Budget Travel - ITA Software, user opinions?

Hi,

I am doing some small scale research on travel meta search engines, especially for the case of finding the cheapest flight deal. In my test, I tried to book a roundtrip ticket from Helsinki to Honolulu during 5 different dates, distributed over the year, of which one was almost a year in the future. The airlines I tried was Air France and British Airways, travel agents were Travelocity and the european eBookers. The meta search engine I selected was ITA Software.

I assume you know the profiles of these companies. ITA is a bit different though, because they are pretty good at comparison shopping, that is, their search engine for flights claim to do a thourough search for the cheapest rates from distribution systems. The output is a list of flights you can get a booking code for and book with your favourite travel agent.

This was my findings for the selected trips were:

Air France
#1 1222 eur
#2 1222 eur
#3 1348 eur
#4 1348 eur

British Airways
#1 995 eur
#2 999 eur
#3 1167 eur
#4 1484 eur

Travelocity
#1 1039 eur
#2 967 eur
#3 1029 eur
#4 990 eur

eBookers
#1 975 eur
#2 962 eur
#3 1183 eur
#4 1190 eur

ITA Software
#1 955 eur
#2 939 eur
#3 999 eur
#4 958 eur

It seems ITA Software actually found the cheapest deal. Since the booking process is a bit odd with ITA, has anyone here used it? Or gained from ITA's results? What was your experience, did you have great advantage of it? Generally, has meta search engines helped you significantly to find better deals?

I would appreciate if you could share your experiences with me for this research project. I will use the answers (anonymously) for a report in an electronic commerce course. (You can post your answer here).

Thank you in advance for helping me,

Torbjörn Lundkvist

You can declare your project dead. FT doesn't book.

I often start my search with the ITA website to get a rough idea about the prices. As far as I understand you can't book directly through this site. Is that correct?

If fare is the cheapest at ITA, I check (and if available book) it at the airlines homepage. If it is a complex routing with multiple airlines involved, I print the fare details and go to a TA, which is normally a bit surprised (please book me this flight, outbound in XLSSQU and inbound in XLSSQW or similar...). But TA = service charge!

+ good possibility comparison
+ combination of different airlines
+ search within a range around the desired airport (other sites would require seperate inquiries for flights ex BSL or ZRH)


- no possibility for bookings (at least I haven't found one)
- prices are in generall all in. Nevertheless, KLM/Northwest prices shown by ITA are not bookable at this price

And the super-plus is:
- month long search! If you'd like to go to NYE somewhen in september and don't care about the exat dates (as cheap as possible), then ITA is the tool to go for!!

I always start with ITA to get an idea of cheapest time to travel (month-long search feature is great) and to generally look for trends: which airline seems to be discounting, what the best prices are on my preferred airlines, etc.

ITA also allows one to search multiple origin and destination points at the same time, so if I know I want to go somewhere around Atlanta, GA, I can type in ATL;CLT;SAV;JAX and any other airport code, and see where the cheapest destination and best connections are. It's usually not the place I thought I wanted to go!

You cannot book on ITA, so I first try the airline website. Sometimes fares will not be available there, and I try Orbitz or Travelocity or Expedia. They sometimes have large blocks of tickets with deeply discounted fares. I use a travel agent every few years for an unusual situation.

Good luck with your project. It's not dead :)

Welcome to FlyerTalk tlundkvi !Good luck with your project. It's not dead :)
Unfortunatelly while prices are probably important to budget travelers, I feel that this kind of study is not suited to this forum. I'm not sure where you should ask your question, but I am closing this thread in Budget Travel.

Good luck with your study and thanks for understanding !

EmailKid
Budget Travel Moderator