I’ve tried them all out, and www.Mobissimo.com is the best. It covers the most ground and finds the cheapest prices. Its interface is simple. It’s for finding cheap flights what www.indeed.com is for finding a new job (if you don’t know Indeed, check it out!).
No, this is not a paid announcement. I’ll be reviewing more flight-finding services in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Related Posts:
- A new cheap-flight guide
- The New York Times on finding bargain / cheap flights
- New Category: Cheap Flights
- Cheap Flights Roundup: Where I go for fares online
- Cheap Flights in Europe: Best Sites?
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Tags: flight, airplanes, mobissimo, sites, cheap+fares, air+fares, travel+agent, web, search, site, airlines, transportation
May 25th, 2005 at 6:15 pm
While Mobissimo may be a good travel search tool to use if you travel for pleasure, it doesn’t cut it if you are a frequent business traveler. That’s true for other consumer travel search tools as well. There’s not much else out there but I’ve discovered a site called http://www.enablesolutions.com that appears to have a service called “MySmartTrip” that seems to come close to meeting my needs. I’m about to try it out and will report back when I’ve had some experience with it.
June 3rd, 2005 at 3:00 pm
Thanks for the tip, Jim — that’s a good point about business travelling. Do many business travellers arrange their own trips? I always thought not.
June 4th, 2005 at 12:00 am
Joe - our CFO showed us a report from Keynote Systems showing that 40% of business travelers now book their travel directly at online travel sites like Orbitz or at the specific airlines. Apparently this is an increasing trend especially for small companies which we are with 13 travelers. That’s why I’ve been looking for a good travel search engine that would work for my business travel which often has multi-stop trips. I don’t have time to check out all the fares at all the sites including Southwest and JetBlue.
June 6th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
That’s good information, Jim. It makes sense that small businesses handle their own. So is what you’re looking for a system that allows for booking multiple trips simultaneously? That allows for easier one-way flight booking?
I checked out MySmartTrip, gave it the test-drive. It looks like a souped-up Airfare Checker — but the “monitor” feature is really what sells the service. I’m curious what your thoughts are on it.
June 6th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
Joe,
Not sure exactly what you meant by booking “multiple trips simultaneously” and maybe I confused you so let me review what I’m looking for.
At my company, we try and find a good compromise between choosing the lowest fares and choosing the flight schedules that best meet our needs. This usually involves quite a bit of shopping around to both airlines and online travel sites like Orbitz or Travelocity to uncover the best options. Since our travel sometimes involves multiple legs - as an example, LA to Atlanta to Miami to Washington back to LA, we also check fares and schedules with all the sites that can handle this type of travel in a single search. Having a good search engine that can do this and cover all of the other needs could save us a lot of time. But to be clear - it doesn’t have to book mulitple trips at the same time. We all travel independently.
I’ve now also taken a test drive on MySmartTrip - in fact, I ran 4 of them - and I really liked its speed, clean interface and the fact that I can email the results to my CFO and/or send him a report. In reading about their monitor product, I would guess that it would only be useful if the travel is out a few weeks or more. In our case, travel is often scheduled less than a week in advance so it probably wouldn’t offer very much benefit.
We’re not process or paperwork heavy here but managment sometimes asks us to validate that we did check for the best options because clients often pay for the travel. I’ve showed the MySmartTrip software to our CFO and he’s interested in trying it out for a few months. On one test drive we did, the fare difference he found (if that fare savings was real), would have more than covered our monthly cost.
June 8th, 2005 at 5:31 pm
Hi Jim,
Okay, I get it — the other flight aggregators out there don’t allow the multi-leg trips, but MySmartTrip does.
By “multiple trips simultaneously” I meant that, say, you travel to San Francisco the first Monday of every month, and you wanted to book that trip for as far in the future as you wanted. Your explanation made sense, though, and that’s good MySmartTrip’s extra functions gave ya’ value.
Let me know what happens after the first couple of months, this is good information to have. Thanks!
June 9th, 2005 at 9:14 am
Joe,
Thanks for the explanation on “multiple trips simultaneously”. And I’ll let you know our experience with the Enable Solutions software.
Think I’ll stop now just to show that I can write short messages. :-)) Sorry about the previous response length. I must have been on a roll.