A Review Of The New Travel Site: Pinpointravel.com

AOL has officially joined the ranks of travel websites with its recent launch of a travel website called Pinpointravel.com, powered by Kayak.com. Though it does not substitute for the personal attention of BookMeaTrip.com, what makes Pin Point Travel unique is that it gives visitors an unbiased search of almost all airlines prices for any destination in the world.

The clean, open home page immediately directs you to begin your travel selection process with a flight for you or a group travel outing. Once you’ve selected your flight departure city and destination city, Pinpointravel will ask you for help in fine-tuning your trip by preferred departure/arrival airport, the airline you like best, and what’s most important to you when you look to book travel, such as low fare, convenient flight time, short trip duration, and preferred airport.

As Pinpointravel runs your search, you can see the list of airlines being checked off and searched. Pinpointravel displays all matching flights and at what price the lowest fare begins. When we tested it for a flight from Chicago to New York, the site pulled up 968 matching flights, with the lowest price from $185. You can even see the list of sites that did not respond to the request, indicating the airline did not provide service for that destination on those dates.

Once you click through to the list of trips, Pinpoint travel displays data in a similar way to other popular travel sites, with a pleasant absence of annoying pop ups or banners for group travel to warm destinations. It’s clean, simple and inviting.

America Online’s Site also features a unique ‘Remember It’ feature, which allows you to save your search list, preferred airports, ect., and share it with friends via email, or print it out to take it along with you as you travel.

Now that you’ve made your decision for which airline, day, and price, the Site will give you the links to sites that will sell you that same ticket for your travel search parameters.

One downside to Pinpointravel would have to be the way that data is not saved from the site to the referring website to buy your airline ticket. This means that once you click on Orbitz from Pinpointravel, you have to enter your information all over again to get the price, then book the ticket. What’s more, is that the price shown on The AOL site does not match the one listed in Orbitz. In our Chicago – New York search, our $185 ticket came up as $335 from Orbitz, a difference of $150!

While Pin point travel has all of it’s elements in place, the beta version will need some more work to make it travel worthy. We suggest you let an independent travel agent take the hassle out of finding comparative travel quotes online. Click Here to request a custom quote from Book Me a Trip