In search of low fares

By STEVE HUETTEL

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2001

Clicking to fly Orbitz, an online travel agency owned by the nation's five largest airlines, has taken flight amid criticism that it's a cartel in the making. But whether it will help travelers find the lowest air fare remains to be seen.

Shopping for inexpensive airline tickets online is like playing the Lotto: You never know what numbers will come up.

To see how newcomer Orbitz compared with the two largest online travel agencies, Travelocity and Expedia, we recently priced round-trip tickets to four cities from Tampa International Airport.

Wanting to hit the best-priced leisure fare categories, we picked dates in mid-July that qualified for 21-day advance purchase tickets and included a Saturday night stay.

And the winner was . . . nobody.

Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia came up with the same $185 fare to New York's LaGuardia International Airport on the same carrier, Northwest Airlines.

After that, each site scored the lowest fare for one destination: Los Angeles, Cleveland or Las Vegas.

Expedia's price for the last three cities, however, was a Priceline-style "bargain fare" that wouldn't reveal the airline, the number of stops or airports along the route until after you bought the ticket.

The sample was far too small to provide much more than an example. More extensive reports commissioned by the travel sites didn't identify a low-fare winner either.

A survey of 300 reservation requests, paid for by Travelocity, found that its site came up with the lowest fare 80 percent of the time, compared with 48 percent for Expedia and 37 percent for the software used by Orbitz (the site hadn't officially opened yet).

On the other hand, an Arthur Andersen survey conducted for Orbitz searched more than 2,000 fares and concluded the new site met or beat Travelocity and Expedia 90 percent of the time.

Online travel experts say airline fares change so quickly, it's virtually impossible to crown any site king of the low-fare finders. Their advice: Shop early and often.

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