Reverse Auctions In travel, the \"reverse auction\" is the craze du jour among a
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Reverse Auctions
In travel, the "reverse auction" is the craze du jour among a small but growing segment of vacationers. It's a much less obvious procedure, and it requires some study. But if you're willing to spend the time on this painfully slow method of buying air tickets or cruise cabins, you can sometimes pick up a spectacular bargain.
In a reverse auction for travel, you specify the cruise ship and date of sailing in which you're interested. Or else, you name the city to which you wish to fly and the date of travel. The operator of the reverse auction submits your needs to an assortment of travel agents, ticket brokers, airlines, and cruise companies scattered around America, and those companies send you e-mails setting forth the price at which they're willing to provide the cruise or ticket.
In effect, they bid for your business (a "reverse auction"), and within a few hours, you have a variety of offers from which to choose. Most bids reach you within two to three hours after you've expressed your desires; some come in five or six hours later; some the next day.
As a full-blown program, the reverse auction began seven months ago in the cruise industry. A company called CruiseCompete created a Web site (www.cruisecompete.com), which asks the public to name the cruise ships and dates that they're interested in and then select from more than 40 cruise discounters and cruise-specializing travel agents (some big, some small, some regional, some national) who respond to those requests with price offers.
Judging from the comments of well-satisfied customers that now appear on the site, a great many members of the public have thus obtained cruise vacations that they regard as significantly less expensive and yet high quality. And approximately 10,000 people a month now request quotes from CruiseCompete.
A longer-established firm, CruiseMates.com, has been offering the reverse auction for several years, but only as a lesser alternative to its more traditional methods of disclosing the prices offered by individual cruise brokers. If you favor the reverse auction approach, you first access CruiseMates' main menu, then click on "cruise shopping," and then on "cruise quotes." CruiseMates.com will transmit your request for a price to its own group of cruise travel agents and afterward forward the quotes to you.
Why would a price solicited from a group of cruise travel agents, large and small, be better than a price obtained from a single large cruise discounter?
In travel, the "reverse auction" is the craze du jour among a small but growing segment of vacationers. It's a much less obvious procedure, and it requires some study. But if you're willing to spend the time on this painfully slow method of buying air tickets or cruise cabins, you can sometimes pick up a spectacular bargain. In a reverse auction for travel, you specify the cruise ship and date of sailing in which you're interested. Or else, you name the city to which you wish to fly and the date of travel. The operator of the reverse auction submits your needs to an assortment of travel agents, ticket brokers, airlines, and cruise companies scattered around America, and those companies send you e-mails setting forth the price at which they're willing to provide the cruise or ticket. In effect, they bid for your business (a "reverse auction"), and within a few hours, you have a variety of offers from which to choose. Most bids reach you within two to three hours after you've expressed your desires; some come in five or six hours later; some the next day.Explanation / Answer
It's because, claims Bob Levinstein of CruiseCompete, no one agency ever has the best prices for all sailings of all ships. Some have special deals for a special date. Others have committed themselves to a block of cabins on a particular ship. By submitting your request to dozens of cruise travel agents, says Levinstein, CruiseCompete heightens your chance of securing a bargain that you might otherwise never have found. You can access CruiseCompete.com or CruiseMates. com to test that claim.
Reverse auctions for airfares have been offered since 1996 by a brassy Dutch travel agent named Ad Latjes in his equally flamboyant European Travel Network Web site at www.etn.nl, which apparently has a broad following. Despite the reference to Europe, the site also offers domestic airfares within the United States, and for that homeland business it maintains a list of 10 widely scattered U.S. travel agents who submit price quotes for the domestic flights you wish to make. (Its broader coverage is for international flights, for which it lists a larger number of worldwide travel agents specializing in different countries.)
As with the cruises described earlier in this column, you specify the dates of your flights and the cities to which you wish to go, and Latjes claims you get price quotes from at least five of his 10 U.S. travel agents "within one to two business hours."
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