Disloyalty Program

Sometime back, when I used to travel a lot for work, I flew the same flights so much that I ended up logging one million miles in the same airline. In a big departure, next week I travel to Toronto in an airline I had never heard about before booking this trip.

Behind this change is the Expedia app, which made it very easy for me to find an airline which doesn't really market itself in my town.

To book the flight, all I had to do was open Expedia, enter my hometown airport and the destination airport in Toronto, add departure and return dates, and then pick the one thing that I care about in this case: nonstop flights between both airports.

My flight was easy to spot because it was half the price of other nonstops. After searching online for the name of the airline, it was a quick decision to pick their flight.

Harder was letting go of years of habit of booking all my flights with the same short list of airlines.

Jacob Passy of the Wall Street Journal recently explained the technology behind my change of habits. He said travel pricing is dynamic based on demand, so you can find bargains if you shop online at sites like Expedia which adjust their prices on the spot instead of looking at your loyalty programs first.

Expedia also made it easy to book a rental car at the airport at a company I had heard about but had never used before.

Then I use Expedia again to book a room at a small hotel in the neighborhood outside the city where I am staying for the week.

Between flight, car, and hotel, that's three services I booked with vendors I have never used before. All on the same sitting and using the same app.

Since I made these bookings for very specific reasons, it's not fair to say that Expedia made me disloyal. Instead, it made me more loyal to myself.

This was issue 5 of Else, a weekly newsletter with alternative software reviews. I’ll be back next week with a review of the My Subaru app. Was this message forwarded? Subscribe!