FareCompare’s 170+ Twitter accounts, new Dealfinder and Q&A with CEO Rick Seaney

I first heard about FareCompare’s new 170+ airport-specific, travel deal Twitter accounts Wednesday morning on Twitter. I quickly signed up to follow @flyfromLAX and within 24 hours already heard about a $356 RT LAX-Buenos Aires deal and an $81 RT LAX-PHX fare that was down 31%. As if Twitter has become the first choice in communication tools, I got in touch with FareCompare’s CEO at @rickseaney and scheduled a time this morning to talk about FareCompare’s new DealFinder and Twitter accounts. In our talks, the only thing that threw me off guard was the fact that they’ve found a way to automate their 170+  accounts. It might not be surprising to you, but I was envisioning an uber social media online travel geek behind six computer monitors, fingers flying fast as they tweeted travel deals to the world. Read on to find out about two new ways you can expedite your next airfare search.

Jen Leo: Is the Dealfinder new?

Rick Seaney: We came up with the idea a few years ago. We had a tool on the site with air deals posted on a Google Map (prices on cities in the map) but it didn’t do a 180-date combination seat check and wasn’t easy to sort. The new DealFinder finishes up our original dream of providing consumers the best air deals by departure date and then scouring hundreds of date combinations for seats in real-time. We officially launched the DealFinder Wednesday but it’s been in soft launch for about a month and a half.

What do you mean by the 180-date combination seat check?

It all came together when we partnered with ITA Software in December (they power the low fare search of many airlines, meta searchers and online travel agencies). Because we know when prices are dropping with our technology, we’re able to do some cool things with them. Our goal is that every time we show a price, they’ll be able to find that price sometime in the month. And then if an airline publishes prices with no seat availability too often we’ll pull them from the alerts.

The DealFinder with one click does the equivalent of 180 separate searches with different depart/return dates. Within a 30-day period, it searches six different lengths of stay (nights) based on the trip distance. For example, pick LAX to PHX and you see the prices for the whole month come up. Click a departure date and you can compare the price difference for different return dates. Select the one that best meets your needs and you’re off to get flight itineraries in a standard meta search that returns hundreds of flight choices that you can filter. We don’t sell tickets as a meta-searcher so you click on your flight and it takes you to either an airline or online travel agency for final booking (all of whom now have waived booking fees).

Now tell us what this Twitter account frenzy is all about. Did I hear that you have more than 170 accounts?

Yes, we have 170+ Twitter accounts, which tweet real-time price drops from the busiest airports in North America to destinations all over the world. Like @flyfromLAX—We’re going to tweet the best deals from LAX plus news you can use. Breaking news, anything related to travel. We’re running a Twitter contest right now – Where is Graeme? We’re giving away 2 free RT flights to Europe and a hotel stay for a week. You can also sign up via e-mail but the easiest way is via twitter.

But there are so many deals out of LAX, how do you decide which to send out? Wouldn’t our inboxes be inundated with tweets?

If you choose to get our deals from Twitter, we’re only tweeting price drops – and selective at that. We might tweet 3-4 domestic, 1 Mexico beaches, 1 Europe, 1 AustralAsia, If a huge sale is occurring – it’ll only pick the best of the best. We don’t want to inundate folks with too many tweets. We also tell you the amount of the price drop with tax included, the depart date time frame (for international like summer or fall), and to give you some historical context – how much it dropped below the previous market low (25-30%). We never tweet anything that doesn’t drop more than 5% below the previous market low and never more.

So who’s got the glorious job of doing all the tweeting, Rick?

We’re a bunch of technology geeks, the info for the real-time alerts (tweets/e-mail) passes through up to  a dozen computers before being distributed. It’s all about technology, Jen. We also have a content editor and other real humans replying and doing some tweets from our blog-related twitter accounts, @farecomparedeals and @rickseaney.

If people respond to the Twitter account – there is a human monitoring it. A human will reply if they ask a question. FareCompare has a package that monitors multiple accounts, we want to keep in the spirit of the social media platform and interact as much as humanly possible. If someone asks a question and a researcher doesn’t know the answer, they’ll ask me and I’ll respond. I get dozens of questions a day on @rickseaney and we try to answer the questions that are the most helpful to the most people. On my twitter account I try to be on and interact frequently.

Which of your Twitter accounts has the most followers.

What’d you’d expect. @flyfromLAX, @flyfromNYC, @flyfromSFO, @flyfromDFW, @flyfromCHI

You say you’re a small company, why?
We only have 19 employees. Mostly tech people until this past year as we have built out our sales, marketing and content teams.

How do you differentiate yourself from others in the industry?

Airfare is probably the most complicated retail purchase you can make. Our goal is to fulfill a trusted relationship – you trust us to let you know when the price drops and when you click through you can actually find it at the quoted price. Others are more concerned about getting you to their site issue a search. I wish I had a dollar for every person that said they got an e-mail from an airline or online travel agency saying they had a sale to Europe for $xxx and never could find that price after hunting and pecking for hours, that is the problem we are solving.

We get the raw airfare data throughout the day from over 500 airlines, we compute prices for every city pair combo throughout the world for the next 11 months to see what happened — we know when prices have gone up or down before they hit reservation systems. Once we know what days of the week the airfare is good on we send out alerts or you can check out the DealFinder any time. Once you found a price you’re interested in, we do 180 searches and get those back in just a few seconds. A six-night stay might be $600 bucks vs. a seven-night stay might be $300. If you have a family of four that’s a savings of over $1,000. And you get to make that decision of what day to fly in seconds not hours you probably spend now.

Thanks for your time Rick. I look forward to getting more hot LAX specific deals sent to my phone from Twitter notifications.

– Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel & Deal blogger

[Photo: Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare; Credit: FareCompare]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 4:56 pm by Jen Leo and is filed under Airline travel, Business Travel, Deals, News, Tips & Advice, Travel Q&A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.