iPhone ‘App’ Of The Week : Airfare

Web: www.stevenfrischling.com — E-Mail: fish@flyingwithfish.com

7/05/2009 – iPhone ‘App’ Of The Week : Airfare

There are many iPhone Apps for finding flights online, and on my iPhone I currently have around half-a-dozen iPhone Apps for either booking flights or finding the ‘cheapest flight.’

Sometimes the ‘cheapest flight’ is not the most convenient flight, but then again there are times every traveller just wants the cheapest flight (OK, to me be honest I often go with the cheapest flight that matches my schedule and airline alliance preferences over the absolute cheapest flight).

For those looking for the cheapest flights ‘Airfare’ iPhone App, by inZania, is the best option I have found yet!

‘Airfare’ searches a wide variety of airfare sites to search for airfares, then rank them in order of pricing.   To check the reliability of ‘Airfare‘ I checked 20 random routings, for 20 different dates and ‘Airfare‘ returned the best fare options for 16 of these flight searches. With an 85% success rate ‘Airfare‘ comes out well ahead of other low-fare iPhone Apps I have tested.

To be fair, of the four flights where I found better fares, two of those routings were curve-balls that usually throw most airfare booking sites for a loop.

When checking how ‘Airfare‘ works I tested against how often the App would choose one website over another and in the end to my surprise the App does not appear to favour one airfare booking site over another.  Priceline did pop up four times, but I also ended up with fares from other sites as well, including Expedia, Orbitz, US Airways, American Airlines and Travelocity.

For maximum flexibility ‘Airfare‘ also lets users search fares for a month rather than by specific date. If you’re flexible on your travel dates you can save hundreds of dollars using the search-by-month option rather than the search by date option.

The ‘Airfare‘ iPhone App is currently on sale for US$1.99 and works with airlines worldwide and worldwide routings.

Below are 10 screen shots of Airfare from my iPhone.

Happy Flying!
–Click Images Below To Enlarge–