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December 28, 2005
A travel search engine that truly rocks
Web applications never fail to surprise me. Even in well-trodden domains like Web search or online travel booking, something comes along every once in a while that makes me sit up and take notice.
Most of my travel is international, for which roundtrip tickets cost over $1000. Right now, there are three ways in which I can book tickets in principle:
a) buy online directly from the website of an airline (let's call these direct tickets)
b) buy from an online travel agent like Orbitz or Expedia (let's call these indirect tickets) or
c) buy from a human airfare consolidator or travel agent.
I almost never use the first option because it shows flights only from one airline and some part of me thinks I might not be getting the best price out there. I have used the second option with for most of my travel bookings. I have been able use to the third option with limited success, pricewise, when online travel agents like Expedia and Orbitz don't give me good enough fares.
With existing online travel agents, I find the user interface to be a bit restrictive for planning my flights. For instance, in my search parameters, I am unable to specify a time window within which I would like to arrive and depart. I have to look at each result and filter out the ones that work with my schedule myself. Moreover, these sites offer fares only for indirect tickets that have been made available to them and do not let the user comparison shop for direct tickets that may be an equivalent or better deal. Because they sell fares, I can only look at the fares they have on sale; this restriction also applies when I buy my tickets from a human travel agent.
I recently heard of kayak.com, an online travel search engine that has blown me over with its feature set and user interface. It acts as a meta-search across websites that offer direct tickets as well as indirect tickets. It does not sell any airfares itself but directs users to fares that it finds from airline websites as well as travel agents. In so doing, it has shown me direct ticket deals that I wouldn't ever have encountered on Travelocity, Orbitz or Expedia. Kayak's user interface employs Ajax skilfully to give a smooth user experience. Kayak also provides Ajaxified sliders, an apposite user interface metaphor for selecting continuums, such as price ranges or time windows for arrival and departure.
The only gripe I have about Kayak is that the outbound links to the actual websites from which you can buy the tickets occasional result in session or cookie-related errors. This doesn't prevent me from purchasing the fare -- it's just an extra step that makes the process a bit less seamless than I would like it. Nonetheless, Kayak has quickly become my favorite travel search engine because of its smart user interface and its coverage of websites from which I would never have thought of buying tickets. I highly recommend checking it out the next time you need to buy flight tickets.
Posted by Vishy at December 28, 2005 08:31 PM