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So Far, Fly.com Is Not So Fly (Dot Com)

February 5, 2009 at 3:29 PM | by | Comment (1)

The internet is all abuzz today about the launch of Fly.com. Ok, maybe it was just us travel geeks since Travelzoo paid something like $1.75 million just for the domain name alone. (PS. Previous owner of Fly.com: Gimme a call, we'll do drinks!)

Of course, we had to give Fly.com a try. We plugged in a very popular route, LAX to EWR, for a trip we are taking at the end of May and decided to see what came back.

Since we are staying a bit longer than the weekend we could be flex with our dates. Leaving on Saturday, May 30 and returning Monday, June 8 we found a deal for $398 on United. Eh. American had flights for $419. Also, eh.

We did like how you could compare Priceline and Hotwire in different windows, yet those browser windows jumped about 50 percent in size when they opened. Kind of annoying. But once you find a fare that you like, the site sends you over to that airline's site and not just to the homepage, but to the actual "Book this flight" page. That's actually very comforting.

Some other cross-search options you can select are the types of class, nonstop routes, and nearby area airports. The site also has a "Why Me?" option which highlights in-cabin WiFi and cool entertainment systems. Although this option wasn't available on the LAX to EWR route search. It did, however, show up when we searched SFO to JFK fares.

Right now, we're not seeing much of an advantage over one of our favorite booking sites, BookingBuddy.com which allows you to search a whole glut of booking sites for the best prices. And it certainly doesn't seem as helpful as Farecast.com which advised us to "Wait" on our trip because prices may come down. This is all sort of shame given how much that domain name alone cost.

The site right now is beta but a Travelzoo marketing director said that Fly.com would add hotel, rental car, cruise and vacation packages later this year. That kind of bums us out because what we like about Fly.com is that it's relatively to easy to navigate without some annoying pop up box asking us if we need a hotel room or rental car.

Just in case you were curious, the flight from LAX to HPN (Westchester Airport)--about an hour and half from our family house in NJ--was a lot cheaper at $246 on Delta. But sorry, it's EWR or JFK or bust.

Test out Fly.com and tell us what you think! How does it compare to your other fave booking sites? And would you pay $1.8 million for it? Let us know in comments below.

Related Stories:
· Fly.com [Official Site]
· Travelzoo Talks $1.8 Million Acquisition of Fly.com Domain [WebProNews]

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Return to » So Far, Fly.com Is Not So Fly (Dot Com)


Pretty fly

I think fly.com will be very good for consumers. The problem with Kayak is that Travelport (Orbitz, Cheaptickets, etc) has an exclusive contract to be the only OTA in the organic search results. This exclusive deal keeps companies like Vayama.com and Airfare.com out of the organic results, which is bad for consumers. A year ago when Vayama was in the organic search results on Kayak, they had the lowest price on international airfare about 30% of the time. So far, Fly.com does not have an exclusive deal with anyone, which means they will be able to aggregate results from many different providers, instead of just airlines and Orbitz.
timschwab on February 6, 2009 at 11:13 AM #Permalink

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