Business Week's "Best of the Web"

Business Week announced the winners of the Best of the Web 2006 awards. In the trip planning category (a sub-category of "not at work") the finalists are:

1) Kayak
2) Trip Advisor*
3) SideStep
4) Farecast*
5) Expedia
6) Travelocity
7) Orbitz / Real Travel* (tied)
8) Holiday Truth*
9) Gusto*
10 Mobissimo*
*write-in votes

Interesting to see the travel search engines scoring higher than the traditional OTAs with the Business Week audience. Hmm...

Simplifying airfare search

If you missed it, you may want to check out the latest updates from Farecast.com. On Monday, we (disclosure: I work there) launched airfare search results from all cities and airfare predictions from an additional 20 cities, for a total of 75 origination airports.

We believe Farecast.com really simplifies the airfare shopping experience. Some airfare comparison sites tout "we search flights from over 120+ websites" but the reality is that agency sites do not have access to lower fares than the airlines websites. In fact, they charge booking fees which makes it more expensive to book with these options.

In addition to the features above, the company also made the following updates:
- New home page
- Auto-complete (AJAX) form
- Redesigned "know when to travel" graph

I've been swamped with the Farecast launch and upcoming releases so posts have been very limited, but hope to write more soon...