Fly.com launches multi-city search, mulls national TV advertising campaign

Fly.com introduced multi-city search to its U.S. website and separately is testing TV ads in the U.S. as a prelude to a possible national television campaign.

Justin Soffer, general manager, N. America, of Fly.com, says the ability to search multiple city pairs at once was the most-requested feature that Fly.com users wanted to see added.

With multi-city search, consumers can search for up to six origin and destination pairs at once.

Some comparison shopping sites – Kayak and Bing Travel, for instance — have multi-city search and others — including FareCompare and Skyscanner — don’t offer the service.

In addition to round-trip, one-way and multi-city searches, Kayak also offers a weekend (Friday to Sunday) flight search.

Meanwhile, Soffer says Fly.com has been testing television advertising in the U.S., likes the results so far and would decide during the third quarter whether the flight metasearch site should launch a television campaign.

It would likely be a national campaign in the U.S., Soffer says, if Fly.com decides to proceed.

In the U.K., Fly.com already has a TV ad campaign going.

Fly.com currently operates in two markets — the U.S. and the U.K. — and offers flight-comparisons only. The U.K. site did not have multi-city search as of this writing.

So what about introducing hotels?

“We are still working on perfecting air search, but hotels are always on the radar,” Soffer says, adding that the hotel business offers higher costs-per click and better margins.

“I’m not saying it’s not an attractive business for us,” says Soffer, referring to hotels, ”but air is by far what consumers [first] look for….”