Looking for airlines, hotels, or rental cars online requires swiftness: you have to act on low prices quickly, because they could disappear just as quickly as they pop up.
For Stephen Gotlieb, the stress of using an online travel agency and having his great deals somehow disappear the minute he got on the page became too great. It was enough to make him create Pintrips.com, a new site that launched Monday.
Gotlieb, a trained structural engineer, came up with the idea when he was in grad school, planning a trip with his wife.
"I was sending her e-mails, cutting and pasting links and trying to communicate over the phone," he said. "I had 10 tabs open and the process was just too painful."
His idea was the make a website that took all the hassles and eliminated them in one cohesive purchase.
With Pintrips, users can select flights they might want to purchase advertised on meta-search sites and airline sites, then "pin" them to a personal dashboard. Every time a user clicks on the dashboard, the price results are updated. Website users can also share certain pages with others.
Gotlieb strived for a site as straight forward as possible, where users could simply input their destination and travel dates, and tock off search engine options, including Google, Orbitz, and airline sites. Each of the itineraries has a clearly marked "pin" button, that, when clicked, automatically links the pin back to the site on Pintrips.
"Each board you create is like its own meta-search site," Gotlieb told NBC News.
He admits that Pintrips is still in the works, and he and his team are actively trying to work out the kinks of the very new site. Gotlieb works with 10 partner sites-there are many other sites offering flight prices with whom Pintrips does not do business, and users could be missing out on those deals.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
