Booking sites

There was an interesting article in Money magazine this month about the best flight booking site.  In the end, it suggested four sites.

Kayak was recommended for people for whom price was the main factor, as well as for people who were planning multi-city trips - although the deciding factor for the multi-city trip pricing was ease of use.  In my past, I've used Kayak extensively for flight searches, so I'm not terribly surprised by the pick, nor do I think that it will be new to most travelers.

The two picks that did stand out, in my reading, were Adioso, which allows you to do an incredibly flexible search based on plain language, and Vayama, for international travelers.  While I haven't had the chance to use either yet, the article points out if you have extremely flexible travel plans, Adioso can give you better prices just because of its flexibility - for example, you could do a search for "New York to Seattle in March", instead of doing the typical +/- 3 days.  I might have to do my own research on it and compare results.

The article doesn't provide a lot of detail about Vayama other than saying it was best for international travel, and I will say that my own experience with international travel booking leaves something to be desired, especially if you want to do multi-city international travels.  That's probably a post for another day.

The last site mentioned in Momondo, which searches regional airlines, a definite plus if you are traveling internationally, as my experience shows that US airlines, while good at getting you to a single destination in a foreign country, are usually not so good about getting you around within the country or continent once you're there.

I'll think about doing some testing of the sites for either an upcoming post or a future trip.