New Web Site Beats Rivals at Finding Low Air Fares

A technologically advanced Internet site for finding low domestic air fares--one that is easier, more powerful and better tuned to user needs than the fare tools used by Expedia, Travelocity, Preview Travel and other online travel leaders--is now available for use in a prerelease form. It’s so much better than the others that it’s worth adopting now for U.S. and Canada fare searches, even in this imperfect, limited version.

You’ll find the air-fare search tool at https://www.itasoftware.com. It was developed by former students in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s renowned Artificial Intelligence Lab, where many of the exotic digital technologies that show up on the pages of Wired magazine are born.

I previewed the site, developed by the Cambridge, Mass.-based ITA Software, at its first public showing in November at PhoCusWright, an annual online travel meeting, and have used it several times since. When the site works (like any beta site, it can balk a bit), it consistently returns more lower-priced options and better choices than the Internet leaders. ITA’s software appears to be the first online fare tool capable of finding the lowest prices and making the site easy to use.

A few caveats are in order. Right now, the site works only when researching domestic and Canadian flights. (International flights will be added in stages throughout next year, beginning with European flights, according to Jeremy Wertheimer, president and CEO of ITA Software.)

The site does not yet permit online booking of the air fares. You can print or copy the information and take it to a travel agent, to the airline, to the airline’s Internet site or to another online travel agency and book there. David Baggett, who is in charge of technology and business development for ITA, said last week that he expects the booking part of the site to be completed in January or February.

Unlike online agencies, the site is now bare--no hot deals, no destination or lodging information, no package deals or cruises.

So what’s the big deal?

The ITA site’s flight-search request--the form you fill out to tell the software what trip you want priced--corresponds nicely with shoppers’ needs and desires. Once you make the request, the search engine returns a thorough, flexible and usefully parsed array of fare and flight choices. The typical fare-search tool shines a narrow flashlight beam into a dark room to illuminate a specific group of fares, but ITA turns on all the lights in the air-fare warehouse and lets you see nearly all the lower-priced options in a single view.

For instance, ask the software to quote prices on a flight between Washington and Los Angeles. Before you start the search, it will let you open the query to any airports within a mileage range you choose (25, 50, 100 miles or more) or to any airports you specify. (Be sure to separate airport codes with a semicolon, no space.) You can also ask the tool to scan for flights within a time window ranging from two hours to two days.

When the site returns your answer, you see a screen highlighting the lowest prices each carrier charges for that route during the time frame you’ve specified (thus answering the until-now-hard-to-answer “How much will it cost me to fly my frequent-flier carrier as opposed to the cheapest flight?”). It also lets you view price differences between flying direct and connecting once or twice.

Unlike most of the competition, ITA’s engine lists flight options only after it has verified the availability of the number of seats you’ve requested. (The exception is flights on Southwest, whose prices ITA quotes even if they are not available. Southwest has contracts that limit its availability information to a tight list of partners.)

When you click on any fare for more information, you get airport-to-airport elapsed time (allowing you to add this to your value calculation), plus most caveats in plain English.

If a connection you’ve chosen is very tight, the software inserts a red warning message in the margin. If a low fare routes you out of one airport and back at another, it red-flags that too. It highlights some (but not all) of the conditions attached to highly restricted fares. It gives you all the booking information you need to consummate the transaction with the airline, a travel agent or another Internet site. It even includes that elusive “fare code” information--to help your agent find the fare.

As anybody who has spent much time growing old and angry with the leading online travel sites knows, this site is worthy of the term “breakthrough,” if not quite “godsend.” It has the potential to be what the denizens of electro-land call a “disruptive technology”--one so different and obviously superior that it threatens to realign an established marketplace in one swoop.

Keep in mind that the site is imperfect. “We still have some bugs, and we’re trying to fix them,” Baggett said.

Sometimes it will overlook airports that are in other parts of the market, which is particularly important in the L.A. area, where Orange County, Burbank and Ontario sometimes offer lower fares. It’s worth it to plug in those codes just to double-check. But, Baggett noted, the system will try “everything but doesn’t list it if they’re 1/8the routes 3/8 lousy.” For example, even if the fare is low, it won’t show you Los Angeles to Boston through Honolulu, he said.

It is true, as the current online travel leaders will certainly insist, that not all customers go to the Internet merely to find the cheapest air fares most easily. Some of them shop for specific times or carriers rather than low fares; some want one-stop shopping for air, lodging and cars; some want package deals and cruises; some want destination and planning information; and some, I suppose, even want that “sense of community” and “interactivity” that e-commerce marketing people croak about.

But my guess is that the number of people who want the cheapest air fares easily dwarfs the number of people looking for the other stuff--and that once this fare-search tool gets put in the marketplace with booking, lodging and other features, it will catch on with savvy users. It will obligate the others, principally Expedia and Travelocity, to continue their baby-step improvements to their fare-search technologies.

For now, the ITA fare searcher is a piece of technology in search of a commercial home. It may join forces with one of the established companies, or it may develop its own site, Baggett said.

ITA chief Jeremy Wertheimer has been working on this project since 1992, when he was a graduate student at MIT, and he clearly takes satisfaction from having developed the software.

“It was fun,” he said. “It was a hard problem, and we’ve solved it.”

Baggett said interest in the technology has been widespread. “We’re considering selling the technology or licensing it,” he said. “We’re still going through a lot of those discussions.” Or ITA could keep the technology and develop the site fully itself, he said. One goal, whatever the outcome, Baggett said: “We very much want this to be used by a lot of people.”

Craig Stoltz is the travel editor of the Post.

Christopher Reynolds is on assignment.