TripAdvisor adds user reviews of airlines to flight searches

By -
Wouldn’t it be nice to know how an airline may treat you in advance? TripAdvisor thinks so. On Wednesday, the travel website, best known for its user reviews of hotels, added user reviews to its flight search engine, TripAdvisor Flights.

Jami Counter, senior director of TripAdvisor Flights, said the website has so far collected more than 3,500 airline ratings from travelers, "and we expect it to grow quickly.” Airlines are rated from 1 to 5 "stars" and also by the percentage of travelers who recommend them.

During a flight search, visitors to TripAdvisor can click on a carrier's name to view its ratings. If they sign in as TripAdvisor members, they can also add ratings of their own, on a scale of 1 to 5, in eight categories: baggage handling, check-in experience, in-flight amenities, in-flight service, punctuality, reasonableness of fees, seat comfort and value.

In another addition, Trip Advisor's "Fees Estimator," which previously calculated baggage fees when you booked a flight, now shows them on an initial flight search. It displays the fee to check one bag -- or more bags, if you adjust it. And if you indicate that you have elite status on an airline, which often entitiles you to fly free with two bags, the tool will omit the fee.

The new tools make for useful comparisons.

For instance, when I searched for a March 3-8 round trip between Los Angeles (LAX) and New York City (all airports), TripAdvisor initially showed Delta Air Lines with the lowest fare of $279. When I filtered the search by “One Bag included,” JetBlue Airways, which allows one bag to fly free, came up with the same $279 fare. Because checking one bag with Delta added $46 in fees, its $279 flight would actually cost $325.

I also checked out the two airlines' ratings. In 106 ratings, 97% of travelers recommended JetBlue. Out of 419 ratings, only 76% recommended Delta.

Source : http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-tripadvisor-flight-search-20110112,0,7698885.story

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

By -
Image
Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea
Read more

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

By -
Image
  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors that
Read more