Yapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) which I reviewed in the past, is launching some new capabilities today. To refresh your memory, the things Yapta is best at are:
- helping you track airfare prices to get the best deal (you get alerts when the price drops) and
- helping you get money back from the airlines if the price drops after you buy your tickets (again, they alert you and provide instructions for how to get a refund or a voucher from the airline)
I've been using this for a while and, thanks to "best" #2, I've gotten several hundred dollars back form United when my airfare dropped on one of my family's vacation trips.
What's new today?
In the past, you had to use a browser add-on to get Yapta's functionality, which meant you used a bunch of other web sites to search for flights and used the add-on to "tag" the trips you want to watch.
Now, they've unified several capabilities into a web experience that doesn't require a browser add-on. You can, through their web site:
- quickly search for the cheapest flights based on your saved preference profile,
- start tracking price fluctuations for a number of routes and flight combinations all at once (great for planning trips that are a good distance in the future), and
- get alerts via email when fares drop or fall below a "target" price that you can configure.
After you purchase your ticket, the site will alert you when you're elegibile for a travel credit from the airline. That's how I got my vouchers from United - and it was dirt simple, since I followed the instructions Yapta included in their email.
They've also added some other convenience features like storing your frequent flier numbers, information on your unused tickets, and information on your travel credits.
There's much more than I've described here - check it out yourself -- for free -- at Yapta today.