Microsoft announced today that they are greatly enhancing Expedia to counter the competition from principally Travelocity controlled by Sabre. Apparently customers will now be offered 400! (four hundred) different itinerary's for a proposed trip if that many are available up from the current 7 to 9. The new system is called ESP Expert Searching and Purchasing. Travelocity was getting the lowest price 80% of the time on a trip itinerary while Expedia had the lowest fare only 48% of the time. And Expedia was getting a booking rate of a low 4.8% of viewers.

I have found Expedia to have better routings than Travelocity - at least as far as itineraries starting in Canada are concerned.

Both have a long way to go however, even though they have added the multiple-stop capability which neither AC nor CP have ever had. Problem is neither has a provision for picking up gold status which gets you into the Economy Plus section of United flights.




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AC SE
BA Gold

Oh great... they're gonna start removing features and options.

A major problem I've found is the price difference between travelocity and expedia.

For example, a H class with same fare basis on YYZ-HKG is priced as $2419 on travelocity and $2133 on expedia which is what AC quoted me. This is the same for many other fares and cities pairs.

The problem with Travelocity or Expedia is that neither displays seat availability. I have to use ITN.com to get the flights I want then come to book it with Travelocity, a two step process.

ITN.com doesn't have a Canadian site so all pricing is in US$. The fare is DIFFERENT in US and Cad dollars... even with a currency rate. For example, a C$140 is sold for US$100... so if I buy it from ITN directly, I lost about 10% there. I lost even more with a credit card exchange surcharge (usually around 3%)...

If they want to improve... they should have this option. Remember www.easysabre.com? It was a site with every information very similar to travel agent's system. When it merged with Travelocity... all the goodies were lost.

[This message has been edited by MoreMiles (edited 01-23-2001).]

Travelocity has seat maps.

Sorry, I mean ticket availability... like Y9 V8 Q7 L1 kind of information.

Microsoft announced today that they are greatly enhancing Expedia

When Microsoft "enhances" any of its software it usually means it will crash with greater frequency.

And I still mourn the death of Easysabre

I find the "Airline Fare List" the most annoying. Almost all of the dates Expedia shows up is sold out or not available. Search engine is slow and the agents on the phone are very poor (worse than Aeroplan regular lines!!).

I recently booked a LGA-YUL-YVR-YUL-LGA (2 stopovers at YUL outbound and return flight) on ITN and it was US$100 less than Expedia.