We just rolled out a new version of our flight schedule app. Hopefully you’ll find it easy to use and also useful.

You can find the new app at http://www.farecompare.com/schedules/index.html

Any feedback you have on how to make it better (missing features, unclear instructions etc) please leave in the comments section on this post.

The team rolled out a new beta tonight. A bunch of bugs have been fixed and we’ve rolled out some more triplets.

Map triplet.

For each trip there is now a Google Map that we overlay with lowest published airfare - its basically a scaled down version of getaway maps that is tailored to your specific trip. So for city to city maps we show prices to alternate cities around your destination, for city to country or zones trips we show all the cities in the appropriate region.

Schedule triplet.

For each city to city triplet we now show the flight schedules for all airlines listing flight times, elapsed times and connection points

MyTrips is a new set of functionality on FareCompare.com that allows registered users to manage ‘trips’ - itineraries that can be as specific as two cities and exact dates or as loose as one city to an entire continent with no dates specified. Coupled with each trip will be a range of tools to allow you to research airfares, add email notifications, check flight schedules and a whole host of other functionality that has long been hidden in the darkest recesses of farecompare.com known only to the chosen few :))).

Its taken a bit longer than expected to get the MyTrips Beta out the door. A few last minute performance issues with Internet Explorer meant a quick bit of replumbing this week.

For those of you who signed up for the beta test - the site is available at http://beta.farecompare.com you should have received an email from me detailing your username and password.

Feedback can be left as comments to this post, or you can email beta.test at farecompare.com. If you find a bug, it will be useful to know if you are on Windows, Mac or whatever - what type of browser Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc and what version of both.

For those of you not in the private beta - don’t worry we’ll be opening it up in a few weeks.

In this version, we’d like you to test out the following functionality and let us know what works, what doesnt work, what needs more explanatory text etc. Feature requests are always welcome.

1. Login

2. Change your password.

3. Edit your profile. Make sure you can set your default departure city and preferred airline.

4. Add multiple trips. Make sure the sorting and paging works.

5. Access the ‘triplets’ for a trip via the More Details. We’ve created a couple but we’re working on more including booking your trip, comparing prices across different vendor sites, displaying prices over maps, display flight schedules, Ricks price analysis etc.

A couple of things to note:

1. We havent finished the new email alert system so while you can setup and edit alerts you wont get an email notification of a new fare til we finish that code in a couple of weeks.

2. Graphs for international destinations dont work yet - and the domestic graphs are a bit slow sometimes. (We’re working on it).

3. The price shown for a trip is the lowest published price - we’ll be adding in the best available price down the line.

4. In a future version you’ll be able to create trips like - New York to Caribbean, Chicago to France and eventually things like Dallas to Ski Destinations, Dallas to Golf Resorts etc. When you enter in your destination when creating a trip, you might find some of these names in there - please just ignore them for just now. I’ll let everyone when its ready for testing.

Graeme

Yesterday afternoon, we rolled out a whole new application for our itinerary results page. The idea was to add in some additional information for users to better judge what type of deal they are getting - at this moment in time. Around 50% of our users come to our home page - query exact dates land on the results page - and then wonder what the fuss is over FareCompare So we decided to show our recent email alerts, historical graphs and any other pertinent information.

I thought it best that we would try and present it as if Rick was talking to you. Of course - if he was really talking to you the page would be thousands of lines long and you would have lost the will to live by the time you got to the results…..(He does get a bit worked up over airfares you know).

Anyway - this is version 1 - we’ll roll new versions out as we roll along towards Thanksgiving and Xmas.

Please give us feedback on the current version. customerservice@farecompare.com - Barry will be happy to forward your email to me

We’ve run into a few problems lately with our results page. Those of you using the site Thursday and Friday of this week may have noticed that the site would appear to be down, stuck loading data or some other manifestation of generally being dead.

We had a couple of problems retrieving results from our backend provider, Kayak. At the time of writing, things have stablised so hopefully its all fixed.

We’ve decided to launch this blog to try and get some more timely information out to the users of FareCompare.com. Initially we’ll be concentrating on the beta program for the new MyTrips functionality but as things progress we’ll include information about new features on the site, point to new howto articles we’ve written and generally make it appear that we haven’t been sitting on our hands for the past 6 months

Your feedback is important so feel free to leave comments in the blog, secure in the knowledge that they will be read.

Graeme Wallace - CTO - FareCompare.com