Checking Out Allcheckin Travel Search

I’m going to Berlin to speak at a travel conference in March, which meant booking a flight. With a British Airways strike looming, I wanted an alternative to fly from my closest airport — London Heathrow — to Berlin. But no one but BA seems to fly to Berlin from Heathrow, according to Expedia UK. […]

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I’m going to Berlin
to speak at
a travel conference in March, which meant booking a flight. With a British
Airways strike looming, I
wanted an alternative to fly from my closest airport — London Heathrow — to
Berlin. But no one but BA seems to fly to Berlin from Heathrow, according to
Expedia UK. Time to cast my net further,
I figured. So I turned back to a small UK and Europe oriented travel search
engine I wrote
about
briefly back in 2005, AllCheckin.
I wanted to jot down a few notes of what I thought. Over time, I’m trying to
play with more travel search alternatives, one by one. So, expect more of these.

The nicest thing at AllCheckin are all the options you get back after doing a
search. You can use sliders to restrict prices to a particular range, or flights
to a particular departure or arrival time. That dynamically changes the results
without having to reload the page. Nice!

Checkboxes let you refine further to direct or indirect flights, plus you can
easily remove any of the airlines that come back in a search. In my search, I
see Air Berlin, Air France, British Airways and Ryanair all fly direct to
Berlin. Don’t want to fly British Airways? Just uncheck the box, and boom —
they’re gone.

Having Ryanair in there was impressive. Ryanair doesn’t show up in Expedia,
similar to how Southwest Airlines or JetBlue don’t show up in US results. My
understanding is that this is because these companies refuse to either allow
inclusion or won’t pay for it. Allcheckin’s got them, making the results more
comprehensive.

Then again, it has Ryanair but noted "424 Day old fare" next to the listing.
Oops. It then gave me a link to update the fare. I did, and nothing happened.
I’m guessing Allcheckin tried to query Ryanair and get results. If so, the page
never reloaded.

Another odd thing was that when I reran the search, suddenly I was shown many
more airlines even though I hadn’t changed anything. It suggested that
Allcheckin is hitting multiple sites directly, and that if there are timeouts or
other issues, you might not get as comprehensive results.

The single Air France flight listed as a direct flight was odd. A direct
flight of five hours? Turns out, rather than stops being 0, it’s stops as N/A
for this flight through consolidator LastMinute. Really, it shouldn’t have shown
up.

In the end, I had some back-of-my-mind reliability issues with the service.
It’s not going to pull me away from my primary service of Expedia. But it’s a
nice backup to make sure Expedia (or Opodo,
another Europe-targeted travel search service) isn’t missing anything.

Oh, and only BA flies out of London Heathrow to Berlin. I’m not schlepping up
to Stanstead — another two hours past Heathrow — to fly to Berlin. Here’s
hoping they resolve the strike.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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