Using the Web to Find Low Gas Prices
It began making national average fuel price information available via the Web in 2002 and gradually expanded to provide local gas station prices for its members. Within the past year, AAA decided to make the information available to the general public, seeking to solidify its brand as a travel website that caters to those planning road trips by auto.
There are a few steps to using http://www.aaa.com, but the results are worth it. You are prompted for your ZIP code, which redirects you to a local AAA affiliate website. There, look for the link to AAA's Triptik travel planner, which allows you to map gas stations along your route. One quibble with the map–you have to float your mouse over each station icon to see the price (if AAA happens to have the data). GasBuddy's map gives a much more immediate picture of where the bargains are.
MSN's site and Automotive.com are two other sites using the same data set as AAA, but searchers probably will not find the sites as useful. MSN actually was the first to provide a gas station map, but now its map technology looks decidedly Web 1.0 compared with GasBuddy and AAA. Automotive.com does not yet have any mapping at all.
AAA, MSN, and Automotive.com all use data collected by the Oil Price Information Service, of Wall, N.J. It culls information on 100,000 gas stations daily, relying on data from credit card swipes by drivers of fleet vehicles–like delivery services–when they visit gas stations. The timeliness of data, of course, depends on how often fleet vehicles stop for gas, and varies station by station, with data sometimes four days old. However, OPIS is working toward real-time pricing, now receiving instantaneous feeds from half of its stations–a number that tripled in the past year.
Just because OPIS is systematic, however, does not mean that it is ironclad. One obvious drawback is that it leaves out cash-only gas stations, which often are low-cost since they don't pay credit-card transaction fees. Another issue: Some retailers (OPIS declines to identify which) refuse to participate.
Glen Falk, retail pricing manager at OPIS, says that the company has been able to get some of that data anyway, by surveying stations directly. "I think some of the companies are not yet comfortable with this because it's a disruptive technology," he says. "The whole gas industry has been kind of cloistered, and now because of the Internet and all these devices, it's much simpler to find out that information."
Mobile services. Of course, it will be even simpler to shop for gas prices when the information is easily available to drivers when they are on the road. All of the services are making an expanded push to provide data for mobile electronic devices. Mobile wireless users can direct their browsers to http://www.gasbuddytogo.com to search for prices on the road. Cellphone users can get data by text or E-mail by messaging gas@gasbuddy.com, with a city, state, or a ZIP code in the body of the message.
Verizon has a mobile FuelFinder service, available to subscribers who pay the $5 monthly access charge for Mobile Web 2.0, for an additional $1.99-per-month charge. But users should realize that this is the same OPIS data that are available free at AAA and other websites. In perhaps a more useful application, OPIS data are now available via Garmin's global positioning systems, where travelers can see prices at a glance, even when they're far from home without any idea of their current ZIP code.
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