Tracking Airline Tickets Via Yapta, Farecast, and FareCompare

Several Web sites allow customers to track airline fares. By tracking the price of your ticket and buying low, you can substantially reduce your travel costs. However, not all sites are the same. Here are a few to consider next time you book a trip:

Yapta: Yapta is a fare tracking service. You can enter in your airline ticket information at the site, and this will enable you to track fares. However, you can't search for, or purchase airline tickets at the site. This is best done at the airline's Web site. If you don't know what days you're planning to fly, Yapta probably isn't best for you. Nevertheless, even though one can't purchase tickets at the site, Yapta offers two very interesting tracking features providing a tremendous amount of utility for customers.

First, Yapta exploits loopholes in airline regulations to help you get the lowest fare. Airlines raise and lower airfares all the time. It's happened to all of us: you book a ticket and then the airline subsequently lowers the fare. But, Yapta offers a way, at least in certain circumstances, to accommodate this. Yapta will track the price of your ticket after you buy it, and if the price of your ticket drops more than the airline's change fee (typically $100) then you could wind up with a travel voucher to use on a future trip. In fact, you can even get a travel voucher on some airlines when the price drops by only $10 or $20 because they don't charge for these types of fare changes.

Second, Yapta offers powerful fare tracking technology that will alert you via email if the price of your ticket drops. The site records a fare history of the ticket being tracked, and you can see the rises and dips in price. By buying as soon as Yapta alerts you to a dip, you can save a bundle on your ticket. This service is especially beneficial if you're tracking a specific flight because you have a schedule or airline preference. Other sites like Farecast can track fares on a given route, but they don't track specific flights.

Farecast: Farecast offers a very nifty tracking technology. A fare aggregator site like Kayak, Farecast enables searchers to search all major airlines (except Southwest) to find and compare fares. But Farecast also offers predictions, based on extensive data-mining, as to whether airfares will rise or fall for your trip, giving you precious information about whether to buy now or wait. Unfortunately, predictions are not available on all routes, due to limited data, but the site hopes to offer predictions in the future for trips to international destinations, as well as for trips well out in advance. While Kayak is a very useful site, Farecast offers better information to travelers and is a must-visit site next time you need airline tickets. With prices rising so quickly, it's imperative that travelers seek out the best ways to save money, and Farecast is one of the best ways to do just that.

FareCompare: Unlike Yapta and Farecast, which are sites tailored to travelers who have an idea of precisely when they plan to travel, FareCompare offers good information for travelers who have a tremendous amount of flexibility. The site offers a search that enables travelers to find the lowest fares for a route many months in advance. If you don't have a strong preference as to when you travel, then FareCompare can help you find the absolute lowest fare. However, if you lack flexibility in your schedule, Farecast is probably a better choice.

Yapta Prepares Firefox Download for Launch Just in Time for the Holidays

Given the sky-high cost of airfares, plenty of new Web sites abound to make finding the cheapest prices on airline tickets as painless as possible. These new sites offer innovative approaches to finding cheap tickets, and one of the most innovative has been Yapta, which publicly launched earlier this year. Yapta is a site that offers a very interesting service to customers. Unlike another travel start-up, Farecast, which helps consumers by predicting when the lowest price on a particular flight might be available, customers can use Yapta as they shop for tickets on most US airline websites and set pricing alerts on specific flights.  By combining fare tracking and automatic email notification technology, the site allows customers to "tag" the flights they're interested in and receive notifications if the price drops. But, not only does Yapta send notifications before customers purchase a ticket so they can purchase it at a low price, but after they've purchased as well. Airlines have consumer-friendly policies called guaranteed airfare rules that enable customers to receive a travel voucher if the price of their ticket falls (net of any ticket change fee) after they purchase it. With tickets becoming more and more expensive, Yapta offers a great way to insure oneself from a major decrease in the price of a ticket.

But for some customers, one of the drawbacks to using Yapta has been that flights can be cumbersome to enter into Yapta's system. Yapta needs flight numbers, the airline, dates, and several other bits of information which can be fairly tedious to enter, especially if one is monitoring many flights. To make the system easier for customers, Yapta developed a download that allows customers to tag a flight directly from the airline's reservation page. After customers download Yapta, they can search for flights on most major airline Web sites and click a button that tags the flight. It makes the process much, much simpler. Previously, Yapta had only offered a download for Internet Explorer, but with more and more Internet users choosing Firefox, a new download was developed and will be launched to the public in a few days.

However, I recently had the opportunity to "test-drive" the new Firefox download for Yapta and was amazed how easy it was. The download was quick and painless, and I was tagging flights within a matter of minutes. The instructions were straightforward and helped me make sense of Yapta's concept. It's a bit strange at first, because the download creates a button on the airline's reservation page that allows you to enter that flights information onto Yapta with one click. At first, the button seemed a bit out of place, since I wasn't used to seeing it on different sites, but after tagging flights at a couple of different Web sites, I got used to its appearance.

After I tagged a flight, a sidebar pops up showing the other flights I've tagged and their prices. This is an incredibly powerful tool that enables me to view all the flights I'm monitoring on one page so I can determine whether I need to tag additional flights. I can then go back to the Yapta site, log into my account, and compare my different flight options, looking at more than just price, but also schedules, airports, and brand reputation of the carrier. This download makes finding the perfect flight much easier.

Yapta does have its downsides, for instance, the site currently does not offer the ability to tag flights on Northwest or Southwest Airlines. However, the company appears to be working on fixing this problem, and once it is resolved, the tool will become all the more powerful. If you're planning on booking airline tickets this holiday season and haven't done so yet, I strongly recommend that you consider Farecast for your initial flight search, and Yapta when you've homed in on some of the flights you're interested in. When used together, these two sites offer very powerful tools for customers to find the best prices on flights.