Here's a new Web-based travel tool I can get truly madly deeply excited about: Yapta. This new upstart/start-up company is promising a tool that tracks specific flights and automatically alerts you when the fare for those flights drop.
Let's say you booked a $350 round-trip itinerary from San Francisco to Atlanta on Delta. If the rate drops, Yapta will let you know, so that you can call the airline and ask for a refund of the difference between the itinerary's current rate and what you paid. (Some airlines may charge you a change fee, however.)
As far as I can tell, Yapta differs from other Web travel tools in this regard. For example, Travelocity's Fare Watcher automatically pings you if fares between two cities drop by $25 or more. But it doesn't tell you if the fare you've already paid for a specific airline itinerary has shrunk. The alternative to Yapta is to constantly check the airline's Web site to see if the fare for your itinerary has decreased--and who wants to do that?
As of this writing, Yapta hasn't gone live but is expected to do so any minute. But I wonder: If Yapta becomes really successful, will it force airlines to revise their refund policies--in their favor, not ours?
This news sounds almost too good to be true! Yapta appears to be a truly amazing tool and also appears to be very easy to use, at least judging from its beta iteration. I can't help but wonder, though, how the airlines will try to circumvent the advantages that Yapta provides: extra service fees for requesting refunds, mysterious last-minute price-hikes in fares Yapta has alerted, or other nefarious schemes the normal person can't possibly imagine.
Posted by: chuck | May 23, 2007 at 11:52 AM