea of comfort and ease is a great addition but again, will be bought out most likely.
Looks like a novel idea, and I’d love to be able to take legroom into account when planning a flight.
Unfortunately, the site was not working when I tried it. Taking a full minute to search and then returning an error code is unacceptable on the web.
I realize it’s beta. It’s a shame that it didn’t work while they had my attention, but in all honesty, I’ll not likely remember to try it out again later.
I definitely think this is one of those ideas that really needed to be implemented… although, it probably should have been one of those things that one of the big guys like Kayak should have done…
I put up my constructive criticisms on chide.it:
http://chide.it/post/41/
Not bad. But according to http:www.fly-how.com it is smarter to use such systems just to get general view of the prices. However, prices are cheaper at the direct websites of the airlines
Silly for them not to support all browsers. I clicked the link - It told me to go download a compatible browser.
I immediately lost interest. : /