Microsoft Unveils Bing Travel

Bing, Microsoft's new "decision engine" now does travel. From the press release:

Microsoft Corp. has announced consumer availability of a new search destination for travelers – Bing Travel – which will help consumers make smart travel decisions through a variety of innovative tools and features. Bing Travel is part of Bing, Microsoft’s new Decision Engine and consumer brand announced on May 28, designed to help people overcome search overload and make faster, more informed decisions when searching online. Bing Travel combines many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with rich news and editorial content from MSN Travel. Bing Travel is available for travelers today at www.bing.com/travel.

According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare. Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options, and 17 percent spend more than one month. Bing Travel aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time consumers spend searching for travel information by presenting comprehensive results in one place, and to help consumers make more informed decisions with tools such as Price Predictor and Rate Indicator.

I tried a few searches for airfares from Dayton to Seattle in July and August. And while Bing did show me a lot of different travel options, for some of the dates I was able to find cheaper fares using Expedia. Doing this additional search, though, was easily done from Bing because right there on the side of the results page is a quick "compare prices" group of links to other sites such as Expedia, CheapTickets, and Priceline. One click and your search is repeated on the site of your choice - no re-filling out search forms. That's pretty handy.

My first search results did not trigger the "Price Predictor" feature (Apparently, Seattle is not a popular destination when flying out of Dayton.) So I retried with flights to Tampa, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. The Price Predictor shows me graphically the lowest fares to these destinations by departure date. Now THAT is a pretty cool search tool.