April 19, 2004 -- Online travel agency sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity have a few flaws. They're missing several major low-fare airlines, such as JetBlue and Southwest. And the travel agency sites have their own special deals with airlines, so they don't show lower fares that may be available elsewhere.
Travelers need a honest, independent broker. Online aggregators like Qixo (www.qixo.com) and BoardingPass (www.boardingpass.com) claim to be that broker, but they charge a high price for their services: a $20 booking fee. The best aggregator we've found so far, SideStep (www.sidestep.com) is a browser plug-in that charges no booking fee.
A new contender, SeekNet SmartRover (www.seeknettech.com) aims to topple SideStep's mastery of the aggregator world. It's admirably independent, honest and open, and offers some innovative features for travelers who are flexible with their time. But it's glacially slow, a touch buggy, and is missing some key low-fare airlines.
SmartRover is a free application you download from SeekNet's Web site. Essentially, it automates Internet Explorer to search 14 Web sites: the travel agencies Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, CheapTickets and Hotwire, and the airline sites for Alaska Air, American, America West, ATA, Aloha, Southwest, United, Hawaiian and Mexicana.
SmartRover's greatest strength is its flexible search function. You can search a range of dates around your preferred travel times for the best fares, and you can leave SmartRover running in the background to repeat your search every 12 or 24 hours. That's great for people who have a few days to wait: set searches to run at noon and midnight, and SmartRover will e-mail you when fares drop below a certain level.
But SmartRover has a few major flaws that prevent us from recommending it wholeheartedly.
First, searches take forever and slow your computer's Internet access to a crawl. Searching for three days around our preferred flight times regularly took us 20 minutes or more on a high-speed cable modem, and during that time Internet Explorer became so slow as to be unusable (though other, non-Internet programs worked just fine.)
SmartRover is also missing several key sites. They don't have JetBlue, for instance; nor do they search the airline sites for Delta, Northwest, Continental, US Airways or Aloha. On several domestic routes we searched, we found that US Airways and Continental often had the lowest fares, but that SmartRover was trying to drive us through the American Airlines or Orbitz sites because they didn't have direct access to those airlines. And in 10 searches, we never once got a single result from Hotwire -- which is strange, because that super-discounter often has very low fares.
SmartRover also doesn't send you to a booking page when you click on a flight -- it usually just sends you to a Web site's home page or generic reservations page. That's a minor annoyance, but, still, an annoyance.
Swapnil Shrivastav, SeekNet's president, told us that they're hoping to speed up searches, increase the number of airlines searched and allow direct clicking over to booking pages in future versions of SmartRover. Alas, this will come with a price -- while the main application will still be free, the ability to run periodic, repeating searches in the background will become restricted to paying customers (a price hasn't been set yet.) We think SmartRover 2.0 may be a real contender -- the current version is only for the patient.
SideStep: This Is How You Do It
SmartRover's rough edges are in sharp contrast to the slick SideStep, an Internet Explorer plug-in that for a while now has been king of the aggregators.
SideStep's strength is speed. When you go to search another site, such as Expedia, SideStep automatically opens up and offers to do a simultaneous search. Most searches take seconds, and SideStep searches Orbitz, OneTravel, Airfare.com and at least 20 airline sites, including JetBlue and Southwest. It makes a terrific compliment to Expedia (which SideStep doesn't search.)
Also, unlike SmartRover, SideStep has permission from all of the sites they're searching. For many, they tap directly into the airline's database, or get fed fares directly from the airline. You can click on a fare and go straight to the correct booking page. That beats automating your Internet Explorer to do 200 searches.
Unfortunately, SideStep doesn't release a full list of the airlines they search. That's irritating, because it doesn't tell you where else you need to look. But we've been generally pleased with their results, especially in combination with Expedia. While SmartRover may be more open and honest about who they're searching, we'll give SideStep our nod for speed, comprehensiveness and ease of use.