Friday, February 22, 2008

Week 5: Thing #11 Web 2.0 award winner Kayak

http://www.kayak.com

Kayak is a travel search engine started by Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia to improve the search experience of folks planning a trip by air. You can also locate a hotel and rent a car through Kayak. You don't actually buy anything on Kayak; Kayak provides links to the vendors, whether it is an airline or a company like Orbitz.

Kayak has many great features. The user is able to modify a search for an airline trip in the following ways:
  • number of stops
  • by specific airline
  • by take off and landing times for both the outgoing and return flights (Useful!!)
  • whether you need the same airport for leaving and returning
  • layover duration
  • trip duration (another great feature, especially when the flight crosses multiple time zones)
A search for hotels yields results in a separate window. The results can be sorted by price, name of the hotel/motel, number of stars, and distance (from the airport?).

All the ways you can modify an airlines search make Kayak an immensely-useful website. I wish I had been aware of it last Thanksgiving when I was trying to find flight for my son who lives in San Diego and who needed to travel withing tight time parameters.

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