TripAdvisor, which has mastered the dark social arts when it comes to hotels, has relaunched its flight metasearch tool serving 31 countries. It's spreading its user-generated model into airfare sales.
The revamped TripAdvisor Flights now lets users look up the details of on-board amenities (such as whether there is wifi, power ports, or seatback TVs) and pour through "thousands" of user-generated photos of seats and cabins.
It's the greater depth of detail that's new for the Massachusetts-based company. For instance, its flights tool now ranks legroom in three broad categories of "tight", "average", and "spacious."
Seats with 31 or 32 inches of "seat pitch" (essentially, legroom) are labeled "average". There is no advanced filter that lets users sort flights by legroom preference. But you can sort by some other cabin amenities, such as wifi, flat-bed seats, angled-flat seats, etc., for more than 10,000 aircraft globally.
CORRECTION: I've replaced the screenshots in this article with accurate ones. These illustrate the greater detail offered by the revamped TripAdvisor Flights. It's itinerary-specific information, such as the number of inches of "seat pitch" (essentially, legroom), for the aircraft assigned to serve a flight.
UPDATE: That two-column design (see the three images, above) is prettier and incorporates more data from sources like SeatGuru, a user-generated flight rating site TripAdvisor owns, than the three column-design of old (image, below).
The photos are aircraft specific, but not itinerary-specific. For instance, if Swiss has assigned one of its A320-214s to a flight, and TripAdvisor users have uploaded images of a Swiss A320-214 in the past, relevant images from all classes of service would appear in the flight details.
The metasearch tool has also been upgraded to promote premium seat upgrades when airlines offer them for purchase.
Content with user content
TripAdvisor has so far declined to say from where it currently gets fares and inventory to power the metasearch engine.
At the time of Google's purchase of ITA Software in the summer of 2010, TripAdvisor used a combination of Expedia BFS, ITA and Amadeus [for international itineraries].
TRIPADVISOR RESPONDS:
"TripAdvisor and its stablemate SeatGuru have captured aircraft details into a proprietary database based on a variety of sources, such as information published online. There’s not one source of data it uses to rely on."
Complex product to deliver
TripAdvisor has done an admirable job of handling the difficulty of presenting accurate, and sometimes conflicting, data on amenities.
Consider Air Canada flight 864 on an Airbus A330-300. TripAdvisor says the seat pitch is 31 inches. Air Canada's site says it's 32 inches for 144 seats of the seats, while another 52 seats are at 33 inches and another batch of 30 seats are at 31 inches. What to do?
Given Air Canada's range is 31-33, the site defaults to the lowest number (31) to avoid giving any user an unpleasant surprise. Impressive.
Again, pedants might quibble with some details. Brussels' flight 501 is listed as having 32 inches of seat pitch, while Brussels' website and press release says 330-200s have 33 inches of seat pitch.
TRIPADVISOR RESPONDS:
"We are correct. Brussels is 32.67 inches. Converted from 83 cm."
In another example, there was no detailed information, such as legroom, provided for a Kuwait Airlines flight.
TRIPADVISOR RESPONDS:
"Your example showcases an Air India-marketed flight that is operated by Kuwait Airways, and flight amenities information pertains to the operating carrier, in this case Kuwait Airways. Kuwait Airways amenity information is not currently in our database.
TripAdvisor continues to offer up amenities information when it is available, and we continue to add more airline content daily."
Despite some glitches, airfare metasearch is an important vertical for TripAdvisor. About 40% of its new member registrations come through flights.
TRIPADVISOR RESPONDS:
"We can't comment on new member registrations. That figure was publicly quoted in November 2012 and our flights and other products have grown and changed since then."
Yet TripAdvisor has been slow to improve its flight metasearch since its reasonably high profile launch in February 2009, prioritizing instead a revamp of its hotel advertising system (also into metasearch), vacation rentals, and its expansion in China.
Shortly after that time, Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of TripAdvisor Flights and other initiatives, told Tnooz that the company might add user-generated reviews into metasearch.
In January 2011, the company added flight ratings to its metasearch results, allowing users to sort airfare results according to airlines that have received high ratings from TripAdvisor users. (Unlike hotels, only user ratings -- not reviews -- are published.)
Back then, TripAdvisor had only very basic amenity filters, such as letting users filter results to only include airlines that have a certain average ratings between one- and five-stars from its users.
Today its revamped service has detailed flight specific information. While pedants can quibble about some minor errors in the data, the overall information is robust. This move puts back on its heels some competitors sites.
There's still room for improvement, as in any new product launch. The metasearch functionality is fairly limited for complete round trips, not leg-by-leg (as Skyscanner and other metasearch competitors enable).
TRIPADVISOR RESPONSE:
True, we don’t have a separate leg-by-leg unique shopping path.
But for any result, you can pick one outbound leg and get corresponding return legs, and vice versa, that are paired with it.
For instance, for an outbound flight, you should see itinerary highlights with darker shading for potential return flights, and there is checkboxes next to each return segment. You can hit one of those boxes and you'll automatically update the results.
More broadly, the product also differentiates itself from competitor metasearch sites by doing a superior job of highlighting amenities so that shoppers can compare the difference between in-flight experiences, such as legroom.
TripAdvisor Flights doesn't let users filter by airline alliance, which matters to frequent fliers (especially the much-coveted big-spending business traveler) the way Kayak does.
CORRECTION:The revamped product does let users filter by airline alliance. I regret the error.
It also sorts by price by default, rather than by a combination of price, duration, and number of stops -- as rival metasearch tool Hipmunk offers.
Flight ratings may pose tricky issues
TripAdvisor's idea of integrating data from SeatGuru, a user-generated review site that it acquired years ago, isn't new. But giving prominence to the Flights product does seem to be new.
Some airlines may not like the potential for negative ratings. Unlike the hotel market thats fragmented into tens of thousands of players, there are little more than a couple of hundred airlines in the world, and some of them would presumably be potential advertisers on TripAdvisor Flights.
On the other hand, a few airlines may be happy with the ratings. JetBlue Airways was recommended by 85% of users across 531 ratings, the best performance among major US airlines that had a broad number of reviews. One factor may be legroom: JetBlue has 34 to 38 inches of legroom, notably more than its domestic competitors.
Perhaps taking advantage of the favorable terrain, JetBlue appears to be one of TripAdvisor's most loyal airline advertisers, frequently appearing in the "compare fares directly" widget that lets TripAdvisor.com (US) shoppers click off for more shopping on airline and online travel agency sites.
NB: Yesterday I reported on TripAdvisor rolling out a redesign of its Flights product.
The emails from the company's PR team said that the new URL for the site would be tripadvisor.com/CheapFlightsHome (tripadvisor.co.uk/CheapFlightsHome for the UK market, etc.).
When I visited the new URL was live, and the old tripadvisor.com/flights page was offline. I mistakenly concluded the new URL reflected the relaunched product. It did not.
The PR team did not respond to my questions sent the evening prior to it putting the release on the wires the next morning.
Today a two-column design launched, replacing the three-column design. So I've updated the screenshots accordingly. I apologize for my error.