Yahoo Closes The Cabin Door On FareChase

FareChase, Yahoo’s discount travel search engine, is shutting its doors today. An alert on the FareChase web site indicates that today is the service’s final day, and encourages users to instead use Yahoo Travel.

In her first conference call back in January, new CEO Carol Bartz said “everything’s open for examination” when it comes to streamlining operations and improving the bottom line.

Yahoo gave this statement to Search Engine Land:

“After careful consideration, Yahoo! is discontinuing FareChase, a travel metasearch engine, effective March 25, 2009. After this date, users will no longer have access to FareChase to compare travel prices, but can continue to shop for and book flights, hotels, cars, cruises and vacation packages through Yahoo! Travel and its partners.

“Yahoo! continues to align resources to focus on core strategic priorities and deliver superior user experiences on the Internet. Discontinuing FareChase will allow Yahoo! to focus our efforts on other key features for Yahoo! Travel, such as Yahoo! Travel Guides and Yahoo! Trip Planner.”

Yahoo bought FareChase in 2004, and in recent years had taken noticeable steps to give the service more exposure. They added it to the Yahoo Travel home page in early 2008, and even featured it as a the travel shortcut in Yahoo’s main search results: