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Frommers.com Podcast: Inside Airfare with Airfarewatchdog (Part 1)

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• AirfareWatchdog: AirfareWatchdog.com searches for best airfare deals online .

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

Announcer: Welcome to the frommers.com travel podcast. For more information on planning a trip to any one of thousands of destinations, please visit www.frommers.com.

David Lytle: Hi, good morning. Today we are talking with George Hobica. He is the person who runs AirfareWatchdog.com, and I think the best person to explain that would be George himself. Good morning, George.

George Hobica: Good morning, David.

David: How's it going?

George: Great, great. I have just spent the morning looking for airfares, as I usually do every morning.

David: Yeah, it seems like that. I am always surprised when you send a column in to us, just the sheer number, for one, of great airfare sales that you find. Would you explain to people listening to this exactly what AirfareWatchdog is?

George: Sure. Everyday the airlines lower a certain number of fares, sometimes to frankly unbelievable levels, and a lot of times this is just some kind of a retaliatory move on the airlines' part.

Just a few days ago, for example, Southwest/ATA, which is kind of like the same coach or airline these days, came out with $109 one-way fares, which is a good deal. They still have those. You can fly from New York to Oakland, California, for example, right now, for $109 one-way, no round-trip purchase needed.

David: I just paid $400 on JetBlue for that exact round-trip route, so...

George: Right. Well actually, JetBlue has done everyone a great favor by adding some competition into airfares, but they don't always have the lowest fare, and that is partly because they are such a popular airline that the seats get sold. I mean, JetBlue is a great airline. They have the TVs, and they have great service, they have non-stop flights; and of course, that $109 is not a non-stop flight, that I just mentioned. JetBlue does mostly non-stop flights. In fact, all non-stop I think.

David: That's an important distinction to make, too, because they are going to be re-routed at least to one airport on that $109 fare.

George: Definitely. So JetBlue is often full, and they can charge a premium because they only have a few seats left on many of their routes, especially in the summer. But anyway, United Airlines came in a few days ago, around noontime, and they had $109 round-trip fares coast-to-coast.

David: Wow.

George: That only lasted a short time. Was it a mistake? I mean, it was only on Southwest/ATA routes that they had those fares. Did somebody type "one-way" when they were supposed to do "round-trip" and they hit the "Enter" button?

David: The idea may be that somebody programmed the competitive fares, hit the wrong button, and reduced those round-trip fares. How long did those last?

George: They lasted about four or five hours. But pretty much everywhere. In fact, one of the people on our staff who researches our fares jumped on it. When we are buying fares that we see, you know it's an incredible fare. Everyday these fares come up, and sometimes they are mistakes and sometimes they are not. Often they are not.

Usually the mistake fares that everyone talks about, like the 88-cent round-trip U.S. Airways fares of April last year, were definitely mistakes. I mean, it was probably supposed to be $288.88 or something, or it might have been $188 and somebody took off a one. But these things do happen and we catch those. But most of the fares we have are simply retaliatory or unadvertised sales.

Let's say an airline had a small plane on a route and suddenly they shifted a larger plane. Let's say they had a regional jet and then they put on a 737. They have to fill those seats, so they might go in and lower the fare. If that route is serviced mostly by another major airline, the other airline is not going to like it, so they are going to go into another route served by the airline that just lowered the fare, and they are going to lower fares there. It just tends to spiral sometimes. It's like tit-for-tat, it's like little boys in a sandbox, fighting over...

David: So they are little skirmishes often that sometimes turn into full-blown airfare wars.

George: Exactly. Like today, Memphis to Minneapolis. That route frequently goes on sale on United. Those are two Northwest hubs, and whenever United is mad at Northwest they will lower Memphis to Minneapolis, Memphis to Detroit, Detroit to Minneapolis, to $138. That's the number they choose. It is normally over $200 round trip. So that's the kind of fare that we find.

The other interesting thing about AirfareWatchdog, and we are absolutely unique in this pursuit, is that we are the only site that does comparisons on JetBlue and Southwest. If you use Travelocity, you know, Travelocity or Orbitz or Expedia, the three big sites, they don't have Southwest or JetBlue. The reason they don't is because Southwest doesn't participate in most of the airline systems, the GDSs.

I think they are with Saber, but even Travelocity was owned by Saber, was Saber at one point, and Southwest was on Travelocity to begin with but they pulled all their fares. So what is a consumer to do if they want to find out, does Southwest have the cheapest fare, does JetBlue, or does one of the major mainline airlines? They have to look separately.

What we do is manually go into Southwest's booking engine, which is publicly available. And we just do the research, and we find the lowest fare, and whatever the lowest fare is, we put up. The ironic thing is -- now, this costs us a lot of money, because this is all done by real human beings going and doing the research, which costs money because these guys have to be paid. And all the researchers are based in the United States. We don't use outsourcing, we don't go to Taiwan or...

David: How many people do you have working for you at AirfareWatchdog?

George: In research? We have about five people plus me. Then we have somebody who does our programming, we have a webmaster that is kind of a contract person. We all work at home; we try to keep the overhead low. We don't have officers, fancy offices; we don't have offices at all.

Right now I am talking to you from Fire Island on the National Seashore off of Long Island, and my desk is out on the terrace, on the patio of this little beach shack, and that's where I'm working from.

David: That sounds really horrible.

George: Yeah, there have to be some compensations for the job, right?

David: Yeah, exactly.

George: Because frankly, it's a fairly tedious job. I mean, that's probably another reason why other sites don't do this, because really it's just tedious. It's like the most tedious job in the world.

I am so amazed at the people who have been with me since the days when I used to do this for America Online Digital City for the Travel area. I am so amazed that these people are still with me. At some point I think they are all going to go postal or quit, I don't know why but they haven't. I think they must like me or they like doing what they're doing.

And in fact, part of the thing is that we get so much incredible feedback from people who use the site.

We were on The Today Show yesterday, and we got a lot of users because of that, although our system crashed, our servers crashed of course.

David: Of course, because of the demand.

George: Yeah, the demand. One person wrote, "This is my lucky day. Where have you been all my life? You just let me visit my girlfriend in San Francisco at a fare I could never have found before, and I booked fares until May for every month."

David: Yeah, I have to say, when I was writing airfare deals for frommers.com earlier on, that is the most satisfying response that you can get, is somebody writing in and letting them know that you have made their life easier.

George: One guy wrote me one thing, "I didn't think I was going to be able to see my sister's kids at Christmastime and watch them open their presents, and you let me see them open their presents this Christmas and I am just so grateful." Yeah, sometimes it brings tears to my eyes, and I'm not kidding.

David: I agree with you. I think the reason why you might have had these same five people working for you is that they more than likely have the same sort of passion for it that you do.

George: I hope so. I think so. And whenever I get one of these comments I immediately forward it to them to let them know that what they're doing really makes a difference in people's lives.

But we are making a certain amount of money at this, finally, after all these years. But we're not making a lot. And we could be making a lot more money if we didn't do the right thing and tell someone that Southwest has a lower fare. Because Southwest doesn't pay us. We do make money through affiliate relationships. If somebody books a ticket on Delta Airlines, like $3 of that goes into our operating fund.

David: OK.

George: But, if we spend time finding out that Southwest has a lower fare and Delta is higher, and we put that Southwest link to their booking engine, we lose money. So, not only do we not get income, but we're spending money to do the research. And I think that this is a point that a lot of people who visit the site don't realize that we really go out of our way for the consumer, and that's sometimes to the detriment of our bottom line.

But we really don't care, because we want to be different. I did work for some of the other deal sites in the past, who I will not name. And I was frustrated, because I didn't think that they were really consumer-oriented. One thing I love about writing a frommers.com airfares column is that you guys let me say whatever I want. I mean, Travelocity is one of your big advertisers, but I'll go in and I'll say, "Southwest has a cheaper fair." And you let me do that.

David: Oh, absolutely.

George: No other site would let me do that. I'm not going to name the deals newsletters and the deals sites that would not let me do that kind of thing.

David: Yeah, I have at least three sites in my mind that I can think of.

George: Yeah.

David: And I'd like to thank you for pointing that out. Because, at frommers.com, part of my job is really putting my foot down when somebody who advertises on the site or might license our content from our guidebooks for their site, wants us to change our editorial statements. We refuse to do that, because ultimately, our customer is the person who visits our site to get information. We're only as good as our word, and if we're ever compromised by taking money from somebody, we're out of business.

George: Right. But what is your credibility worth? I mean, my credibility is not worth 20 cents a click -- I keep on telling people -- or $2 per airfare booking. It's just not. And I think that you feel the same way.

David: That's right.

George: Which is why we're so good together.

David: Exactly. So, if somebody's going to Airfare Watchdog, what can they expect to find there? How would somebody from Memphis -- what's the quickest way for them to find out about these routes that go on sale from Memphis to Minneapolis?

George: On the home page, we have a link to something called "The Top 30," which, until today, always had like 100 fares. We just decided we were going to limit it, finally, to 30 fares. That's a good place to start. That's our pick of the most outrageously low fares of the day. And it may not speak to everyone. But then, there's a search menu that we just introduced a few weeks ago, actually. We completely redesigned the site. There's a pull-down search menu, you just go to Memphis, you hit go and you'll see our pick of all the fares from Memphis.

Sometimes there might not be too many fares. We are not going to put up a fare just for the sake of putting up a fare. There's been a lot of hoopla lately about sites that forecast airfares. And again, I'm not going to name names.

David: Yeah, there's a new -- and I actually sent you an email about one that I was curious about. It's in beta, and it only had two cities.

George: Right. And it doesn't have Southwest and it doesn't have JetBlue. And I think it's really impossible to predict what the airlines are going to do, they're just so capricious. So what we do, instead of predicting by using a computer model, is we do our research -- our manual research -- and when it's time to buy, that's when the fare is up.

In other words, if it's low -- and it's hit what we think is a really low point, a historic low point -- that's when we post the fare, and not before. And sometimes people say, "Why are there no fares from Billings?" or something. Well, Billings is not a cheap airport. So, we don't often have Billings' fares.

David: Right. Yeah. This is something that I often have to explain to readers when they write in. They'll say, "Why are all your airfares out of New York and Los Angeles and Chicago?" And I have to point out to them that -- and it's my understanding -- basically the higher volume that you have at an airport, the better chance you have of finding a cheaper fare at it. Does that ring true for you?

George: That's usually the case. Sure, although sometimes you'll find these anomalies. There was a time when Delta and US Air both flew out of New Haven, Connecticut, which is a good alternative airport for JFK or Hartford. One day, US Air just had these incredibly low fares out of New Haven. You had to connect through Philadelphia and then maybe connect another time to get to San Francisco.

But sometimes the smaller airports -- if a new airline comes in -- you'll see these amazingly low fares for a while. That's rare, but sometimes the lower fares are out of those smaller airports. And what we do on Airfare Watchdog, on any given page, if there's a nearby airport that we consider drivable from the main airport, we will have all on that one page the fares from the alternate airport and the main airport. So, without having to look any further, you just scroll down the page and you'll see, for example, Moline might have something. Detroit, Michigan might have Lansing, or Chicago might have Ft. Wayne.

David: If people are willing to drive maybe an hour or an hour and a half, they can sometimes actually save on their airfare.

George: Definitely. Worcester, for example, to Orlando; Sanford, which is the old Orlando Airport on Allegiant Air, is often going to be cheaper than flying from Boston to Orlando's main airport. So, on the Boston page of our site, we list Worcester. And Allegiant Air is, again, one of these small airlines that does not show up in any of the search engines. They don't pay us when we send traffic to them. We spend a lot of time looking for their fares and seeing if the fare is actually available.

That's another thing, David, that we do that nobody else does. And I'm sounding like I'm patting ourselves on the back, but I think our staff deserves it. We actually go into the fare system -- the fare booking engine, and see if seats are available. There are a lot of other sites out there that have fare listings. Travelocity is one of them, that has something that's pretty good, that's called "Low Fare Alert."

David: Right.

George: The problem is that airlines will file fares sometimes on routes that they don't even fly.

David: Really?

George: They do this to preserve their right to fly the route in the future. You'll see this often on Travelocity. You'll see a great fare, you'll click, you'll try to book it and then you'll see this error message saying, "American Airlines does not fly this route." And, sometimes this message is wrong and American Airlines did fly that route. But usually it's true. The fare is listed, but there's no service.

David: George, I just really want to say thank you for talking with us today. It's some fantastic information. And for our listeners, just to remind them, you can go to airfarewatchdog.com -- it's all one word -- and go there often. You will actually find some fantastic information, some great fares, and money-saving tips on getting a cheap flight.

Thanks, George.

George: Thank you very much, David. It's been great talking to you, and it's great working with you too.

[music]

Announcer: This podcast is a production of frommers.com. For more information on planning your trip or to hear about the latest travel news and deals, visit us on the web at www.frommers.com and be sure to email us at editor@frommers.com with any comments or suggestions.

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