InsideTrip.com – a new online flight booking concierge

I got to take a preview tour of InsideTrip.com, a new travel flight aggregator that launches Tuesday and is bound to inspire other travel search engines to question whether their service is consumer-friendly enough.

You can ask yourself now, when you book your flight online, are price and schedule the only things that matter — or would you also like to compare legroom, the age of the plane, on-time performance and find out about the airline’s lost-luggage track record too?

These are just some of the 12 additional types of information that can be screened when you search for your flight on InsideTrip.com. The full list of information you can get is broken down into three categories, comfort (legroom, aircraft type, aircraft age, historical plane passenger loads), speed factors (number of stops, flight duration, on-time performance, security wait time) and ease factors (connecting time, routing quality, lost-luggage track record and airport gate location). InsideTrip might be the first travel website to have business travelers and stroller-laden moms drooling at the same time.

InsideTrip is the brainchild of David Pelter, an online travel veteran with extensive experience that dates back to TWA, where he created the industry’s first last-minute “Web specials” product. Pelter was also an executive at Farecast and a senior consultant and advisory board member for the launch of Yapta. InsideTrip is Pelter’s attempt to quench some of the remaining frustrations that travelers still face when booking online. Hands-on, Pelter says he’ll start blogging for InsideTrip by the end of the week.

Does it succeed? InsideTrip officially launches Tuesday and we can have our fun ranking the cheapest flights with the most legroom from Los Angeles (LAX) to San Francisco (SFO), New York (JFK) or even London (LHR). Even though it will still be in beta, InsideTrip will include 30 countries for international flights. Some of the compromises to be expected early on are occasional site outages and server-busy errors, and slow search times, among other issues. At launch, Firefox 2.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 7 are the only supported browsers. Their plan is to be fully cranking by the end of 2008.

Don’t worry… if you don’t want to analyze all the “pain points” of the flight, as Pelter calls them. There is also a handy customizeable rating system next to each flight. InsideTrip analyzes the details for you and rates each flight on speed, comfort and ease based on a 100-point scale. I am excited about the geek-friendly details section. It’s a drop-down menu that stems from each flight and tells you how old the plane is, how full you can expect it to be and about how much legroom it will have or not have compared with the other flights.

The one drawback I see so far is that there could be information overload. Travelers who are new to shopping for flights online might get overwhelmed, even though the structure of the info is clear and well-organized. But those who’ve found other travel websites frustrating due to a lack of information may find InsideTrip to be just the online concierge they’ve been waiting for.

What’s your favorite online airfare booking site? Check out InsideTrip and let us know how it compares.

— Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel Deal Blogger

[Image: InsideTrip]

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 3, 2008 at 3:02 pm by Jen Leo and is filed under Business Travel, Family & Kids, Frequent Flier, News, Tips & Advice, Travel Q&A, Travel Technology. 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.