Frommers.com | Carrie Havranek | March 10, 2006
A Site to Find the Shortest Route
DoHop (tel. 33/4-93-36-34-34; www.dohop.com; e-mail: contact@dohop.com) based in Reykjavik, aims to search over 660 airlines around the world. Born out of frustration, and tired of wasting time looking for travel deals, the site was formed by a group of Icelandic executives in 2004, who launched the portal last year. Anyone can use it -- it's free and no membership is required -- so there's no virtual red tape here. You can, however, create a user profile so that information such as home airport, currency, and country of residence can be stored and you can receive news from the company. The idea behind DoHop is to be more comprehensive and save time -- if you're looking for a deal to somewhere that's not in the say, top ten international cities or other frequently traveled-to destinations, you're hard pressed to find a cheaper flight using most major travel search engines. "DoHop's primary goal is to help people find time saving flight routes and the results are initially ranked by travel time," says general manager Frosti Sigurjonsson.
Indeed, you can find the fastest route, the latest price and links to airlines and travel agents from the site. In December, the site brought together the capability to search low-cost and traditional airlines, and offer flight combinations if necessary. And just last month, they launched over 6,000 pages of information on cities, airlines, airports, and countries. You don't book directly through the site; instead, it gives you links to other web sites for airlines, etc. DoHop also enables you to search current travel deals, and sort your results, and prices include what they term "all known booking fees." You can filter by either departure or destination country or state, and look for deals that way: U.S., Mexico, Europe, Caribbean, Florida, Hawaii, the United Kingdom and "worldwide" are possible terms. A typical search allows you to filter your results by time, stops, airlines, airports, and even aircraft type. Right now, you can't filter your results by price because the company has only received that information from half of the airlines. "As more airlines get connected, we will be able to sort results by price," says Sigurjonsson.
Because most of the users right now are from Europe, the bulk of the carriers are small, low-cost and from Europe. This is potentially a boon for U.S. travelers interested in saving money but who most likely wouldn't know where or how to search for such deals beyond using the most common, popular travel search engines available here.
Source: http://www.frommers.com/articles/3474.html
