Why do airline/travel websites still not offer these obvious features?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Let me start by saying that I don’t want this to devolve into a Pit Thread, but I do find these missing features wildly annoying. Reading another post about the airlines and their very low profitability, someone mentioned how Expedia and other travel sites really hurt the airlines profitability. Having used all these mainstream sites, as well as gambling with Priceline, I am regularly struck by three annoying things that STILL haven’t been fixed:

  1. Some airlines aren’t listed that are legitimately the cheapest option.

For example I live in San Diego, and Southwest or Jet Blue are often cheapest depending on the destination I am going to. These airlines want you to check their sites separately. Is there STILL no way to make a crawler that pulls in their data or autofills the fields and gets it to you so you can do a fair comparison despite the airlines not wanting to participate?

  1. None of these sites seems to get you a “real” price and all get tricked by certain airlines with their extra fees. Why is that so hard to program in as a set of rules?

For example, I don’t remember any site ever asking me how much luggage I was checking or if I had a carry on, as well as if my luggage weighs more than x lbs. It sure would be nice to know that my first two bags fly free on Southwest, but it will cost me $50 on American Airlines, and to add that directly into my price when it quotes American Airlines. Some European Airlines have also screwed me on weight. Alitalia had no problem with my bag weight going from the U.S. to Italy, but coming back with the same clothes, it had to magically weigh 15 lbs less or else I had to pay close to $150 extra in ‘overweight baggage fees’. And I once got scammed and selected Frontier Airlines as cheapest, which screws you for everything, including a price to select ANY seat on the plane, and they screw you twice if the flight has a stop over, in addition to a carry on fee! All that should have been factored into the price, along with any local taxes, airport fees, etc.

  1. And how about some warnings about certain flights or locations that seasoned flyers know, but that a first timer won’t when you try to book a less preferable location/time?

By way of an example, anyone who regularly flys into the San Francisco Bay Area knows that your odds of a flight being delayed or cancelled due to fog or weather is astronomically higher if you fly into SFO instead of nearby Oakland. People who have never flown to Washington, D.C. may not realize that flying into Dulles might have more available times, but it is very far from the city and will absolutely require ground transportation and an extra hour (at least) to get into the city depending on the arrival time. Meanwhile, if you fly into Reagan National, you might be able to take the subway straight to your hotel and save hundreds of dollars and hours of headaches without having to pay for a car or travel time to and from Dulles. I have also gotten burned more times than I can count by airlines that drag their asses and are always running an hour or more late on their afternoon flights. I would have liked a warning about that too, because Southwest tends not to have that problem as much as the bigger carriers.

I’m sure others will chime in on more obviously missing features, but to me, these are improvements each of the travel sites should have added a decade ago to make me use them over the others. To me, Expedia, Travelocity, etc. are all totally interchangeable. You want my business? Add some of these things to differentiate yourselves!

2

Well, item 1 is impossible because Southwest, at least, forbids it. They specifically don’t allow their fares to show up on any web site except their own. They have their official reason, which is not entirely believable, but nevertheless they don’t allow it.

3

I’m not sure how this would work. There are so many different reasons and preferences for traveling that you’d have to have a questionnaire first before it could warn you. Not everybody is looking for budget travel into the city.

4

One teeny exception - when I search for fares using the web site of the travel agency we use for work, which contains pretty much only airlines we have a deal with, SW does show up. But only one fare per route. I don’t know if they have deals with other travel agencies that are similar. Public websites, definitely no SW. I suspect Jet Blue may have similar restrictions.

5

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen results for how often a flight is on-time, but I can’t remember where. That information is available. In San Francisco, you have to balance delays at SFO with delays for getting to Oakland on the Bay Bridge, not to mention the new line from the BART station to Oakland is fairly expensive.

As for airport location, there is no way a website can say what is best for you, and the information is not that hard to find.

Now average flight load would be a great thing to see, but that ain’t going to happen.

6

This isn’t a technical problem, it’s a legal one.

If a company puts up a website, they can put restrictions on who can use it, and a restriction they often add is that you can’t scrape their data for commercial use. This comes up all the time when someone wants to make a better interface to craigslist. They start by scraping all of craigslist data, and they generally end by losing a lawsuit, so I assume that it’s reasonably well-settled law.

7

Kayak has “add luggage” (though not oversized) and “search nearby airports” options.

Brian

8

Surely you meant “evolve”, Vérdäd¿