Lowestfare used to be a great place to buy an airline ticket.

Then it wasn't...Now it is again... Let me explain.

The owner of Lowestfare was Carl Icahn. Icahn is a renowned corporate raider and an astute businessman who once was the CEO of TWA. When TWA attempted to fire him, Icahn negotiated one of the best severance packages ever seen. As part of this package, TWA agreed to let him sell 4 Billion dollars in airline tickets for at least 40% off of retail rates. I'm guessing that the TWA guys didn't think he could do it. I'm also guessing that they didn't know what the Internet was, and how it might help.

So, armed with this booty, Carl opened Lowestfare.com in 1996. It was a website, and it also had a call in number, so that you could buy over the phone. It wasn't the best looking site, but it sure worked. In 1997-1999, Lowestfare was consistently among the top 3 sites in total sales on the web. It also had some of the best rates you could find anywhere. In early 2000, TWA's business started to fail. The millions of discount tickets that it was selling via Lowestfare.com probably didn't help it. So it declared bankruptcy. It was taken over by American Airlines, and is still part of that company. Unsurprisingly, one of the first moves AA made was to terminate the Karibu ticket agreement (that was the name of it) with Icahn and Lowestfare. Stripped of their low fare inventory, Lowestfare became much less of a bargain. However, the site kept running. They turned to Sabre to process tickets on the web, and tried to diversify into vacation packages. Neither proved to be a great benefit to the business.

In April of 2002, Lowestfare announced that it was leaving the air business. It posted an out-of-service sign on the site. Most people thought that that was about it for one of the Internet's early brands. However, it became a new beginning.

Once struggling e-tailer Priceline.com bought the site and started to remodel it. Priceline's stated intent was to enter the retail business, and Lowestfare let them do that. They relaunched the Lowestfare.com site with a retail booking engine provided by onetravel.com and intermingled the priceline.com opaque concept into the site. All in all it's a pretty tight display and consumers seemed to like it. It's pretty good looking, and the fares are competitive.

Here's how the travelsites team thinks you should use Lowestfare...(keeping in mind that they're run by priceline). Go to the site. Put in your itinerary to see what comes back for retail rates. For this example, we used NYC to Denver 21 days out. The site found a rate on Spirit Airlines for 247.00. Consumers should probably take that rate, as it's a good one. If the rate for your itinerary is not something that grabs you, the travelsites team suggest taking the lowest available rate and subtracting 30% off -- and you should use the priceline link to try your luck. Lowestfare uses an Orbitz-like fare display matrix that shows you how to get the best fares that are available. You are able to sort by airline, stop-overs, and flight time. Conveniently, the site has a sorting mechanism that ranks your fare returns by whatever metric you find most important. This should help you find the best deal! All in all, Lowestfare.com is a good travel site, but a much better tool for getting a great deal at priceline or hotwire.

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