Microsoft gets into Airline Price Comparison

Alongwith the Cashback program to encourage online shoppers, Microsoft has also introduced the Farecast search on Live at: http://farecast.live.com

homeArrowGuideShort Using the farecast search, you can locate the cheapest fares on the web! it also provides comparison with other international travel sites like priceline.com, expedia.com..

If you are in India, there are other travel portals also available as yatra.com, makemytrip.com, ezeego.com,

To give farecast a spin, I tried booking a flight from Delhi to Dubai on July 8th and return on July 13th. Here are the results:

Farecast.live.com INR 17352
Yatra.com INR 17541
Makemytrip.com INR 17832
ezeego.com INR 18623

 

However another search on Delhi –> Seattle sector gave me INR 53679 (i.e. USD 1310) on China Airlines using yatra and USD 1568 on Continental using farecast.

Farecast doesn’t provide cheapest price all the time! in addition, farecast transfers a person to a different site to book the ticket… e.g. it tranferred me to Gulf Air website to make my booking. The transfer would have been palatable if the choices made at farecast were transferred to the redirected site. But none of the data was pre-populated (though it was given already at farecast)..

In conclusion, farecast.live.com provides a very basic fare search facility for users. If you are in India, you are better off using any of the Indian travel sites given the additional service and liability you can hold them responsible for. it wudn’t hurt too much though to check the fares at farecast.live.com before making a booking for any international flight.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

In my continuing discussion with Community Stars across the country, I had a discussion today with Sadashiv. Though he works out of chennai and was here for a short trip, he found time today to discuss the opportunities for Community Star program to improve on. Some of thoughts we generated out of the discussion are as follows: 1. Community Stars are disengaged 'cause of lack of communication with them from MS. Better communication channels need to be developed. 2. Award experience and delivery of the Community Star benefits leave a lot to be desired. 3. Community Stars feel that MS is not laying enough importance on Community Stars and do not value their contributions much. More information needs to flow to CSs. From our end, we are doing the following: 1. Launch an extranet portal exclusively for Community Stars. We will host issue submission on this site. Also, we will share opportunities via this site e.g. beta opportunities 2. Re-launch the Community Star distributi
Read more

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do: Go to the Control Panel Choose "Indexing Options" Click on the "Advanced" button Click on the "File Types" tab Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents" Click OK and OK again on the message that appears. This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :) Tip taken from On10.net Technorati tags: Outlook , PST , search
Read more

Technocratical Society

In the past days, I haven’t been blogging. A lot has happened in that time – terrorist attack in Mumbai, MNS lost track, global recession set in and Congress advanced in the country. Here’s an ode to the state of the society as viewed by my nephew, Shantanu Chandra who is in Class XII, Amity International, Gurgaon. The lines below capture the times prevailing and the need for us to drop the “chalta hai” attitude but with caution: This techie world of gizmo and gadget This eerie feeling of incongruous widget Which gives us pleasure and takes pain Along with it makes us insane; Absurdness to such a horizon from where one would never fall And still people call you “Microsoft—…That’s all” A teen like me can’t do without a mobile-call Even though I know it is killing my brain cells, after all; This techie world of gizmo and gadget Makes a non-techie guy weird and hollow The bureaucrat are more concerned about their Sunday meal Than to serve the poor people whose w
Read more