Question

I've been using Kayak for all my searching in the last few years, and I guess I get reasonable prices. But has anything else sprung up that's better for determining the cheapest flight out there?

Answer 1

There are quite a few websites which allow you to search a variety of carriers for the cheapest prices, generally they will all give pretty similar results. I usually find it best to search on these sites for the cheap ones, but then book directly with the carrier since that tends to be a bit cheaper (not always though).

• Amadeus
• Expedia
• Yapta (Allows you to track price changes)
• Last Minute
• Travel Supermarket
• FareCompare
• Bing Travel (This also has a "Farecast" feature, where it will predict if the price is going to go up/down, so when the best time to book is)
• Cheap Flights
• Opodo (Mainly Europe)

(These are in no particular order)

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure Kayak doesn't search Southwest.

Answer 3

Before booking on Kayak, check on other sites also. I found a cheap flight on http://www.makemytrip.com than kayak.

Answer 4

The problem is that Kayak and others don't include many of the low-fare airlines that are not part of the big reservation systems. To get all of these you'll have to search the individual airlines' sites. Fortunately there are usually only a few budget airlines that directly serve any particular route. A few meta-sites exist to help you find which airlines fly your route:

• www.budgetflightfinder.com
• www.whichbudget.com
• www.skyscanner.net

Answer 5

One of the things for someone who watches fares.. is to know your market for airlines and the cities they serve. For example, I have lived in the PHX area and have monitored airlines that fly to the Florida area and found that Continental and Delta priced lower on a regular basis versus other carriers. Trend watching via Farecast, Smarterliving and others mentioned above are good to know when fare wars are about to take place. There are certain times of the year that it is known to get better deals on fares. If you can plan ahead, you can get quite lucky on some decent fares. Low-cost carriers that do not book through a GDS will not appear in some of these aggregated searches. Last tip.. sometimes booking one-way tickets tend to price out cheaper than buying a round-trip ticket. Make sure you try all variations if you are truly interested in getting the best fare out there.

Answer 6

I had a lot of luck using SideStep and Orbitz to find different combinations of flights that I was interested in.