Yapta a New Form of Flight Price Comparison

Techcrunch has to be one of my favourite sites on the net for discovering new websites and other cool techy.  But I appreciate that to your average traveller talk of APIs, Ajax and Apollo is less than revetting.  Never fear, I intend to happily fill such a void with my watered down ramblings.

This week Techcrunch covered a new site currently in 'closed beta' (read you can't sign up yet) called Yapta that plans to launch another flight comparison engine.  It is however slightly different from it's competitors in that it neither pulls info directly from the Airlines, like Expeida, nor does it crawl lots of other sites and republish the information.  Instead, Yapta wants your help.  By bookmarking flight deals using a Firefox plugin Yapta can pull the information onto their site and monitor any changes to it.  In affect the pricing info can change in real time.  Another benefit to the system is that if a price changes after you have bought the ticket, Yapta can inform you and advise you on how to claim the money back, a legal requirement the airline is bound to that many do not take advantage of.

It all seems great, the major problem being that the site needs a critical mass in order to offer real value.  That or a dedicated team of employees paid to scour the web for discounts.  It is takes off, it could be a handy extra resource.