You board your flight to Chicago, $600 ticket in hand, and do a quick survey of the people sitting around you. Turns out 13D paid only $300 for her flight, while 14E shelled out nearly $1,000 for his. It’s a reality of air travel that infuriates passengers, but now several new travel websites are promising to demystify the seemingly nonsensical world of airline ticket pricing.
It was exasperation with existing online travel tools that led Robert Metcalf to develop flyspy, a site currently in alpha mode using fare data from Northwest Airlines.
“I once spent six hours combing through different websites,” says Metcalf, who wanted to see how prices changed if he flew into a different airport or adjusted his travel dates and length of stay. “I ended up compiling all the data I gathered into an Excel spreadsheet, and started wondering why there wasn’t a site that provides this kind of functionality.”