Yapta saves fliers cash with alerts on ticket price reductions

By Richard N. Velotta (contact), In Business reporter

Published Fri, Jan 16, 2009 (2 a.m.)

Updated Sat, Jan 17, 2009 (9:24 p.m.)

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to save money in your travel expenses, you may want to look at a Web site that has been operating for more than a year and a half and has a cool new feature that is helpful to some frequent fliers.

It’s Yapta.com, with “yapta” an acronym for “your amazing personal travel assistant.”

Since May 2007, Yapta has saved its members more than $109 million in air fares by alerting travelers whenever their airline offers a lower ticket price than what they paid. The average savings per ticket: $227.

Here’s how it works: Go to Yapta.com and sign up for the free service. You can purchase tickets through the company’s booking engine, which operates like most airline or travel booking sites. Once an itinerary is established, Yapta forwards the booking process to the airline Web site to complete the transaction.

The site enables customers to track the movement of the fare instead of booking right away.

Or, if you prefer to book on your own, list the flight and how much you paid for your ticket and Yapta will monitor for fare decreases.

If the airline offers a better fare between the time you purchased your ticket and the day of travel, you’ll get an e-mail alert from Yapta and the company can assist you in getting the better fare, which usually results in getting a travel voucher or a credit for future travel.

The company takes into account the fees some airlines charge for making an itinerary change. For example, it costs $15 to make a change on AirTran. If the new fare gives you more than $15 in savings, you’ll get the alert.

In many cases, a ticket would have to come down quite a bit for any savings, since domestic ticket changes cost $150 on American, Continental, Delta and US Airways. But some airlines — such as Alaska, JetBlue and United — don’t charge for a change.

The new feature that Yapta unveiled in November is particularly helpful for frequent fliers. The company tracks and alerts travelers when they can use their frequent-flier miles for a particular flight. Currently, Yapta only offers that service for flights on Alaska, United, Delta, Continental and US Airways.

Tom Romary, the founder and chief executive of Yapta, knows his way around the airline fare game since he formerly worked as an executive with Alaska Airlines in Seattle.

“The airlines like the fact that Yapta drives direct bookings to their own sites,” Romary said of his company’s relationship with the 30 carriers that it monitors. “The reality is that most people already are doing comparison shopping on the Web, but we show the comparisons and help consumers get something back if there’s a sale.”

Probably the biggest rub Las Vegans might have with Yapta is that it doesn’t provide its alert service or comparison shopping for Southwest Airlines, which flies about one-third of the passengers who travel to and from McCarran International Airport.

That’s not a big surprise. Southwest doesn’t share its fare data with other big travel sites such as Travelocity or Orbitz either.

“They have tight control over their inventory and they’re aggressive about not wanting to be in comparisons,” Romary said. “They’re a good airline and I know because I used to compete with them when I was with Alaska.”

But he also figures that Southwest wouldn’t welcome a comparison because it doesn’t always have the lowest fare on a given route.

“I think that’s one of the biggest myths in the industry, that they always have the lowest fare,” Romary said. “But that shows how good their marketing is. I think someday Southwest will open up to transparency.”

Comparing Southwest fares to other airlines is further complicated by the baggage fees charged by some airlines. I’ve seen some airlines come in with lower fares on some routes, but as soon as you tack on the baggage fees charged by other carriers, the Southwest fare is the same or slightly under their competitors.

In the meantime, Romary suggested that fliers could track a ticket price on Yapta and compare it with fares offered on Southwest’s Web site.

Comparing Southwest cuts

It’s been widely reported that Southwest Airlines has focused on optimizing its flight schedules to get the most bang for its bucks, basically putting more flights and seats into markets that would be more profitable and fewer in markets that don’t perform as well.

In general, local industry leaders have been relieved that Southwest didn’t take the same approach as No. 2 McCarran carrier, US Airways, which cut its Las Vegas capacity nearly in half over the last year and a half.

By comparison, Southwest has cut about 4 percent of its flights and 3.9 percent of its seats to the Las Vegas market from March 2008 to its March 2009 schedule.

Other markets had far larger double-digit percentage cuts like Spokane, Wash., and Louisville, Ky. (each down 16.3 percent), Oakland, Calif. (off 15.8 percent), and Tucson (down 15.7 percent).

But because Las Vegas is Southwest’s largest market, the relatively small percentage decline masks the fact that the airline cut a substantial number of seats. Only four of Southwest’s 64 markets had bigger cuts by volume than Las Vegas.

Boyd Group International, an Evergreen, Colo.-based aviation analyst and consultant, recently completed a report of Southwest’s traffic shifts, primarily to dispel the notion that Southwest is moving away from its long-term strategy of operating only at secondary airports, a move that some media say is noteworthy because of Southwest’s recent expansion in Denver and its announcement that it is entering the Minneapolis and New York markets.

The Boyd report compared Southwest’s March 2008 and 2009 schedules and noted increases and declines by number of flights and seats (some of Southwest’s older Boeing 737s have smaller seating capacities than the newer models).

The report found that 75 percent of Southwest’s markets will have a reduced number of departures in March and only seven of the 17 cities where there are increases are in major metropolitan markets, thus disproving that Southwest is abandoning its secondary airport strategy.

But some of the minutia in the report is interesting.

The 3.9 percent decline in the number of seats to the Las Vegas market represents a loss of 38,817 for the month. Only Baltimore, Phoenix, Chicago Midway and Oakland had larger losses.

Although the Boyd report said Oakland suffered a loss of 88,864 seats to that market for the month, it also should be noted the number of seats to San Francisco International Airport across the bay had an increase of 29,042, the third-largest increase in the Southwest system.

The biggest growth for the airline is occurring at Denver International Airport, where 233,374 additional seats will be flying into the market, more than doubling the number it had a year ago.

The 101.8 percent increase is by far the largest growth market for Southwest and an indication that it aims to compete vigorously with established carriers United and Frontier in that market.

Other growth markets for Southwest: Fort Lauderdale and Fort Myers, Fla.; Philadelphia; Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Orange County, Calif.; Buffalo, N.Y.; Indianapolis; Omaha, Neb.; New Orleans; St. Louis; and Albuquerque.

One more note on capacity reductions: US Airways announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week that it plans to cut domestic mainline capacity another 8 percent to 10 percent in 2009. There’s no word yet on whether cuts will include more in Las Vegas, where the airline offers an average of 73 flights a day, down 36.6 percent from January 2008.

Addressing problem gambling

Longtime Southern Nevada casino executive Glenn Christenson is the new chairman of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, a 12-year-old national nonprofit group devoted to funding research to better understand and treat pathological gambling disorders.

Christenson, a former executive vice president and chief financial officer for Station Casinos, has been active in problem gambling issues for years and takes the chairmanship from former Harrah’s Entertainment Chairman and Chief Executive Phil Satre. Christenson is the managing director of Velstand Investments.

The National Center for Responsible Gaming is the nation’s top problem gambling awareness organization and its board of directors is led by President Bill Boyd, chairman and chief executive of Boyd Gaming; secretary-treasurer Judy Patterson, senior vice president and executive director of the Washington-based American Gaming Association; and board members Robert Boswell, senior vice president of Pioneer Behavioral Health; Sue Cox, founding executive director of the Texas Council on Problem and Compulsive Gambling; Alan Feldman, senior vice president of public affairs for MGM Mirage; Kevin Mullally, general counsel and director of government affairs for Gaming Laboratories International; and Jennifer Shatley, vice president of responsible gaming policies and compliance for Harrah’s.

Richard N. Velotta covers tourism for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at 259-4061 or at rick.velotta@lasvegassun.com.