A recent article in The Wall Street Journal says that it has become almost second nature for bargain-hunting travellers to turn to travel web sites and search engines such as Expedia.com (www.expedia.com), Orbitz.com (www.orbitz.com) and Travelocity.com (http://travelocity.com) in planning a trip. According to the article though, these established players lack some of the best prices and are being challenged by a new generation of price-searching sites, which take the form of search engines that scan up to 150 other travel sites for prices and deals allowing travellers to do side-by-side comparisons.
One of these new search engines, Mobissimo.com (http://travel.mobissimo.com), is developing a search tool that will let the user search based on an activity, like skiing or going to the beach, rather than a specific destination. A company called Kayak Software plans to offer a test version of a new search engine at Kayak.com (http://kayak.com). FareChase, acquired by search giant Yahoo last month, is offering its FareChaser service, which searches about 150 travel sites, at FareChase.com (http://farechase.com).
Almost none of the search engines, the article says, charge a fee. Rather, they hope to make money by getting referral fees or commissions from the hotels, airlines, car-rental and travel agencies when users click through and make a purchase. Nevertheless, the article concludes, there has been some reluctance in parts of the travel industry to fully embrace the search engines.
