Flight Blog
News and Tips about Air Travel, Business / Industry, Flying, Airplanes, and other fun

A quick look through Fuck Continental Airlines gives the impression that maybe this site needed a marketing budget. There aren’t any stories on it, and heck, you figure it could at least link to the infamous Seat 29E complaint. Was the domain registered in a moment of anger? Did the anger then subside?

It’s too bad, because niche sites like FCA have massive usefulness potential. Think if there were similar sites created for every airline. One could then measure airlines by how many complaints-per-day they were averaging on their particular Fuck site. Oh well

From TechCrunch:

Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.

The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.

Looks awesome. Check out the alpha site here (only works for Minneapolis-bound flights to select destinations), and read TechCrunch’s breakdown of FlySpy here.

Hey, in case you didn’t know, Flight Club is an online community for air travelers. Flight Club (the parent of this blog) has online tools that help members meet other members on airplanes and in airports — basically, we’re fun people that make travel more exciting. Business travelers, recreational travelers, if you fly for fun or for work, if you fly just once a year, Flight Club has a spot for you.

Membership is booming, so if you haven’t thought about joining before, then now is a good time. Registration takes about a minute and you can do it at this page. It’s free, it’s a fun site, uh huh oh yeah.

Travel journalist and blog entrepreneur George Hobica bumps his cheap flight report up a notch. A new domain, improved interface, and easier way to find discount air fares going where you want to go. This guy and the people helping him scour the web each day looking for fares the airlines don’t advertise. It’s great stuff.

On the new site he adds features like “Today’s Top 30 fares” — which is cool, but is it worth the effort? Most people looking for fares will search by destination, and then look for deals there.

Not to knock the man or anything … part of the reason I like what he does so much is his attitude behind it. Check out the last paragraph of his recent blog post about a newsletter he’s writing for Frommers. He says, “We often refer you to links and airlines that make absolutely zero for us (because we don’t have a financial relationship with that airline) simply because that’s the best value on a given route. We’d much rather gain your trust than [your money].” That’s awesome — and a definite contrast to someone like Tom Parsons.

I just got a link to Daily Travel Deal.com, a site that posts various travel deals and advice each day (of course). Darcy, a travel agent, launched the site May 11. Good idea for her! Strike up business and inform people at the same time. A travel agent not afraid that the internet is going to dismantle her industry. I wonder if it’s the same Darcy as the one who wrote here … (update: yes, it is.)

I found the Air Fare Checker at betterbidding.com today. It compares Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia prices (and one of the best uses for frames I’ve ever seen).

If you’re AirlineMeals.net then I’ve got an answer for you. AirlineMeals is an online community about nothing but airline food (members post photos, write reviews, and discuss changes in the field). The NY Times wrote an enjoyable piece about them, which ran in Sunday’s paper. I subscripe to their travel newsletter, and I found out and read about the story on Saturday.

See what happens when you sit down one person to do one thing and do it well? George, a travel journalist already, now spends most of his time scouring the internet to find the inner workings of the internet air fare world. And how good does this guy get? Well, beside the fares he finds ($170 RT from Portland Oregon to North Carolina? Absurd!) he also breaks it down. Check out his analysis of the latest United deal: comes down to bogus.

He also finds such gems as the link to Independence Air’s corporate fare site, which gives you 20% off their regular trip prices.

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.

Of course, that’s what they want you to say. AOL’s Pinpoint Travel sure is slick, using the latest web technologies (AJAX!) to deliver some seamless interface shenanigans. It’s still in beta, and you can’t even look for one-way flights. Basically, they rolled out their interface to get some buzz rolling. Ah, well, you heard it here first.