Booking a first class flight? You might be safer with a travel agent.
The New York Times covered a report that Consumer WebWatch did last month. It takes an in-depth look into the mechanisms of booking first-class flights online, and they come up with a couple problems. One was “fare jumping,” when the price quoted would jump hundreds of dollars when the customer clicked to check-out. The other was false labeling: certain sites came up with first class tickets for low-cost airlines which don’t have first-class seats.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t fly first class unless it happens by accident. The most interesting piece of the article for me was near the end:
[The report] said Expedia performed particularly well against the competition, returning the lowest fare 40 percent of the time, compared with 31 percent for Travelocity and 28 percent for Orbitz.
» Read the article (warning: the story is valid for two weeks, after April 24 the NY Times will make you pay to read the whole thing.)
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- The Travel Agent industry strikes back: Daily Travel Deal.com
- Good idea for airport security checkpoints
- Got a complaint about United Airlines? Share it (and see others’ complaints) here
- The Lighter Ban Logic: To make us safer we have to be less safe