KayakReviews 321

Indispensable tool when you are traveling to get the best prices for plane tickets. Although it doesn't carry every airline, like regional stuff in south america, it does a pretty good job for US travels. I always use the search then link directly to the airline's own website. I've never seen a better price displayed on Travelocity or any of the other travel sites, and they always charge a commission and make cancellations are complete nightmare.

I travel to Canada fairly often and am within 2 hours of 5 major airports. While I would never book through Kayak - it uses the major travel companies, like orbitz, that are all rather scammy and can cause a host of problems - it's great for initially comparing the prices for the different airports. Sometimes airport A is cheapest to fly out of, sometimes it's $200 more than the other 4, and sometimes it's best for me to do one layover. Kayak helps me figure out what I'm looking for when I go to the airlines' websites.

Yesterday, I did a search on kayak.com for a pet-friendly hotel near our home. We need a place to stay with our dog while our bathroom is being repaired. It came up with the Metro Points Hotel-Washington North. If you follow this link, you'll see it's listed as pet-friendly on Kayak's website (at least at the time of this review):

Http :// www.kayak. Com/h/hotel/details. Vtl? Searchid=QpK0YQ&hid=*******&rating=3&bookiturl=-*******. EXPEDIA, EXPEDIA.-100|*******381. HOTELSDOTCOM, EXPEDIAHOTEL. 8486|*******. ARN, ARN. 8486&cp=13-86-384&idx=165&&ro=false&pg=1

Kayak's link forwarded me to Hotels.com, where I booked the room, non-refundable, for $339.42. Later, when I went to Hotel's site, it turns out that the Hotel is NOT pet-friendly. I called Hotels.com and they in turn, called the hotel. The hotel says it has no relationship with Kayak and refused to refund my money. Hotels.com refused to refund my money unless the hotel agreed to refund it. I called Kayak's offices and talked to someone in very noisy surroundings—I had to yell into the phone for her to hear me—and she said she could find no record of my reservation.

So here's the situation: Kayak's site gave me wrong information (I have a screenshot of it); passed me through to another site, which may have had the right information, but I had already searched on pet-friendly on Kayak's site. And now I'm out $339.42.

Travel search engines are a dime a dozen these days and for the time being kayak.com has a leg up. I however, made the mistake of trusting kayak.com's search results and fancy diagrams and it cost me over a thousand dollars. It claimed that the fare that i was searching for was a stable fare and would be stable at that price for several more weeks. Supposedly the tickets I wanted were going to be their for awhile. Days later I went back to the site and found to my horror that the prices had jumped 200 bucks overnight! These things happen but kayak.com shouldn't be claiming to be experts on pricing and claim to have superior pricing analysis when they are just guessing. They claim to much smarter than they really are.

There's no reason to search the other travel sites because Kayak already does that. This is the one stop shop for putting together travel ideas. Although the prices might not reflect the best deals out there, it's a good starting place for finding out what actual flights will get you to where you want to go. In terms of prices, there's a lot of strategies out there and Kayak does a good job of quantifying price fluctuations and trends, but sometimes once you know the flight you want it's just better to buy directly from the airline. I've been using this site for years and plan to continue until Google comes up with something clever and makes it obsolete ;)

If you are booking a trip, you should be comparing prices on kayak.com. It's a meta-travel-site search engine (don't know if that's the proper term) which basically means it searches all the different travel sites (orbitz, priceline, etc), aggregates that data on their site, and allows you to pick the most affordable or convenient flights. It even has a priceline.com window pop up in a new window with their prices so you can make sure you are getting the best deal possible.

Even if you are sure you are getting a great deal on Virgin or Southwest (I think these might be included in the kayak search now but not 100% on that), check kayak anyway. I thought I was getting a great deal from SF to NYC on Virgin America last month, but just for the hell of it, I did a search for direct flights on kayak and found one for almost $100 less! Definitely one of my favorite places on the web.

Very useful meta-engine for travel fare searches. Presents total fare including fees and taxes when searching for airfares and hotels. Allows for multiple multi-destination listings. Good filtering system (nonstop, 1 layover, 2 layovers, etc). Also includes option to open up separate browsers to concurrently search orbitz, priceline, etc., for comparison. Fares are spot on with other sites. Does not allow for hotel and flight packages for multi-destination trips. Even though both outbound and inbound flight combinations are presented as a pair, can select the pair or just one of the flights, upon which the site then presents possible flights for the other portion of travel. Presents the option to search nearby airports. Easy to navigate and parse the information.

Improved travel site for cheap airfare/vacation/car rental/cruise deals - Started by the founders of Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity a few years ago, the ever-evolving Kayak is still the most efficient, comprehensive, and user-friendly travel site I've come across. It scours a ton of travel sites to deliver optimal combinations of itineraries and low prices in an easy-to-use display. Better yet, it sends you directly to the source, including low-cost carriers such as JetBlue and Virgin America (I was so excited when they added these!), to make your purchase. Booking directly with the travel provider allows you to bypass service fees typically charged by other travel sites and take advantage of benefits such as upgrades and bonus miles. One can filter to narrow results by number of stops, airline, airline alliances, takeoff/landing times, flight quality, aircraft type, layover/flight duration, sites searched, and price. Among its many useful features are buzz (shows the cheapest deals that other Kayak users uncovered in their searches) and fare alert (email notification when a trip route of interest meets or beats your specified price).

Great travel site - Kayak's one of my favorite travel sites. It's very useful for searching for flights, hotels, cars, cruises, deals, and so forth... With flights, for example, it searches all of the airline sites themselves as well as the "discount" sites -- Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, Priceline, and Expedia. There are of course some other sites that are good too, but one that's worth checking out in conjunction with kayak is http://www.yapta.com. Book the flights at the best fare with Kayak, and then register your flights with Yapta; if the fare drops even further, they refund you the difference! It's great.