Travel News

Beyond Airfares, Search Engine Seeks Speed, Comfort, Ease

InsideTrip.com Trip Quality DashboardMany travel search engines, such as Expedia and Kayak, find the “cheapest” airfare for a route you search for, but a new site on the block supposedly searches for good deals and also takes key factors, like legroom, on-time performance and mishandled luggage, into consideration.

InsideTrip.com offers fares and evaluates overall trip quality, using a TripQuality score out of 100. Dave Pelter, a 17-year veteran of the travel industry who started InsideTrip, promises this site will fly above and beyond old airfare search engines.

The site evaluates what Mr. Pelter refers to as 12 “pain points,” such as legroom amount, aircraft type, if your connection is within walking distance, and even how long you’ll have to wait in the security checkpoint that is nearest to your gate.

We here at PeterGreenberg.com tested out InsideTrip by comparing it to Farecast.com and Kayak.com, two travel search engines.

Using a roundtrip route from LAX to NYC departing Friday, March 21 to Sunday, March 23, we found that Farecast located the cheapest airfare, at $390 with Delta. The lowest airfare Kayak located was $400 with United Airlines, and InsideTrip’s cheapest airfare topped the two at $416, also with United.

Clearly, InsideTrip did not find the cheapest deal, but its TripQuality Dashboard makes it easy to search for what you consider to be most important when flying, be it speed, comfort, ease, or all of the above.

The various airfares are neatly organized, with Overall TripQuality levels listed using easy-to-read symbols.

Bottom line: As InsideTrip is in its infancy, be sure to compare its airfares to other sites, such as the aforementioned Kayak and Farecast, or others, like Mobissimo.com, Expedia.com or Sidestep.com.

By Monique-Marie DeJong for PeterGreenberg.com.

Related Links: The New York Times

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