Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, <a href="http://matrix.itasoftware.com/" rel="nofollow">http://matrix.itasoftware.com/</a> is the way to go.<p>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.
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.
Kayak is great (was?) but Hipmunk is more than up to the task of filling the void if Priceline ruin Kayak.<p>Congrats to the Kayak folks I guess, when they got into the industry they really raised the bar.<p>Before Kayak I remember having to use Expedia and Orbitz and just having to accept their crappy UI because there simply were no alternatives.
I don't like any of the existing travel sites, so even had to write one for friends and family (we like pick a random place and just go):<p><a href="http://www.somewherenice.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.somewherenice.net/</a><p>This was put together over several weekends, so don't be too harsh on me. :)
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 <i>illegal</i> to publish Southwest's prices?<p>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.
This may not be the place or time to ask this but here goes anyway:<p>How do the travel indexing sites like Kayak get their data? Surely they don't index or consume APIs from the travel companies individually?
From the Kayak IPO S-1:<p>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.<p>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.<p>I suspect this is Priceline admitting that it (and other OTAs) are losing relevance in preference for the meta-search model.<p>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.<p>Kayak was the best interface before hipmunk, and it may (or may not be) the best interface now.<p>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 :) )
I think this is a great acquisition by Priceline. They are going for market share here to get ahead of Expedia et al.<p>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.
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.