Being a faithful reader of Guy Kawasaki’s blog, I couldn’t help but try the travel site he was promoting recently. The site is called cFares, and apparently cFares has direct access to highly discounted air fares. In Guy Kawasaki’s own words,
cFares is the first and only online travel site with exclusive relationships that gives it access to the $20 billion of consolidator “net” airfares. Consolidators are travel wholesalers who commit to buy large blocks of inventory from the airlines at volume (also called “net”) discounts. They are restricted from selling directly to consumers and have historically only offered these fares to travel agents.
I decided to take it for a test drive, and found the results to be *very impressive*.
Take, for example, a round-trip from San Diego, CA to Stockholm, Sweden leaving on December 9, 2006 returning on December 19, 2006. cFares’s cAgent price (similar to the COSTCO membership model) is $784.00. Contrast that to one of my (previous) favorite travel sites–Expedia. Expedia wants $1033.00 for the *same* trip. That’s a whopping difference of $249.00! The savings pay for the $50/year cAgent membership 5 times over 
One of the gripes I have with cFares, albeit minor, is that the first search results that appear usually are quite expensive–but once the Ajax-enabled search feature has completed the highly discounted fares appear. The “processing” indicators used (in the top of the page) are not as clear as I would like them to be. When I did a mini usability test with some friends of mine, they had the same reaction as I had–whoa that’s expensive! Of course, if one give it a little bit of time, cFares’s (otherwise) cool Ajax updating magic will give you the really discounted fares.
So, my suggestion would be to somehow make the search results page a bit more obvious (intuitive) to us users. It should be completely clear that the cFares system is still looking for cheaper fares and that the cheap fares are just a few seconds away from popping up. This phenomenon is particularly prominent if it takes cFares a while to find fares for a given route.
Overall, I know cFares will be my first destination next time I consider flying anywhere.
