Three websites — two recently relaunched or upgraded, one launched earlier this year — are giving consumers new ways to search for travel.
Two, Routehappy and Momondo, are metasearch sites. The other, PointsHound, is a hotel booking site that enables users to earn points in their frequent flyer program while still earning hotel loyalty points in five major hotel groups.
Momondo
Momondo gives users one of the fastest and most intuitive front ends out there when it comes to finding the cheapest time to fly to a specific destination.
Users plug in destination and date, and a Price Calendar appears, with a row of columns with fares for 31 days nearest to the selected departure and return dates. The height of each column makes it easy to see which days' fares are best, and it's easy to slide a cursor along the grid to see how prices change when dates change. Users can easily change months to see at what time of year prices are best.
Users can also choose the flight that fits best by adjusting for price and departure times on a graduated scale.
Click on its just-introduced Flight Insight tab and the site swiftly aggregates the attributes of hundreds of thousands of fares for the city pair. Users can see which airlines flying that city pair are the most or least expensive on average, which season offers the best rates, which airports are the cheapest to fly into if a destination has multiple airports and what days and times of day are the cheapest to fly. It uses emoticons to indicate which flights have the best time-and-cost ratios.
Momondo was founded in Denmark in 2006 and acquired in 2011 by Cheap Flights Media in the U.K., which changed its name to Momondo Group. The metasearch engine gets its content through direct connects with airlines or by scraping the information from hundreds of websites, according to Martin Lumbye, a member of the company's board of directors, and it makes money on its referrals. Once a consumer picks a fare, a link takes them to book at the airline's site.
It lists business-class and economy fares and is working on getting ancillary services for the U.S. market.
"The problem is not actually our capability to do it," said Lumbye about ancillaries. "It's more a matter of getting the information from suppliers."
Momondo is not limited to airlines. It also includes rail schedules between European cities where high-speed trains are available and on some Amtrak routes.
Routehappy
Routehappy, meanwhile, has integrated a low-fare search engine with its "Happiness" factors. This means consumers can search for a flight not just on price and departure but also on "softer" attributes, including aircraft types, seats, amenities and trip duration, to compute what it calls Happiness Scores.
It gathers disparate product information about flights from hundreds of sources and then scores product attributes across flights and matches them with dynamic fares and availability.
Flight data includes seat size (pitch and width), business- and first-class seat types, seat layout, entertainment, WiFi, in-seat power, plane quality, trip duration and more.
The site has categorized seats into more than 25 types and analyzed them based on legroom, width and style, providing information about roomier economy seats and the different kinds of premium seats, including recliner, angled and full-flat pod.
A variety of icons cover aircraft type, room, WiFi, entertainment, in-flight power and other attributes and amenities. For details, users simply hover their cursor over the amenity, and a popup box gives more detail.
The site is written in an informal, chatty tone; for example, it winds up its description of the wider-than-normal seats on an Air France A380 with the phrase "double yay!"
Routehappy gets schedules from OAG and fares from Amadeus and the airlines directly.
It does not list ancillary services; however, it is "working hard to be the first flight search site to fully incorporate the extra ancillary options that many airlines offer," said Kellie Pelletier, director of public relations and communications for the website. Routehappy makes money from lead generation and advertising.
PointsHound
PointsHound is a hotel booking site in which travelers can book hotels and earn mileage in the frequent flyer program of their choice. Passengers collect miles upon checkout. Travelers have to join the site, which is free, to use it. They can select from more than 100,000 hotels.
Because accruing points in hotel loyalty programs is important to many frequent travelers, users can also rack up points in the loyalty programs of major hotel groups, including Hyatt, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott Hotels & Resorts and Starwood, with another hotel group in the works. These are called "Double Up" points. PointsHound introduced the ability to earn hotel-loyalty points after its customers pushed for it.
PointsHound uses the commissions it earns from the hotels it sells to buy frequent flyer points. These commissions are often 12% to 15%, but commissions it earns for some hotels can be substantially higher. "We have some really high-margin deals," said Pete van Dorn, co-founder of PointsHound.
On these hotels, members can earn miles at rates ranging from 10 to 20 miles per dollar spent. For example, a member recently earned 10,000 miles for a three-night stay at a boutique hotel in Chicago.
The more travelers use the site, the more their mileage-earning potential grows.
Because PointsHound is buying miles in bulk, airlines will charge them less for miles if the company can guarantee a certain level of mileage point purchases, van Dorn said.
Van Dorn said that the business is highly automated so that it doesn't have to have a big staff.
"We try to solve as many problems [as we can] with automation, so we can live on lower margins," he said.
Follow Kate Rice on Twitter @krtravelweekly.