The perfect travel site
I can’t find it, but here’s what it would do for me:
- Allow me to enter in my home airport and others that I would be willing to drive to so that I don’t have to enter TPA each and every time I search a flight. This shouldn’t be a feature for only registered users.
- The deals section (every travel site seemingly has one) would actually be useful because it would know my airport. I don’t care about Boston to Orlando… I’m in Tampa! I’ve never yet found a deals section that had fares from Tampa, but there are plenty of (cheap) flights leaving daily.
- More on this deals section, I want to input a list of cities that I would like to go to some time in the future (heck, maybe even countries) and have the system email me when there’s a deal. I can set what I consider a deal as price (per city) or just a percentage below last year at this time.
Yahoo! Alerts does most of that last part for me, but it’s a bear to use. And it’s not smart on the deals part, I know it can figure out what’s a good price, but how do I know what Tampa to Beijing is going for on average in May.
Yahoo! Travel is the only travel site I can find that has a, "My Dates are Flexible" button, which is an amazingly useful feature. For people like me that want to go certain places, but can go at anytime, this is a must have. With variable airline prices, it knows how to pick travel dates better than me. I would even like it to pick destinations for me (as an option). It knows where I want to leave from, so it could just find me the best domestic or international fares to wherever.
I don’t know what’s stopping one of these sites from launching a killer deals section. They make enough money for a large R&D budget, much larger than what would be needed for some breakthrough features.