“Necessity is the mother of invention,” philosopher Plato once said. Literally it means that a need or a problem encourages creative efforts to meet that need or solve that problem.

Frequent traveler, Tom Romary, had a desire to make his own travel planning easier. A seasoned traveler, having racked in a lot of miles in the sky for business, adventure, vacation and family reasons, he had become a pretty selective traveler with a preference for non-stop flights. Consequently, he spent a lot of hours on the web shopping around for airfares and tracking pricing changes. As the former Vice President of Pricing for Alaska Air Group, Inc., he knew how volatile airline prices were. He also knew a little something about the way people were using the web for planning their travel. Personally, though, he was looking for a way to make his travel planning easier and less time consuming, but there wasn’t a website that did just what he wanted it to do. This is how the concept of Yapta, which stands for Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant, was born.

Seattle based www.yapta.com was launched in the spring of 2007 and within months was touted by Time Magazine as one of their “50 Best Websites”, and Travel and Leisure listed it among their “Top 20 Travel Sites”. The idea behind Yapta is that this “assistant” does all of the time consuming work for you. It tracks pricing changes letting you know the instant a price change happens. It also tells you where and how to get refunds or credits when those prices fluctuate.

In general, airfares yo-yo based on ticket sales and airlines’ expected demand for flights. Prices can change several times in a single day sometimes, which makes it very difficult as a consumer to know that you are getting the best deal possible. It’s like hitting a moving target! There is a secret in the airline industry that is not well known to the public because the carriers don’t readily promote it. It’s called the “Guaranteed Airfare Rule” and has been in existence since the early days of deregulation. Basically, it means that you can get money back from the airlines – even on “non-refundable” tickets - when the rates change to the consumer’s advantage. All you have to do is ask. The potential to save hundreds of dollars is there for the taking, but even the most seasoned travelers of the world don’t realize it. Actually, there are tenured airline executives that are just learning about this, as well!

Just like everything on the web these days, travel websites are becoming more niche focused. Yapta is unlike the travel sites that are just ticketing sites, like Orbitz or Travelocity, because it is the one and only site on the web that it is constantly tracking the flights you are interested in and alerting you to changes in price immediately. When you tag, or bookmark, a flight you “tell” Yapta to take over the monitoring of that flight’s pricing. On the website there is a notepad feature that allows you to see all the flights and prices on the trips you have tagged. It allows for easy comparison in the way it displays the prices and the respective airlines. It even has the intelligence to separate the flights that have been purchased from the flights that are being watched. Because of features like these, 70% of Yapta’s users use this website as a planning service before tickets are purchased.

Those features are all outstanding and unique to Yapta, but the best, by far, is the money that this service saves consumers everyday. 43% of all the flights Yapta has tracked have had a price drop. The key to success is to first, track your flights through Yapta. Then, when you decide on the flight you want, purchase the tickets through the airline itself. If the price changes, you will get an email alert from Yapta with a link and instructions on what to do to redeem your credit or get your refund. But you must know that time is of the essence when you receive your alert that the price has changed because credits and refunds are only available as long as the fare is still available. So act fast and call quickly. Be aware, though, that some airlines charge a “change fee” of up to $100, which may ultimately reduce or even negate the savings. Policies vary from airline to airline, but there are some out there that give vouchers for the full price difference. United, JetBlue, Southwest, US Airways and Alaska Airlines are a few that don’t charge a change fee.

In their press release on May 22, 2007, Yapta reported that “in just three months, they alerted its 275 test users to approximately $30,000 in eligible savings and refunds, for an average net benefit of $109 per traveler”. With the airlines being as unstable as they are right now, and with the cost of fuel increasing daily Yapta is providing a valuable service to consumers. Their ability to track 11 major US airlines saves travelers valuable time and money. Thanks to Tom Romary taking Plato’s admonition to heart to solve his own dilemma, Yapta is effectively changing the way America is planning their airline travel.