Cheapest travel deals from cFare
By Vivek Puri | August 31st, 2006 at 10:48 am ET
cFares latest entrant in the online travel booking market, claiming to provide you the inside connection for travel. In order to do so, cFares has established exclusive relationships with travel wholesalers to provide lowest fares. It’s good to see that innovation keeps continuing in the online travel area with recent startups like Farecast also providing new ways to get best travel deals. cFares is founded by the serial entrepreneur Vajid Jafri and is located in Redwood Shores, CA.
Features: Site is pretty straightforward where you can search for Fights, Hotels, and Cars. A quick search for various flights on cFare, Farecast, Orbitz revealed that cFare does seem to have the lowest ticket prices with few exceptions. Following is the search for tickets with Departure on 18th Sep and Return on 24th Sep for various origin and destinations:
cFares also has priceline like feature of being able to name your price for a ticket. When users search for a ticket and think they can find a better fare for the trip, they can click cFares’s cAgent. Here you can name you international itinerary and the price you are willing to pay. cFare proprietary search agents process this information, check cFare databases for up to a week and find the lowest ticket price for you. cFare gives you 24 hour seat and price guarantee so that you have time to decide. After all said and done, remember that cAgent searches are currently only for international travel.Plan: cFare has 2 types of membership - Platinum or Gold. Gold membership is free, and for Platinum there is a $50 annual fee (sounds like Sams Club or Costco). The lowest fares offered by cFare are only for Platinum members. I don�t really know how many people will go for the Platinum membership, which can make cFare a difficult sell.
Technical/UI: Site is very basic as of now with lot of work required on the UI side. I got couple of errors while registering for the membership. There are no RSS feeds in any of the areas. Besides cFares does not have a company blog as of now to keep their users informed about new offerings.
Future: cFares faces stiff competition from well established players in the market like Orbitz, Expedia and well funded startups like Farecast. If cFare is consistently able to provide the lowest fares, it shouldn’t have problems getting the initial traction in the market
Links:
cFare
on May 14th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Cannot access cfare.com anynore, since last night. Are you experiencing the same difficulty?
on May 14th, 2007 at 10:11 am
It comes up just fine. Try: http://www.cfares.com
on May 28th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
A friend just called me in a panic. She’s at the counter for Air France, and they’re saying she has no ticket. She booked on cFares and got billed — I know this is true because I logged in to her bank account and saw that she had been charged. I called cFares and they were closed for the day. I left a message and got a call back from a nice manager who said he checks the email from home, and who gave me the ticket number.
But this ticket number didn’t match the flight that she booked; it matched a flight that left several hours before. Because the flight she booked was a discount fare, the airline would not let her take the later flight without paying an upgrade fare.
This is all such a nightmare that I will never ever use cFares myself.
on July 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am
[…] cFares, the travel startup that StartupSquad.com was one of the first blogs of write about last year, today announced the completion of its Series A round of funding. The investment round was led by Claremont Creek Ventures, with previous investor Garage Technology Ventures also participating in the round. Total amount of funding raised by the startup now comes to $4.5 million. […]