XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2017/03/05
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2018/02/04
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2018/11/25
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2019/01/13
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2019/10/27
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2019/11/24
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2019/12/01
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2019/12/15
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2020/01/05
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at http://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at http://airinfo.travel or http://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (http://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (http://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (http://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (http://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (http://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't
sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (http://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer"
airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri =
'http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (http://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (http://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (http://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used
to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (http://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (http://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (http://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (http://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (http://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their
service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S.
cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (http://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports,
so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (http://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (http://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (http://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure
and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte
Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2020/11/08
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2020/11/15
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2020/12/06
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2021/02/21
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2021/03/07
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2022/11/20
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: rec.travel.air, news.answers

Archive-name: travel/air/online-info
Last-modified: 2022/12/25
No changes from last week.

Please look through this entire document, particularly the PLEASE NOTE at the end, before e-mailing me a question or comment, since most of the questions I get are already answered in it.

* What's in this document?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the Web about airlines and aviation. This FAQ concentrates on two things: schedules, fares, reservations, and tickets for commercial airlines, and on-line travel agents. We list both airline-sponsored and independent information.

The first parts of this FAQ discuss on-line sources of airline schedules and fares, of which there are several general-purpose services.

After that it lists airlines that have any of online schedules, fares, reservations, ticket sales, and flight status.

Next comes a listing of on-line specials, sources of special fares and other deals available over the net. Many airlines have short-notice specials which are worth checking out.

The rest of the FAQ lists travel agents that offer service over the net and have indicated that they'd like to be listed. I am not a travel agent (I consult and write computer books which you can find out about in my web site
at https://www.johnlevine.com, and the agent listings are provided free to any agent that asks and sends in a short description of what he or she offers.

* Where is this FAQ available?

It's on the Web at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero. There are, unfortunately, a certain number of out of date copies of this site floating around the net; the only one that's up to date is the one at https://airinfo.travel or https://airinfo.aero.

* How do on-line reservations work?

Four giant airline computer systems in the United States handle nearly all the airline reservations in the country. (They're known as CRSs, for computer reservations systems, or more often now GDS for global distribution systems.) Although each airline has a ``home'' CRS, the systems are all interlinked so that you can, with few exceptions, buy tickets for any airline from any CRS. The dominant systems in the U.S. are Sabre (home to American and US Airways), Galileo (home to United), Worldspan (home to Delta, Northwest), and Amadeus (many European lines.) The company that owned Galileo and Orbitz recently bought Worldspan, so the two GDS will presumably be merged. Many of the low-price start-up airlines don't participate in any of these systems but have their own Web sites where you can check flights and buy tickets. Southwest,
the largest and oldest of the low-price airlines, doesn't participate, either. Southwest's web site gets car and hotel info from Galileo, but the info seems not to flow the other way. Orbitz, one of the big three online travel
agencies, runs its own system which is "direct connect" linked directly to
many of the airlines.

In theory, all the systems show the same data; in practice, however, they get
a little out of sync with each other. If you're looking for seats on a
sold-out flight, an airline's home system is most likely to have that last, elusive seat. If you're looking for the lowest fare to somewhere, check all four systems because a fare that's marked as sold out on one system often mysteriously reappears on another system. Some airlines have rules about
flight segments that are not supposed to be sold together even though they're all available, and at least once I got a cheap US Airways ticket on Expedia, which didn't know about all the US Airways rules even though I couldn't get it on their own site or Travelocity which did know about them. On the other hand, many airlines have available some special deals that are only on their own Web sites and maybe a few of the online agencies. Confused? You should be. We are.

The confusion is even worse if you want to fly internationally. Official fares to most countries are set via a treaty organization called the IATA, so most computer systems list only IATA fares for international flights. It's easy to find entirely legal ``consolidator'' tickets sold for considerably less than the official price, however, so an online or offline agent is extremely useful for getting the best price. The airlines also can have some impressive online offers on their web sites.

Here's our distilled wisdom about buying tickets online:

* Check the online systems to see what flights are available and for an idea
of the price ranges. Check more than one CRS. For tickets within the U.S. and Canada, the prices in the CRS are for the most part the real prices that
people are paying. See the Big Online Agencies later in this FAQ for some good places to start.
* After you have found a likely airline, check that airline's site to see whether it has any special Web-only deals. If a low-fare airline has the
route, be sure to check that one too, since most low-fare airlines don't
appear in CRS listings.
* If your schedule is flexible, check ticket bidding sites including Hotwire (https://www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (https://www.priceline.com) and ticket auctions such as SkyAuction (https://www.skyauction.com/).
* You can also talk to travel agents, particularly if it's a route where you aren't eligible for the lowest CRS fares, but remember that agents get no commission on fares visible on the CRS, so you can expect an agent to charge you for ticking them.
* For international tickets, do all the steps above in this list, and then check both online and with your agent for consolidator tickets. This is particularly important if you don't qualify for the lowest published fare. See Edward Hasbrouck's Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ (https://hasbrouck.org/faq) for much more detailed information on consolidator tickets.

The U.S. airline industry is chronically in dreadful shape, with Aloha, ATA, Skybus, Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet, and now Zoom having shut down. Midwest merged into Frontier. American went bankrupt and the corpse merged into US Airways, although the surviving company is still called American. Sun Country went bankrupt but is still flying, Frontier went bankrupt but seems to be surviving as part of regional carrier Republic, and most of the remaining airlines are hanging on with a combination of somewhat higher fares (much higer for trans-Atlantic) and very full planes. The weak economy has kept them from raising fares as much as they want, but they're not passing on the recent
lower fuel prices. Southwest and Airtran, two relatively healthy low-fare carriers have merged, with the surviving airline Southwest with more east
coast and international routes.

Lufthansa has bought and probably will absorb bmi, which will give them a substantial Heathrow hub, and French all-business carrier l'Avion was absorbed into British Airways' Openskies subsidiary, which is looking kind of iffy itself.

Airlines cut back schedules as the recession hits their customers, so there
are fewer seats on more crowded planes. In some cases small several regional jet flights have been replaced by one larger jet, but the overall trend is down.

Airlines are scrambling for revenue anywhere they can find it. Fuel surcharges are now common across the industry, and can be several hundred dollars on overseas flights. Most US lines other than Southwest charge for all checked bags on domestic flights. Many now charge for picking your own seat, and
charge more if you pick a decent seat by an exit row or bulkhead. (The kindest way to think of it is that the prices have increased, but you get a discount
if you're willing to fly with no checked bag, sit in a lousy seat, and bring your own lunch.) Nobody includes meals on domestic flights any more, although
I have to say that the $7 salads and sandwiches are often a lot better than
the former free gray-green glop.

The airlines that aren't bankrupt have shrunk themselves and tried to raise fares but and are sporadically profitable, largely depending on fuel prices. Beyond the ones that have shut down, Sun Country's options to emerge from bankruptcy are not promising.

A major effect of all of the bankruptcies and downsizing is that airlines are much more thinly staffed than they used to be. That means that problems tend
to have worse effects and last longer than they used to be.

Low-cost Canadian airline JetsGo turned out to be so low cost that it ran out of cash and died, Canjet retreated back to charters, and surviving low cost competitor Westjet and Air Canada aren't competing very hard, so Canadian airfare prices are not low other than on Air Transat's vacation routes.

Passengers are subject to much more extensive screening than in the past, including screening of checked baggage at check-in time, and, according to
news reports pat downs that approach groping. Airlines recommend arriving at least an hour earlier than before. In my experience the extra delay is rarely more than 15 minutes, even with the extra baggage screening, although I
usually fly out of smaller airports, not big hubs where you can get the killer two hour lines. The TSA has handed back screening at a surprising number of airports to private contractors, all of whom wear outfits intended to look
like TSA uniforms. There is remarkable inconsistency in procedures from one airport to another, particularly with respect to your shoes, is worse than ever. Don't put your shoes in a bin, do put your shoes in a bin, and they all insist very loudly that whatever their rule is has always been the rule everywhere. A variety of extra cost "trusted traveller" plans may allow people to get through the screening faster, or may just involve waiting in a
different line. The TSA makes no promises. If you don't want to go through the X-ray machines, whose safety is nowhere near as clear as the TSA would like
you to believe, you can get a light body massage instead. They have a web site with estimated wait times (https://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov) based on averages in previous months, not real time numbers.

Anyone who flies very often should join TSA Pre-Check (https://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck), which returns the security process to what it was before 9/11, fast and relatively painless. It's included with the various international low-risk traveler programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS, or you can apply directly on the TSA web site.

Other changes include: some airports have stopped curb-side baggage check, anything vaguely resembling a knife or lighter may or may not be confiscated (although lighters suddenly stopped being dangerous a year ago), you're sometimes only allowed one carry-on plus a purse, briefcase, diaper bag or the like, non-passengers aren't allowed past security, all passengers must have a document that looks like a boarding pass at most airports to get past
security, you may have to put your toothpaste and shampoo in a baggie that may have to be a one quart size, some parking areas close to terminals are closed. But check-in clerks no longer ask you whether you packed your own suitcase.


* Wow, there's a lot of places to look for plane tickets

The original version of this FAQ described only one online source of plane reservations (the late, lamented Easy Sabre) because that's all there was. Now there are approximately fifteen gazillion web sites selling plane tickets. But setting up a system to sell tickets is a lot of work, so in reality most of those web sites funnel into a much smaller number of underlying systems. This means that you aren't likely to find a lot more from visiting a hundred sites than from visiting four or five. Good sites to start at are ITA Software (https://www.itasoftware.com), which uses its own search engine but doesn't sell tickets, and a couple of the comparison sites such as Kayak (https://www.kayak.com). For more detailed suggestions, see How do on-line reservations workearlier in this FAQ.

Airlines' own web sites are a notable exception. Even though they are all backed by one of the standard search systems (increasingly a customized
version of Orbitz), they each provide access to their own flights without any booking fee. No matter where you find a ticket, it's worth checking the airline's own site to see if it's a few dollars less there. Buying on the airline's own site frequently also makes it easier to pick seats or change tickets later.

Most sites are intended for relatively casual travellers, not road warriors
who need to know the exact fare class of a ticket, so they can optimize frequent flyer miles and upgrades. For access to detailed fare and class availability information, see Expert Flyer, described later. It costs money, but if you care about that kind of stuff, it's well worth it.

* The big online agencies

For domestic US tickets and simple international tickets (e.g., a round trip from the US to somewhere else, bought at least a month ahead) the big three
are as good a place to start as any.

Note: Some airline play chicken with the agencies in a dispute about who displays what and how much they pay. As a result, some airlines don't show up on Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz at all. If you're going somewhere where you'd expect to see flights on an airline and see nothing, you might want to check their site or a neutral search site like ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/) to see if there's something worth going to their site to buy.

Travelocity: Travelocity (https://www.travelocity.com) is an online agent
owned until recently by Sabre. In 2014 they contracted their back end operations to Expedia, and in early 2015 Sabre sold the site to Expedia.

Tickets can be issued as e-tickets or, at extra cost, by mail. There is also a great deal of travel destination information of variable usefulness. Unlike most other web-based systems, it sometimes lets you hold a reservation without buying it. Also handles hotels and rental cars. A nice fare watcher feature lets you list a few routes you're interested in, and it sends you e-mail when an interesting fare becomes available. They have a Vacation Deals page that often has private fares, two-for-one deals, and the like. Their flexible
search option provides a fare calendar, table of what fares are available on what dates, that's better than any other site I know. Unfortunately, just because a fare is available on a date doesn't mean that any actual seats are available at that fare, so a certain number of the fares are cruel jokes,
great bargains if only the airline would sell you a seat at that fare which they won't.

Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (https://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.

Expedia: Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. In 2005 they admitted that synergy is just a buzzword and spun it off as a separate company. It still has that Microsoft feel. The site is a bit noisy, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and to find schedules and fares. You
have to provide a credit card number to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on, when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right. (At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes
you select. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely, so their prices should be the same as you'll find on airline sites.

Orbitz: Orbitz (https://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, then in July 2007 was spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings, and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials. Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it runs on racks of cheap PCs rather than on expensive mainframe computers) so it'll often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on other systems. For domestic US tickets on the airlines they include, they're hard to beat, although like other online agencies, they don't include Southwest. For international tickets, particularly on anything more complex than a
round-trip, they can be very hit and miss. Try building your trip one leg at a time and watch the price zoom up and down. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can call you or send a text message to your mobile phone
or PDA a few hours before flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They're waiving the booking fee indefinitely on tickets where all legs are on the same airline, so their prices should be the same as you'll
find on airline sites.

Opodo: var uri = 'https://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(js)g(27442)a(1518026)' + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(''); Opodo (https://www.opodo.co.uk) is owned by nine European airlines and the Amadeus GDS. Its coverage of the European majors is good, but keep in mind that on
many European routes you can find something cheaper on a low-cost airline that doesn't participate with Amadeus. (See Fare Searches below to find services link to the airlines that Opodo doesn't.) It's intended for European audiences although anyone can use it, so tickets are priced in pounds or euros.

Opodo's user registration is, ah, challenging; no matter what I do, it insists I have entered an unknown user or password or the e-mail address for password recovery doesn't match the user name, even though I copied them from confirmation messages that Opodo just sent. So buy tickets without
registering.

Apollo systems:

Internet Travel Network (https://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express. It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo, which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS.

Worldspan (https://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that underlies Expedia and Orbitz (described above). Galileo's owner Travelport is in the process of buying Worldspan and will presumably merge the two.

Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.

Amadeus:

AmadeusLink (https://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as Opodo, or a
site built on their AmadeusLink system. The AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of the graphics, the function they provide is identical.

* Meta-searches

A meta-search looks at lots of other sites and gives you a combined result
that is supposed to have the lowest fare. All of these work, but in each case it appears that they only search sites that will pay them a commission. The commission doesn't affect your fare, but it does mean that there are other sites that might have lower fares that they don't search. In particular,
you'll never find low-price airlines like Southwest and Ryanair.

Hipmunk (https://www.hipmunk.com/) is ain interesting approach to flight
search using what they call an "agony index" that trades off price, length of flight time of day and other factors. The display is time bars similar to ITA's, but sorted differently and with slightly different options like no red-eyes. They don't sell tickets, but link to Orbitz or the airlines once you've selected your flights. It's an interesting idea, although my agony
index (I hate red-eyes and tight seating but don't mind a connection so long
as there's an airline club I can use) appears rather different from theirs.

Mobissimo (https://www.mobissimo.com/) is a meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found.

Kayak (https://www.kayak.com) and Sidestep are meta-searches, systems that search multiple airline web sites to make a combined listing with links you
can click through to the various sites to buy. They work well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you
still have to look for yourself. They were originally separate competing sites but the companies merged.

Pricegrabber (https://www.pricegrabber.com/home_travel.php) offers price comparisons of everything from computer parts to hotels, now including plane tickets. It's pretty slick, but the list of places they search seems limited.

Fare compare (https://www.farecompare.com) isn't really a meta-search; it
takes fare information directly from the airlines to let you find the cheapest dates on routes of interest.

Yapta (https://www.yapta.com) checks airline web sites to see if the fare for trips of interest has dropped since the last time you checked. Much of the functionality is bundled into a very intrusive browser plugin that I haven't tried.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (https://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. They used to have a "fare beater" feature with negotiated and "white label" fares, but it's gone. Too bad. It's a competent but ordinary online agent now. Cheapseats (https://www.cheapseats.com) is another portal into the same system.

Travelweb (https://www.travelweb.com), also known as Lowestfare (https://www.lowestfare.com), is a subsidiary of Priceline. It offers the
usual array of tickets, with lots of links to Priceline.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere. It's by far my favorite tool to explore what's available when, keeping in mind that it can't see low fare airlines not in the GDS that provide its data. Google has bought ITA, but they don't seem likely to make big changes to what ITA provides.

Qixo (https://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Yahoo Travel (https://travel.yahoo.com) offers fare calendar searches using Travelocity's engine; you give it two cities and it helps you find the lowest fares and the dates on which they're available. It says US and Canada only,
but it will actually do searches anywhere.

Air Ninja (https://www.airninja.com/) offers a good directory of low-fare airlines that don't sell through the usual online agencies. You tell it where you want to go, it offers links to the airlines that go there. Coverage
appears good of both US and foreign airlines.

Cheap Flights USA (https://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (https://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where
they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Foundem (https://www.foundem.com/search/flightsUK.jsp) searches multiple sites in the UK. Supposed to include both regular agent sites and low-fare airlines, but it missed a lot of the low-fare ones when I looked.

Sky Scanner (https://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (https://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

Cheapo (https://www.flycheapo.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

* Discounted international tickets

AirTreks (https://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a
travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come
from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can
navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (https://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares
via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (https://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of
consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available.
For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports
a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with
their UK agent.

Air Fare (https://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (https://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Prognostication

Farecast (https://www.farecast.com/) attempts to predict future airfares so
you can pick the best time to buy your tickets. Their list of cities, originally only Boston and Seattle, has expanded to a modest list of domestic airports, so if they happen to cover your favorite route, it's an interesting idea.

* Detailed fares and availability

Expert Flyer (https://www.expertflyer.com) provides detailed seat and fare availability information, similar to what a travel agent sees. Five day free trial, then limited access for $5/mo, full access for $10/mo. If you fly a
lot, it's invaluable for finding which flights have seat upgrades available, which ones have seats at particular fares, and other detailed info for finding the exact flights one wants.

* Real-time flight status and information

Flightcaster (https://www.flightcaster.com/) uses historical data and secret patent pending algorithms to predict how late your plane will be. Start checking about six hours ahead so you know when to get to the airport. Also available as an iPod app and on Blackberries.

Flightstats (https://www.flightstats.com) provides realtime flight departure and arrival information along with related goodies like airport delays, historical lateness stats and more. With free registration, get alerts by
email or SMS.

Expedia (https://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (https://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (https://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United
Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than
the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems.
The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology
to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on many European airlines.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

Airlines often offer special fares or promotions to Internet users, and there are some other specialist outfits selling tickets on-line.

* Special fare newsletters and sites

Smarter Travel (https://www.smartertravel.com/) collects weekly specials from selected major cities and both puts them on their web site and e-mails them to

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)