Newsstand - cFares Releases New Airfare Dashboard for Consumers Better Insight to Price Variety

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--cFares (www.cfares.com), the first search-based travel site designed from the ground-up for the new realities of online travel, today unveiled an enhanced user interface that presents travelers with a visual dashboard that charts the tradeoffs a traveler can make between departure time and prices among similar flights.

Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070724/20070724005621.html?.v=1

A few weeks ago I made reservations on cfare.com for our flights from Beijing to Shanghai, three business class tickets, and got our confirmation numbers online. All was well, heard nothing back from them about any problems and my credit card was charged for all three tickets.

Imagine the joy when we get to the airport that morning and there's no reservations, no e-tickets, no nothing. And we speak no Chinese. The 14 year old was crying and my partner panicked; an hour of work with China Eastern and we found that the reservations were cancelled by cfares on the 22nd of September, six days before our flights! They told us nothing whatsoever and would have been perfectly happy to strand us in Beijing.

We finally heard back from them after complaining very loudly, and they told me that they couldn't issue electronic tickets, and had no way to reach me (no phone, e-mail, or physical address) in order to get us paper tickets. Somehow they had all three of these to charge my credit card, just not to let me know that they'd destroyed our reservations.

Beware!

Upcoming flight, PIT-HYD, J, March, 2008

Kayak - $5,056 - I can filter by arrival/departure time, airlines, flight duration, local airport, layover airport


cFares - $7,212 -and I need to set up and account to get the information - I can filter by arrival/departure time, price, airlines

A few triangles and diamonds on a timeline to help with that oh so difficult task of figuring that prices change at different times of the day - worth $2,156?

I'll pass, thanks