Using the Web to Find Low Gas Prices
Gasoline hasn't been expensive enough to make Americans drive less, but fast-changing pump prices have convinced many drivers they ought to shop more before filling up. In fact, 20 percent of motorists say they would drive five minutes out of their way to save just a penny per gallon, even though such a detour for savings so scant would almost never pay off. But plenty of Internet and mobile-device tools can help consumers search for the best gas price without burning fuel.
Prices change rapidly at the nation's 167,000 gas stations, so the challenge for search sites has been to provide not only accurate and timely information but also broad coverage. At least five gas price search sites on the Web employ two different data-gathering approaches: using automated data from credit card swipes or relying on a community of gas price spotters who send in reports from the field. Since each method has merits and drawbacks, you should test which keeps the best tabs on gas stations along your daily commute. Since they're all free, you can try them all often.
GasBuddy is the most popular site. It was started seven years ago by two childhood friends who were then recent college graduates in Brooklyn Park, Minn. Over the past 18 months, the site–actually a collection of 180 sites covering every state and most metro areas–averaged 500,000 unique visitors per month, says comScore Media Metrix. Traffic peaked at 1.8 million during the gas price spikes right after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. GasBuddy has about 1.1 million members, who log in prices for about 120,000 gas stations a day, says cofounder Jason Toews.
To ensure the prices are up to date, GasBuddy data is wiped out of the system after 24 to 48 hours. Accuracy checks gradually have been built into the software–giving higher confidence ratings to the prices reported by well-known users and flagging prices as suspect if they depart significantly from historic patterns. GasBuddy has a helpful new map feature that allows you to scan prices over a wide area before clicking the best of the lot for the station address.
GasPriceWatch, another site using volunteer spotters, also started seven years ago, in Dayton, Ohio. The site has about 380,000 members. It color-codes prices to indicate how fresh they are and allows searchers to filter out old entries. Currently, it links users to outside map sites, but there are plans for an integrated map at the site soon. Like GasBuddy, it relies on a point system to spur its volunteers to report gas prices.
But neither site offers any prize but bragging rights. "It never fails to amaze me," says GasPriceWatch founder Brad Proctor. "There's no reward, but people fight over points." He has even had to refine his system to identify "price pirates," users who steal prices that have already been reported by other members in order to rack up points.
AAA is one of the sites that gather data more methodically, to avoid the vagaries of the volunteer system. "In the very early days, we used visual inspection of stations and log sheets and snail mail and later faxes, and we simply found that the [information] was not as trustworthy as we wanted it to be," says Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for the American Automobile Association, which has kept tabs on gas prices for 30 years.
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.