Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go.
It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.
FYI - you can access most of ITA's routing language on Hipmunk, if you type :: after an airport code. The advantage of using us is we can make you a booking link to actually purchase the itinerary.
It was a sad, sad day when they shut down the old http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/ interface. It was much more keyboard accessible with faster navigation between inputs, and the forward and back buttons always did exactly what I expected. Also really miss the "weekend search". It was a really great service, but I guess it wasn't exactly making them money.
Kayak, Hipmunk, Google Flights, Orbitz, and almost every other aggregator licenses ITA Software's system, actually. And most major airlines use it internally. It's good enough that it's pretty much the de facto standard and framework.
Fun fact: Both are located in Norwalk, CT., about a 5-10 minute ride from each other. Priceline is located almost on the Darien border and Kayak is nestled in South Norwalk (SoNo). I gotta believe this proximity lead to board member and executive coziness.
To save you from reading that document, a law firm has decided to 'investigate' whether Kayak's board "breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders by failing to adequately shop the Company before entering into this transaction and whether priceline.com Incorporated is underpaying for Kayak shares, thus unlawfully harming Kayak stockholders."
I respect what Hipmunk is trying to do, but I really doubt they are filling voids outside of "this" community. I find it much harder to scan, slower to load, and having lower quality tools for finding alternate (or cheaper) fares.
Hopefully Priceline will learn some improvements from Kayak and not try to force changes the other direction. Kayak has a great UI overall, but the explore interface is pure awesome: http://www.kayak.com/explore/
I was getting ready to say almost the exact same thing -- thank heavens that Hipmunk came when it did, or that acquisition (if soured) would have left a very large hole in my travel-making tools.
I don't particularly like Kayak, but as a matter of effectiveness, there's no doubt that it was pretty much king of the hill for a good long while. Since Hipmunk's inception though, it has definitely been the 'go-to' place for travel-planning, and beats the nearest competition (that I've used) by a mile.
I would also venture to say that this was perhaps a timely exit for Kayak, as the more and more traction Hipmunk sees, the less off the Kayak founders would have been for an exit.
I'm working on a travel (many)weekend(s) project myself yet to launch, so I won't be too harsh, but... :P I put Warsaw in, and the suggested airports were Okecie (correct) and Babice (it's in Krakow), Modlin was missing. And all the result were in the USA. I like the design theme with all the backgrounds etc. and the logo, cool idea. You should leave some way to contact you with feedback on the page. Keep on, good luck.
I like it, I've been looking for something like this. Some features (dreaded feature creep!) I'd love:
1. Map interface with little lines from my home base airport to the possible destinations - It's just fun to see.
2. Sliders to increase/decrease budget - Dynamically adding/removing routes as I change the $$ limit.
Maybe these would only take another weekend to add? </joke>
There is always http://hipmunk.com, which I think has the best UX of any of them (although maybe it is lacking some features, but none I would use anyhow).
Pretty tangential, but why is it that none of the flight search engines include Southwest? I realize that Southwest doesn't give their fare info to whoever the other airlines give it to, but what's stopping someone from just scraping southwest.com every hour or so for the current fares? Or even if scraping is against their TOS, couldn't they hire one data entry employee to manually go through and add Southwest's flights every day? Or is it somehow illegal to publish Southwest's prices?
I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.
Southwest does not believe in distributing their fares through the metasearch or OTA channel. They want to own the customer and make sure there's only one destination to book Southwest fares and that is Southwest.com and it's worked out pretty well for them.
The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.
In particular, for the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Expedia and its affiliates, including its Hotels.com and Hotwire subsidiaries, accounted for 25% of our total revenues. Also during this period, Orbitz and its affiliates, including its CheapTickets and ebookers subsidiaries, accounted for 19% of our total revenues.
I guess Priceline wants to get a first shot at all that business, and then to get paid by their competitors for bookings they don't get.
In recent times, Kayak has been shifting to push customers directly to airlines and hotels, instead of pushing them through online travel agencies like Priceline.
I suspect this is Priceline admitting that it (and other OTAs) are losing relevance in preference for the meta-search model.
Smart move, and I don't think they're dumb enough to ruin it. Read up on how successful Priceline was with their Booking.com acquisition.
I'm not remotely worried about priceline ruining kayak.
Kayak was the best interface before hipmunk, and it may (or may not be) the best interface now.
But there will be more improvements in travel buying interfaces... whether those improvements come from kayak or someone else, Kayak's current interface will seem kludgy in a couple years.
That's really bad news for Expedia. When you book a hotel room directly on Kayak, over 90% of the bookings go through expedia and hotels is where these travel agencies make most of their money. (Not airfares, they have become a commodity, thanks to Kayak :) )
Since everyone seems to be putting in their 0.02$ on which sites they use for booking, bing.com/travel is also very good. The buy-wait prediction is fantastic.
[+] [-] casca|13 years ago|reply
It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.
[+] [-] spez|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mherdeg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koeselitz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotth|13 years ago|reply
And be sure to click around. It has some interesting tools, like prices for flights to your destination flown out of nearby airports.
[+] [-] smattiso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makmanalp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3327|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taumeson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makmanalp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hluska|13 years ago|reply
http://zlkdocs.com/KYAK-Info-Request-Form-463
To save you from reading that document, a law firm has decided to 'investigate' whether Kayak's board "breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders by failing to adequately shop the Company before entering into this transaction and whether priceline.com Incorporated is underpaying for Kayak shares, thus unlawfully harming Kayak stockholders."
Another firm has announced it is conducting another investigation (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/block-leviton-llp-investigates...). Not sure if it relates to whether or not Kayak adequately shopped around the company....
[+] [-] antoko|13 years ago|reply
Congrats to the Kayak folks I guess, when they got into the industry they really raised the bar.
Before Kayak I remember having to use Expedia and Orbitz and just having to accept their crappy UI because there simply were no alternatives.
[+] [-] thezilch|13 years ago|reply
versus
http://www.hipmunk.com/flights/LAX-to-SFO#!dates=Nov09,Nov16...
I respect what Hipmunk is trying to do, but I really doubt they are filling voids outside of "this" community. I find it much harder to scan, slower to load, and having lower quality tools for finding alternate (or cheaper) fares.
[+] [-] jobu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|13 years ago|reply
Which makes it fairly useless to me, and absolutely not a replacement for Kayak.
[+] [-] bduerst|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmelton|13 years ago|reply
I don't particularly like Kayak, but as a matter of effectiveness, there's no doubt that it was pretty much king of the hill for a good long while. Since Hipmunk's inception though, it has definitely been the 'go-to' place for travel-planning, and beats the nearest competition (that I've used) by a mile.
I would also venture to say that this was perhaps a timely exit for Kayak, as the more and more traction Hipmunk sees, the less off the Kayak founders would have been for an exit.
[+] [-] photorized|13 years ago|reply
http://www.somewherenice.net/
This was put together over several weekends, so don't be too harsh on me. :)
[+] [-] zalew|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jngreenlee|13 years ago|reply
1. Map interface with little lines from my home base airport to the possible destinations - It's just fun to see. 2. Sliders to increase/decrease budget - Dynamically adding/removing routes as I change the $$ limit.
Maybe these would only take another weekend to add? </joke>
[+] [-] dude_abides|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daakus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|13 years ago|reply
Edit: Doh, fixed the link!
[+] [-] FaceKicker|13 years ago|reply
I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.
[+] [-] calbear81|13 years ago|reply
The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.
[+] [-] muratmutlu|13 years ago|reply
http://cl.ly/image/3j0Z2m1Y2N44
[+] [-] personlurking|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinsidoti|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _casperc|13 years ago|reply
How do the travel indexing sites like Kayak get their data? Surely they don't index or consume APIs from the travel companies individually?
[+] [-] tonystubblebine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
In particular, for the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Expedia and its affiliates, including its Hotels.com and Hotwire subsidiaries, accounted for 25% of our total revenues. Also during this period, Orbitz and its affiliates, including its CheapTickets and ebookers subsidiaries, accounted for 19% of our total revenues.
I guess Priceline wants to get a first shot at all that business, and then to get paid by their competitors for bookings they don't get.
[+] [-] photorized|13 years ago|reply
Btw, anyone from Travelocity here? Would love to share some feedback about your platform.
[+] [-] colinsidoti|13 years ago|reply
I suspect this is Priceline admitting that it (and other OTAs) are losing relevance in preference for the meta-search model.
Smart move, and I don't think they're dumb enough to ruin it. Read up on how successful Priceline was with their Booking.com acquisition.
[+] [-] colinsidoti|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] riviera|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbecker|13 years ago|reply
Kayak was the best interface before hipmunk, and it may (or may not be) the best interface now.
But there will be more improvements in travel buying interfaces... whether those improvements come from kayak or someone else, Kayak's current interface will seem kludgy in a couple years.
[+] [-] edouard1234567|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordonbowman|13 years ago|reply
A big part of their growing business is in Europe via Booking.com, so with Kayak they beef up their market share here in the U.S. in a big way.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] yawgmoth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonpug|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouadz|13 years ago|reply