Travel Search Sites Offer Competing Deals

There’s been a flurry of updates in the travel search world and they all have to do with finding great deals. Whether you’re a travel provider, advertiser, or just plain need great airfare tix to SES San Jose in August, here’s what you need to know:

Mobissimo has added student and youth travel fares to their site. Students can now compare those special fares to normal fares. Hey, you never know when a low-priced carrier might even beat out a student fare on a “bigger” airline. So, definitely check that out.

DealBase.com is all about hotel deals and now offers a personalized newsletter. Get emails that pertain only to the destinations, hotel star ratings, and price range that you select.

Last but not least, Tripeedo.com is a new site entering the competitive travel search niche. Tripeedo is kind of the Dogpile.com of travel search. It searches the search sites, as well as the individual airline sites, hotel sites, etc. However, most of the search sites already offer price comparisons on competing sites. And most of the time, all of the sites have the same prices. What would have sold me on Tripeedo is if they didn’t open the search results in different windows. That’s, again, what all of the other sites do, but that just clutters up my browser and desktop.

Having said that, Tripeedo’s interface is very nice and makes it one of the easiest travel search sites to use. If they ever get the results to load on one page instead of multiple tabs or windows, they might just become my default travel search engine.

Tripeedo has their work cut out for them. In a normal economy, you would see sites compete in this manner, but there’s a certain urgency seen in these updates perhaps related to the current not-so-normal economy. It’s not just about beating the competition these days, it’s about suriviving.