Domestic

Ticket Price Drop? Award Seats Open? Yapta Tells All

Welcome to Wing Tips, the new air travel blog from the publishers of First Class Flyer. You can read about this unique new publication here. Today's topic: What's a "Yapta"? We were curious, too, on hearing this new website's unusual name. What we learned was that Yapta is internet lingo for some neat air travel tricks. Here's what it can do.

One aim of Wing Tips is to help you build a bank of travel resources that you might otherwise have not known about. Such resources can easily go unrecognized these days, especially when some newer ones carry the typically cryptic names so favored by "in" internet sites.

Such is the case of Yapta.com.

Led by a former marketing executive with Alaska Airlines, Yapta has received increasing notice from knowledgeable travelers. Billing itself as "Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant," (ergo, Y.A.P.T.A.) the site offers at least two services that many travelers find appealing.

Emails When the Price Drops ...
One benefit is the ability to know, at computer speed, whenever your airline reduces its fare on a given flight, even after you've purchased your ticket.

Once a user has registered his or her flight data, including the price paid if the ticket has already been bought, Yapta's ever watchful systems track the flight and send an email alert if the fare drops by a user-specified amount.

That's not all, however. The site also provides guidance on how to claim a refund or voucher from the airline if the carrier offers a lowest price guarantee, which many do if the ticket is bought directly from them. Or, for $15, Yapta will make the call for you. The site provides this function for some 23 airlines.

Yapta's services have already been used by some 350,000 fliers, the site's owners say. And Yapta claims that this service has already saved its users more than $90 million, the vast majority of it prior to payment; the rest was in vouchers after the fact.

...And When Award Seats Open

A second, even more unique service, involves emailing users when award seats open on flights that they've asked Yapta to track.

"Airlines do open and close buckets of inventory around award seats," said Yapta's CEO, Tom Romary, in a New York Times interview. He added that, if 10 % of seats are set aside for award purposes, half typically go unclaimed, so the airlines are happy to find passengers to fill them, as this both reduces unused miles liability and promotes customer loyalty.

At least one airline executive agreed. Mark Guerette, e-commerce director of Alaska Airlines, called Yapta's service "purposeful innovation," adding that, "it helps the customer look for the proverbial needle in the haystack."

At this writing, Yapta had just started the award notification service, and was able to monitor award openings on only Alaska, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways. Additional lines will be added over time, Yapta officials explained.

We'd be interested in hearing your experiences with Yapta or similar services. Email us at WingTips@firstclassflyer.com.