Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Kayak.com

I've always kinda taken charge at setting up our travels at work. As embarrassing as it is, I have to admit that I've been using Expedia.com this whole time. It has always allowed me to book my flight, hotel, and car in one stop. Since it was all I knew, I was happy... Well, I have a new standard. I recently had to book a flight and Issam sent me a link that blew me away: Kayak.com

This single site ties together lots of sites into a single list to filter, sort, and flag. Using the controls on the left, it's so quick to search for the exact flight you want. For example, on this trip I was trying to avoid a certain airport. With a single click, I was able to exclude all results that had layovers at this particular airport. Using the flight time sliders allowed me to only show flights that left within my defined time range. There were 250+ possible routes to get to the destination I wanted. However, after some simple clicking and dragging, I had my results down to 20 or so. From there, I simply checked the details of some and remove the ones I didn't want. I placed a flag on the good ones until I got down to about 5, then I just picked one. Picking one spawned off multiple site queries from various sites (including Expedia, Priceline, CheapTickets, Hotwire, as well as all the major airline's sites). I ended up buying my tickets from Priceline.com. The entire process was so painless and I got the exact flight I wanted.

Conclusion: Next time you book a flight, use Kayak.com.

Oh yeah, Expedia called and they want their 56k modems back...

1 comment:

Dan Seifring aka "OBRATS" said...

Thanks for stopping by my blog. I just checked out the site and WOW I will use it in the future.