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New service identifies ‘corpse’ flights

A NEW travel website is providing passengers with free tools to help them travel smarter by providing better flight service intelligence before they fly.

It includes identifying ‘corpse’ flights, you know, those flight that are always ‘the late flights’. The site also offers powerful downloadable applications to enhance any website or travel portal.

www.flightstats.com provides easy-to-use tools that help business and leisure travellers travel smarter, the company says.

“Everyone complains when their flights are late or they miss a connection,” said Meara McLaughlin, vp business development for FlightStats.

“If you could see that the flight you intended to buy was a one star (habitually late) and another on the same airline an hour earlier was a five star for $10 more, which would you pick?”

Flightstats.com also offers what it claims is the first global flight alert system for any flight, regardless of where travellers book, which carriers they use or where they are headed.

A simple entry form sets a monitor on any flight that will send an alert to a desktop, PDA, or even cell phone when a flight is running late.

Other useful day-of-travel features include security wait time estimates for nominated airports, terminals, gates and time of day, global flight status lookup by flight route or airport, weather conditions and forecasts.

The site also introduces a variety of online forums to give travellers a place to share experience and intelligence empowering people to travel smarter.

Also new on the site are application widgets for flight status and flight rating lookup. A ‘widget’ is a mini-application that provides fast access to FlightStats information and services and they can be added to Google or Microsoft Live.com personalised home pages.

“We’re thrilled to release this new site,” said McLaughlin. “Our previous site was designed to represent our extensive business solutions. To our surprise the site really caught on with consumers and we are now committed to serving both the consumer and business travel market by providing innovative solutions that enable people to travel smarter.”

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