Tips on Travel Search Engines
Go away! But don't pay more for the trip than you have to. First there were the search engines of the individual airlines, then came online booking engines Orbitz, Travelocity and the like. Those open sites operate as online travel agencies. They negotiate directly with airlines and hotels and search their own databases and travel-agency systems to come up with airfare and hotel deals.
Come now the metasearch engines that search all the other search engines, as well as the airline sites, ticket consolidators and the like. Of the most used sites, Kayak is getting great reviews from users surveyed by J.D. Power and Associates according to this article.
Kayak can save you more money than Orbitz and Travelocity because its engine takes you directly to the airline website to close your ticket deal, and avoids the service charges the search engines place on their fees. Kayak's features include a tool that lets you find the lowest fares from your nearby airport, so if you just want to go someplace, this feature will let you do it cheaply.
If you don't want to do any work at all, try TripStalker, a downloadable service (Windows only, sigh) that scours the web for the flight you want at the price you have established and notifies you when your price point has been found. You can be alerted via desktop pop-up, email message, or SMS text message to your phone. I downloaded it easily enough, but it required me to have a .NET feature, as well, which was time-consuming to download. It's currently searching several fares for me. Updates as I get the fare reports.
Comments
Farecast (farecast.com) is another new online travel service that, like Tripstalker, notifies you when a trip you want to take is available at the price you want to pay. It's web-based so it works will all operating systems.