Sites of Passage

Where are the best travel deals on the Web? We find the hottest sites for online booking--and round up essential tips and tricks for wired wanderers.

Michael Shapiro

In 1961 in a classic futuristic episode of The Twilight Zone, Burgess Meredith played a librarian who was put on trial by a totalitarian state. His crime? Obsolescence.

Well, another profession might be facing that charge in the near future--conventional travel agents.

Sure, we've been saying for the past two years that the Web will never replace agents completely. And it's still true that far more travelers book through agents than online. But this year, according to Internet travel analyst Phocuswright, online bookings are expected to total $20 billion, more than 11 percent of the U.S. market, compared to less than 1 percent five years ago.

Over the past year, a slew of new travel sites, such as Hotwire, SideStep, and Travelbyus, has arisen to deliver more online booking choices for travelers than ever before. Long-standing sites such as Expedia and Travelocity have improved their services as well. (See our update for the latest services from Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz, and for new deals from airlines.)

Today you have more options for finding bargains online--from Web-only specials offered by some airlines to last-minute cruise discounts. And improved services let you hone searches and locate fares and itineraries that are exactly what you want. With travel agent commissions nosediving faster than dot-com stock prices, fewer agents are willing to spend time to save you money. So it's great that the Web gives you another option.

Services also exist for changing your itinerary with a wireless phone and for downloading destination guides into your PDA. The widespread use of handhelds has encouraged leading travel publishers like Lonely Planet and Frommer's to create miniature versions of their city guides for the Palm OS. (Frommer's is owned by PC World's parent company, IDG.)

Web sites are far from perfect, though, and planning a trip online takes longer than calling an agent. A travel agent may still be more suitable for specialty trips, too, like spa vacations and complex overseas trips. But as agents begin turning to the Net themselves to ferret out deals and charge $50 fees for their services, more travelers will book trips on their own. And it's never been easier to do just that.

The Contenders

To see how some newer travel sites compare with established ones, I tested four sites that launched in the past year against Priceline (the well-known bidding site) and Expedia (my pick for general booking because of its revamped, easy-to-navigate design).

The four newer sites are Hotwire (which, like Priceline, sells blind tickets that don't state the flight time or the airline before you buy); Qixo (a price-comparison site that monitors fares from discount sites such as Cheaptickets.com); SideStep (a travel search plug-in designed to work with Internet Explorer); and Travelbyus (which uses a new booking tool that gives you several options for sorting results). I opted to test against Expedia instead of Travelocity, because its prices are often similar to Travelocity's but Expedia is easier to use.

And since most travelers look to the Web to book more than just their flight, I also checked innovative sites for booking hotels, planning sightseeing, and more.

Site Showdown

To test the booking sites, I compared them using three itineraries: a simple, short-notice, domestic round-trip; a three-legged journey with a longer lead time; and an international jaunt booked a month in advance.

The ground rules were simple: I would fly any time of day (except overnight) and told the sites to show me the lowest fares first (as opposed to flight times or other criteria). I researched all bookings on the same day--as veteran travelers know, prices can jump or plummet overnight.

Itineraries

Itinerary 1: Basic domestic round-trip from San Jose, California, to any of New York's three major airports, booked with five days' advance notice.

Itinerary 2: Music-lover's delight, a three-legged jaunt from Los Angeles to Nashville to New Orleans and back to Los Angeles, booked 24 days in advance.

Itinerary 3: An international flight going from Chicago to Paris, with 30 days' advance notice.

My conclusions? For last-minute deals, I like Hotwire, which can find some surprisingly low fares, as long as you're flexible about what time of day you fly. For complex itineraries involving more than one stop, Expedia is my pick, thanks to the variety of options it gives you for sorting your results. But no site will get you the top deal every time. Your best strategy is to research fares on several sites before you buy. That's what I did.

Michael Shapiro, author of Internet Travel Planner (Globe Pequot Press, 2000), contributes to the San Francisco Chronicle and coauthors an online newsletter for The Industry Standard. Yardena Arar is a senior editor for PC World.

Simple Itinerary

I started my search with the basic domestic round-trip from San Jose, California, to any of New York's three major airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, or Newark), booked five days in advance.

One disadvantage of booking on short notice, of course, is that airfare is typically stratospheric. Such is the price that Expedia gave us for this trip: $1104 on America West.

SideStep, a plug-in that displays its data in the left column of Internet Explorer browsers (a Netscape version should be available this spring), identified a best fare of $1299 from San Jose to Newark. (All prices quoted in this story refer to round-trip fares and include taxes and fees.)

SideStep grabs the search terms you enter at Expedia, Travelocity, and other major online travel agencies and compares the best fares offered by 28 airlines, including some online-only fares not available at other general booking sites. It also automatically searches alternate airports (one trick for getting a lower fare). For instance, it showed a $360 overnight flight on JetBlue, a new discount carrier, from Oakland (about 40 miles north of San Jose) to JFK. But I decided it wasn't fair to include this option in my comparisons, since I didn't allow the other sites to search alternative airports.

SideStep rarely uncovers dirt-cheap deals, but it can save you 5 percent or more off typical fares. And because SideStep directs you to the airlines' sites to book your flight, you can earn bonuses--such as frequent flier miles--that sites such as United.com offer when you purchase your tickets directly from them.

Travelbyus and Qixo both uncovered the lowest standard fare (a fare available through mainstream travel agents and sites): a $761 ticket that combined flights on Continental and American, with a stopover in each direction. Travelbyus is the first online agency to adopt a new booking system from ITA Software that allows you to sort options based on price, flight times, stopovers, and airline. (Expedia recently added similar options to its site.) ITA's software is also the heart of Orbitz, scheduled to launch in June.

Qixo, the other site that found the $761 fare, compares bargain fares from 17 discount agencies and other sites--fares that don't usually show up at mainstream sites like Expedia.

Buying Sight Unseen

The price results of my initial search were disappointing but not surprising, given the short notice. Most people who book at the last minute are business travelers who are less reluctant to pay high prices on their expense accounts. But if you want to avoid paying a lot ($761 really isn't a deal for a simple cross-country flight), it may be worth rolling the dice at Priceline or Hotwire.

I decided to first try Hotwire, which offers good deals even with less than seven days' notice. And unlike Priceline, Hotwire tells you the price up front, so you don't have to play a guessing game with bids.

Here's the deal: You can specify only the date you want to fly, not the time or the airline, and you can't obtain a refund if your travel dates change or you can't use the ticket for some reason. You also don't get frequent flier miles or assigned seats.

I prefer Hotwire to Priceline because it lets you compare fares for flights going to different airports before selecting. The site gave me a choice of all San Francisco-area airports and all New York airports. I picked San Jose for my departure and selected JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark for my arrival. (Testing the limits of my flexibility, Hotwire asked me to consider flying into Philadelphia instead, but I declined.) In a few seconds Hotwire turned up a $310 fare from San Jose to Newark. Alternatively, it offered a fare to the more convenient JFK for $320.

I had only 30 minutes to respond--if you don't book within that time, Hotwire restricts you from searching the same itinerary for another 72 hours (of course, you could try another username, credit card, and computer if it's worth the trouble), so I zipped over to Priceline.

Priceline, bowing to various consumer complaints, now pledges to respond to bids within 15 minutes (down from an hour), to keep layover times as brief as possible, and to streamline the bidding process by decreasing the number of screens you have to use to make a bid.

Using the Hotwire fares as a guideline, I bid a slightly lower $270 for a flight from San Jose to JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark. But before I received results, Priceline told me I'd have to pay $29 in taxes and fees (Hotwire includes these in its fares). I clicked OK and sent the bid; within 15 minutes an "urgent" e-mail arrived saying "Congratulations Michael Shapiro, you got your price of $270" (for a total of $299 with taxes and fees).

Priceline Pros and Cons

The only drawback was that the flight (on America West) included a stopover in Phoenix each way. But since Priceline had already accepted my bid, I had to purchase the ticket. Nonetheless, finding a coast-to-coast ticket for under $300 on less than a week's notice was a good deal, especially compared to the $761 fare quoted at the other sites--although Hotwire's flight straight to JFK for $320 would have been more appealing had I purchased it.

Jon Goodstein of Mendocino, California, also obtained good results at Priceline. He recently paid the site's $358 round-trip fare for a flight from San Francisco to New York. "It was a nonstop on Delta, and the flight times were convenient," he says. Even better: The flight was overbooked, so Goodstein volunteered to be bumped and got a $350 voucher toward a future flight as a reward. And he was upgraded to business class on the next flight.

But not all Priceline customers are so happy. Kathleen Caldwell of Sonoma, California, scored a $200 fare from Oakland to Chicago--with a catch: The flight had two stopovers each way. One of them was in Atlanta--talk about taking the roundabout route.

Both Priceline and Hotwire offer prices at less than half the standard fares. But the concessions you have to make aren't always worth the savings. You can't choose your flight times, and perhaps most important, you can't change your ticket. If your savings are in the hundreds of dollars, it may be worthwhile to accept these restrictions. Otherwise, if you plan ahead, you should be able to locate a decent fare elsewhere, collect frequent flier miles, and retain the right to change your plans (although you'll probably still have to pay the airline's fee for changing your booking).

Complex Itinerary

The next domestic trip I tested was more complex: a three-legged jaunt to music hot spots. Los Angeles to Nashville was the first leg, followed four days later by a flight from Nashville to New Orleans, and back to Los Angeles three days later. I planned the trip for 24 days later so I'd be eligible for advance-purchase discounts.

Because of the multiple destinations in this itinerary, several sites couldn't handle my ticketing request. Hotwire, Priceline, and SideStep book only simple round-trip itineraries, and Qixo books one-way trips one leg at a time (instead of as a single itinerary), so I focused on Expedia and Travelbyus. Here, the ITA Software that Travelbyus uses showed its value.

I could easily find fares for primary airports, or I could consider alternative airports within 25, 50, or 100 miles of my first choice. I could also specify two departure airports, such as LAX and Orange County, and only the main airports for Nashville and New Orleans, or I could choose alternative days to find the best price. The only drawback in listing so many alternatives is that the search can sometimes take a bit longer to return results--and it may turn up too many.

At Expedia you can sort results by airline, price, or total flight time (including stopovers). So a one-stop flight with a short layover will be listed ahead of a one-stop flight with a longer layover. Ultimately, though, Travelbyus and Expedia found the same flights at the same price: a series of one-stops, all on Northwest Airlines, for $310, a very low fare considering that three flight segments are included.

Having to fork over so little for the flights, I could afford to splurge a little in New Orleans and laisser les bon temps rouler (let the good times roll, as they say).

International Itinerary

Next stop: Paris in the springtime. For the third trip, I booked a flight from Chicago to Paris, with 30 days' notice. I brought in all the players except Hotwire, which didn't offer overseas bookings at the time I researched this article. (Hotwire has since added international air service.) I figured I could get a pretty good deal by booking 30 days in advance and traveling in March, before hordes of summer tourists dimmed the City of Lights.

Qixo found the lowest fare, a $420 ticket through a consolidator called TicketPlanet. Unfortunately, this flight stopped in Brussels. A nonstop trip on Air France cost $427 through Lowestfare, a much better bet. Expedia found the same Air France flight and fare, while Sidestep and Travelbyus found flights on American and Delta, respectively, for $437.

With these low fares, it didn't make sense to try Priceline, because even if I could find a slightly lower fare, I'd probably sacrifice convenience. Priceline is a much better option when I have less lead time or when I'm trying to beat a peak summer fare. But just for the sake of comparison, I decided to bid $200 at Priceline. This, along with the $103.45 that the site would add in taxes and fees, meant I'd pay $303.45 if Priceline accepted my offer.

But a pop-up window informed me that my bid was so low it would have only a 3 percent chance of being accepted. It asked me to consider bidding $100 more, but I wasn't willing to do that for an itinerary I couldn't first approve. Minutes later my $200 bid was rejected, but the site in-formed me I could still buy the ticket for $388.45, including taxes and fees. Too little, too late. I wasn't about to trade a guaranteed nonstop flight on Air France for $40 savings on a mystery itinerary.

When you fly overseas, it doesn't make sense to sacrifice convenience for a few dollars. In addition, choosing Hotwire or Priceline means you forfeit frequent flier miles, a big loss if you're flying 10,000 miles.

Gestures Around the World

When visiting Malaysia, don't put your hands on your hips--it's a sign of anger. In France, if you play an imaginary flute, you are signaling that someone is talking too much. To find out about what gestures mean in the country you're planning to visit, come to this entertaining site from the Web of Culture.

Have Palm, Will Travel

It's great to have the convenience of the Web to plan and book flights, but let's face it, travel is all about mobility, and a PC and modem don't always fill the bill. That's why travel services for handhelds are helpful--even if they're not comprehensive. If you own a Palm VII or a properly equipped cell phone, you can check your flight status for delays and cancellations, or find out what gate your flight is leaving from.

Three years ago, Travelocity introduced flight paging, a valuable service that sends a message to your pager if your flight is late or canceled. That service is being expanded later this year to let you choose notification via e-mail, voice mail, cell phone, or fax. Several airlines now offer the same kind of notification service if you book directly through them.

You can rebook your flight (only for another flight the same day) with Travelocity through your cell phone using Nextel, AT&T, and Sprint PCS. However, it's probably easier to just phone the airline directly to rebook.

Expedia has its own mobile and wireless services. If you have a Pocket PC, you can download maps for itineraries that you've booked through its site, including point-to-point driving directions. The wireless service lets you access real-time data, such as when your flight is due to leave.

But booking flights through wireless handhelds, says Henry Harteveldt, travel analyst for Forrester Research, will not become common before 2003 or 2004. Low data transfer speeds and small screens are the main obstacles. "The devices, calling plans, and connectivity aren't there yet to provide a comparable experience to the land-based Web," Harteveldt says.

Booking Hotels

In addition to flight bookings, the Net offers great deals on hotel bookings. And you can look at a room before you book it. HotelDiscounts is my pick for the best rates and the most extensive selection of hotels.

The use of streaming audio and video at hotel sites makes the experience of choosing accommodations almost interactive. Not only can you see pictures of rooms, but at HotelView you can take a virtual tour of hundreds of top-tier hotels and destinations worldwide. But don't forget that hoteliers only show the nicest rooms, not the cramped singles next to the ice machine.

When it comes to finding good deals, hotel chains, such as the Hyatt, often have specials available only through their site. And discounters such as HotelDiscounts and Quikbook offer rates significantly below retail. These companies tend to buy blocks of rooms months in advance and sometimes offer space in a hotel listed elsewhere as sold out.

Reservations booked through discounters occasionally fail to go through to the hotel, however. So it's a good idea to call or e-mail the hotel after booking to confirm your room.

Expedia and other major booking sites also negotiate deals with major properties. And TravelWeb, a general hotel-booking site, has a section called Click-it Weekends for last-minute rates. I found a rate of $95 per night at the Regal Biltmore in Los Angeles. (The regular rate was $259.)

The best thing about looking for a hotel room online is the selection of one-of-a-kind properties and nonchain accommodations. For vacation homes, try VacationSpot, which lists over 25,000 unique properties around the world.

The best B&B directories are BedandBreakfast.com and InnSite, which let you explore properties through still images and in some cases read reviews by other travelers. BedandBreakfast.com lists over 25,000 inns, most of them bookable through the site. I checked out the Bahari Bed & Breakfast in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, and saw the price for each room as well as availability for the night I wanted to visit. The listing included the innkeepers' names (Len and Yvonne), their toll-free number, and a link to the inn's Web page so I could learn more.

Web Travel Guides

With my airfare and hotel booked, I turned to sightseeing and nightlife. Online guidebooks are almost as old as the Web itself: Fodor's, Rough Guides, and Frommer's realized early on that the advantages of putting content online outweighed concerns about lost book sales. Frommer's and Rough Guides place the full content of all their books online.

Even more helpful than text is the advice available online from seasoned travelers. Frommers.com hosts chats with its authors and maintains an archive of recent talks (click on Ask the Expert under Travel Message Boards). Here I learned of bird-watching tours from the author of Frommer's South Florida guide.

Since even new guidebooks can be out of date in crucial respects, Lonely Planet has an Upgrades section containing information updates to their books. So if your guide to Bangkok came out over a year ago, you can still find the latest advice on politics, visas, and events over the Web. The updates use Adobe's PDF format and are designed to be printed, not read on your monitor.

If you don't want to print a sheaf of pages or carry cumbersome "guidebricks," consider downloading advice into your PDA or accessing a wireless guidebook. Frommers.com is one of several firms that offer guides through wireless PDAs like the Palm VII.

Capsule hotel and restaurant reviews accompany lists of top attractions, and the service is free. Downloads can be frustratingly slow, though, and your wireless access fees will add up. In addition, depending on your wireless service, you may not be able to access the advice everywhere. My verdict: This site feels like a proof-of-concept demo, not a prime-time-ready killer app.

Lonely Planet's CitySync offers a much more sensible approach: Download a condensed city guide into your handheld, and access it anytime. This means you don't have to dial up for access, but the CitySync guides cost $20 per city. You can download them or buy a CD that offers any five of the available 20 cities for $50. You can also download a demo from the site before buying.

During a recent trip to Paris, Ora Tsang of Edmonton, Alberta, had a positive experience with CitySync, using it to locate restaurants and places to visit. For example, she could search for Left Bank restaurants that charge less than 100 francs per person.

Tsang then used her Handspring PDA to add her own notes to CitySync's content and beamed the notes to a friend who was traveling to Paris later. "And you don't have to carry a guidebook, lightening the load in the daypack," Tsang adds.

CitySync currently offers downloadable updates only every few months. But Eric Kettunen, Lonely Planet's U.S. general manager, says the company envisions a "WorldSync" where hundreds of destinations are updated daily, with timely theater and event listings. That plan is a few years away from being realized, however.

Data for Handhelds

One service that does offer daily syncing is Vindigo, though it doesn't offer wireless updates and it covers mostly U.S. cities. Vindigo works with such partners as the Washington Post to provide daily updates on movies, nightlife, shopping, and dining for 19 U.S. cities and London. It works via syncing between the handheld's cradle and a computer. Sync before you leave, and your listings should be current for a week or so.

One interesting feature of Vindigo is its location-based listings--simply select a street corner, and Vindigo will spout advice on nearby shopping and dining.

For more-precise advice based on location, consider the new Geode ($289) from GeoDiscovery. The Geode plugs into the Handspring's springboard slot, and its GPS unit can locate you on a map within 2 meters of your position and deliver location-specific advice for sightseeing and dining in a city.

If you're out hiking, it can even serve as a compass to get you out of the woods. (If only the kids in The Blair Witch Project had had one of these.) And it can record place-specific notes: If you find a hike with breathtaking views, you can beam your impressions to other PDA users so they can follow in your footsteps. All very cool. But are you willing to spend $300 to locate yourself on a map and play Scotty and Spock with your friends?

Other online sightseeing services include 12degrees.com and Guidebookwriters.com, which connect you with travel authors for expert advice. For a variable fee (it depends on the writer, but figure on $80 per hour for about 2 hours total), you can get a custom itinerary from writers like Joe Cummings, the award-winning author of Lonely Planet's Thailand guide, listing the spots that best suit your particular interests.

The price may sound high, but if you're used to paying hundreds of dollars for guided tours, it could be a worthwhile ticket to unique experiences.

The Verdict

With all the travel-planning options now available online, you can find bargain airfare, cozy lodgings, and sightseeing advice without ever calling your travel agent. From Web-only discount airfare to hotel videos to downloadable miniguides, the Net is making travel planning fairly easy and convenient.

Sure, it still takes more time than phoning an agent, but travel sites give you more control over getting the precise trip you want. And with wireless services improving and growing in number, you can access more information while you're out on the road.

One development to note, however: As this article went to press, two airlines canceled their commission agreements with Travelocity and Expedia, with the aim of drawing customers from these sites to the airlines' own sites. This action, plus the impending launch of Orbitz.com (a site that's being backed by most of the major U.S. airlines) could mean that one-stop shopping sites like Expedia will not be able to offer better deals than the airlines' sites much longer. Stay tuned.

Travel Booking Online: Features Comparison (chart)

Site	Ease of use	Booking flexibility	Finding lowest fares	Sorting options	Comments
Best Bet Expedia www.expedia.com	Excellent	Good	Fair	Price, airline, duration of flight, takeoff or arrival time	Good place to get an overview of your options; technically sophisticated.
Best Bet Hotwire www.hotwire.com	Good	Poor	Good	None, since you get only one result	Good deals; lets you pick travel dates but not flight time or airline.
Priceline www.priceline.com	Fair	Poor	Good	None	Finds good deals, especially with less than seven days' notice, but won't let you specify the time or airline you want to fly.
Qixo www.qixo.com	Fair	Fair	Excellent	Price	Compares discounted prices from 17 sites so you don't have to.
SideStep www.sidestep.com	Fair	Fair	Fair	Price, number of stopovers, airline, duration of flight	Automatically searches alternate airports for lower fares; tracks your surfing and purchases.
Travelbyus www.travelbyus.com	Good	Excellent	Good	Price, number of stopovers, airline	New booking system gives you several sorting options.

Road Food and Local Hospitality

Where to Eat on the Road

Tired of zipping through fast-food drive-throughs every time you hit the road? Check Roadfood.com for thousands of more-promising suggestions. Choose a state and select from dozens of restaurant types--that's how I found the Bon Ton Café in New Orleans, featuring redfish bon ton, crawfish, and gumbo.

Local Hospitality

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but sometimes you can get a free room and bed. Globalfreeloaders.com puts you in touch with locals around the world who are willing to host visitors for free. The site specifies the age of the host, the type of housing, and whether the host prefers a quiet guest or someone more outgoing.

And for additional local hospitality, check out Localsintheknow.com, which provides you with travel advice from knowledgeable locals about the best neighborhood pubs in London or where to find the best sea views in Hong Kong.

Staying Connected on the Road

Computers and the Net are great travel companions--e-mail, instant messaging, and chat are invariably cheaper than a long-distance telephone call, provided that you have the right tools and an ISP that offers national or international service. Here are some tips for staying connected when you're thousands of miles away from your desk.

Equip yourself: Find out before you go what kind of access the hotel offers (dial-up, broadband, or wireless), and pack the necessary cables and adapters. Longer cables are best, in case your room's outlets are not conveniently located. If you're going overseas, make sure your notebook adapter will work with the foreign power system. Most notebooks less than five years old are already equipped to work overseas. Check your adapter. If it says "Input 100-240V," you should be fine. If it lists only 120V, you'll need to buy a voltage converter, which costs approximately $40. A good source for cables and adapters is TeleAdapt.

Look for broadband: Some major hotels offer in-room high-speed access for $10 a day. Inquire before booking your room.

Guard against intruders: Hotel connections, depending on how they're configured, can open your system to hackers and corporate spies. Ensure that your system's security settings are in place, turn off file and printer sharing in Windows, and make certain you up-date your software with the latest security patches; also, install a good virus/Trojan-horse scanner.

Beware of café hackers: Cybercafés are notorious hacker targets (as are computers set up at conferences for attendees to use). Public terminals can carry a Trojan horse that sends your user name and password to a hacker. If you must use a public terminal, have Symantec's free security check perform a thorough virus sweep of the system first. And be sure to sign off completely from any free e-mail services you use.

Think security: Frequent travelers who keep sensitive data on their notebooks should at the very least password-protect their systems. A $45 Kensington lock can prevent a thief from stealing your notebook. Or consider a fingerprint scanner or other biometric security system.

Get a national ISP account: Even if you love your local provider, get a low-cost, limited-use account with EarthLink, AT&T, or another service that has many local access numbers. Using it will be far cheaper than paying long-distance charges to dial up your regular ISP. You can also obtain temporary accounts in many foreign countries.

Note your e-mail settings: With your user ID, your password, and the names of your incoming and outgoing mail servers, you can check your POP3 e-mail, using any standard e-mail program--including Outlook Express, which comes bundled with Internet Explorer.

--Yardena Arar

Travel Update

Since PCWorld.com first published this story, recent developments may have changed the way you will want to research and book travel. Among them:

• Travelocity and Expedia, the two largest travel booking sites, recently began promoting exclusive deals negotiated directly with airlines, hotels, and other travel suppliers. For most airfare searches on either of these sites, three types of fares now appear: standard or published fares; proprietary, negotiated deals; and opaque (Priceline-style) fares, in which the carrier and flight times are hidden until purchased.
• Orbitz, the online agency backed by five of the six largest U.S. airlines, was cleared for takeoff by the Department of Transportation in April. The site promises deals and specials that previously have been relegated to airlines' own sites.
• Southwest Airlines has broken away from Travelocity, meaning Southwest.com is now the only major site where you can buy tickets on the country's leading budget carrier.
• Northwest Airlines and its alliance partner KLM have decided to stop paying ticket commissions to online agencies. To compensate for its loss, Travelocity now levies a $10 fee on all Northwest and KLM tickets.
• American Airlines in April added a $10 fee on most paper tickets to encourage travelers to opt for e-tickets. The fee doesn't apply to full-fare tickets and isn't assessed when e-tickets are not an option.
• An entirely new type of airline ticket, one that's almost as transferable as a movie ticket, is slated to debut May 22 at FairAir.com. See the site for rules and restrictions.

--Michael Shapiro