Interview with Neil Bainton, chief operating officer, FareCompare

Neil Bainton, chief operating officer, FareCompare, says the goal of the
company is to make it easier for consumers to shop for airfare by
providing a new research tools.

"Consumers are frustrated by effects of yield management," says Bainton,
who before joining FareCompare served as vice president of Strategy and
Business Development at Worldspan.

Bainton feels for consumers pricing seems irrationally complex. "Many
feel it is a game and that they need to invest a considerable amount of
time to make sure they aren't paying too much. Our goal is to provide
the consumer with a reference point on what fares are in the market and
what are the restictions for using these fares. It is still possible
that the fares won't be available, i.e. there may not be seats at that
price, but consumers can feel more confident in understanding the
pricing scale."

The company is working on additional data tools to provide more
perspective to consumers such as a notion of historical pricing as well
as integrating data from other sources to provide some indication of an
airline's performance for a particular market.

"With the Firefox extension we've also added the capability to set a
price strike point with alerts," says Bainton. The company also provides
tracking tools allowing consumers to follow markets of particular
interest.

FareCompare looks for those fares that consumers really want to fly,
focusing on simple round-trip itineraries with a maximum of one
connection. Pleased with progress made by FareCompare recently, Bainton
says, "We have been working for over a year to try to sort out a
consumer model. Our revenue today comes exclusively from providing fare
data services to other businesses."

"We believe our current approach leveraging RSS will prove to be a more
successful model. Our challenge is to provide useful information to
consumers who have been trained to shop exclusively by schedule. In
future versions we will work to make the bridge between the research
phase and the shopping process as seamless as possible. We intend to
keep our business as a data provider only and do not have plans to
complete purchase transactions," says Bainton.

On salient and unique features of company's online search offerings,
Bainton says, "We believe we are the first in the travel space to offer
personalised RSS subscriptions. Consumers can set filters to their
subscriptions and thereby ensure that the results returned are relevant
for their travel plans." The executive adds, "We just released the beta version of our
custom wizard that automates the process of creating custom
subscriptions. Separately, we sponsored the development of a Firefox
extension for tracking fares and are working with other developers to
create a Google Sidebar tool and a Konfabulator widget."

On tracking the way consumers use such online services, the company says
right now company's tracking is "pretty basic."

"We can analyse server logs to get a feel for who is coming to our site
and what pages they are accessing," says Bainton.

Providing his viewpoint on online travel business, Bainton says, "Meta
search has passed it's peak, The major online agencies are now all
controlled by major corporations. Things have quieted down a great deal
compared to this time last year."

Going forward, the company will focus on improving its search tools,
gaining access to additional data sets, adding international fares,
bringing the data to new platforms and making  the data easily
accessible.