Air Travel 2.0: Online Service Just Got Much Better

The days of pokey search engines at online travel agencies are gone, replaced by jet engines and tools that offer regular folks the kind of power that travel agents have had for years.

On March 1, Orbitz introduced a search feature called Flex Search, which allows customers to go beyond the simple searches of when you want to leave and return. With the new function, travelers can see departure and arrival times across a wider range, and see all of the possible flights over a long weekend or an entire month.

"We're always communicating with our customers, and we found that 20% of consumers were willing to change their travel dates to get a better fare," said Orbitz spokeswoman Kendra Thornton. "We used to allow customers to search for bonus days, three days before or after the flight times. Now you can search in three ways, over a weekend, over a month and with the bonus days."

How powerful is the new Flex Search feature? Let's say you're a schoolteacher from Boston on summer vacation, looking for the cheapest possible vacation to Las Vegas for about a week, any time in the month of July.

Using Flex Search, you'd be able to see that flights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the cheapest at $255 round trip, which means you can stay for nine days and pay the same price as if you'd only stayed a week. The entire month's schedule is laid out in front of you, so you can see when it's cheapest to fly and get the most bang for your buck.

In about three to four months, Orbitz plans to unveil its "Deal Detector," which is a downloadable application that sits on the user's desktop and searches for flight times, like a personal assistant. Just tell the application, which is currently in beta testing, where you want to go, where you're leaving from and how much you want to pay, and it will keep looking for flights until it finds what you want.