Entering the already competitive and crowded market for travel search, InsideTrip is betting it’s bringing enough value to the market to gain consumer awareness and usage. The site offers a metasearch engine (like Kayak or Farechase) for airfares. But it also has compiled public data on a range of other factors such as aircraft type and age, security wait time, routing quality, lost bags rank, and other criteria. These create a proprietary “overall trip quality” score.

The “pushback” or argument against the site is that people only care about price—that air travel is a commodity. However, those who travel a lot know that it’s not a commodity and price is an important consideration, but not the only one.

In addition to all the conventional filters (airports, number of stops, time of day, etc.), InsideTrip offers a nice interface that allows consumers to quickly determine the shortest flight visually (the gold, horizontal bars). The trip quality score also allows travelers to zero in on the “highest quality” flights quickly. Most economy flight experiences are pretty mediocre these days, so anything that can bring some modest improvement to the experience is welcome.

The actual booking of flights takes place through Orbitz.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Travel Search Engines

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling