Unclear Skies

Passengers want transparency when shopping for flights. Airlines are fighting to keep them in the dark.

- Nikki Ekstein

When the travel booking website Hipmunk Inc. began in 2010, it offered the option to sort flights in order of “agony,” a way to help customers avoid long layovers or multiple stops. It was a clever marketing idea then, but these days the agony is all too real: Airlines are increasingly nickel-and-diming passengers by charging for carry-on bags or creating cramped economy cabins, leaving shoppers to pick the least-worst option rather than the best.

For 83 percent of travelers, the least-worst flight is also the least expensive, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from August. But extra fees are becoming harder to discern; they’re poorly disclosed and can vary wildly based on the length of your flight, your destination, your frequent-flyer status, or the plastic in your wallet. It should be simple to determine the cheapest option, but booking air travel has devolved into a guessing game.

That’s where services such as Hipmunk are stepping in. During the past three months, a half-dozen online travel agencies and flight aggregators have introduced clever, newly specific comparison-shopping tools that bring transparency to an increasingly murky marketplace.