Kayak™ Flight Search Tutorial

A Short Course in Kayaking - Searching Airfare Rates

Don't you hate it when you are in the early stages of planning a trip and hit one of those airline or hotel pages where you have to register and jump through a flaming hoop or so before you can get any information? If so, our short course in Kayaking can pay great dividends.

Pretty much anyone planning a vacation is looking for bargains. Kayak™ doesn't have bargains per se, but they show you all of what's available in one attempt.

You only need to select your departure and arrival airports and travel dates and let Kayak's software do the rest. The default settings are for one passenger and for economy class. If you want a business class ticket, and are bad at math, you need to change those "select" settings. The basic settings:

1. Departure Airport (option to check nearby airports)
2. Arrival Airport (option to check nearby airports)
3. Departure Date (note the handy "lowest price" calendar)
4. Arrival Date
5. Travelers (a reality check)
6. Travel Class
7. Preference for Nonstop Travel (limits options)

You can get more specific if you choose, but some of those specifics will reduce your options.

1. Check flights to nearby airports
2. Flight quality
3. Aircraft type (general)
4. Layover Duration

During the search, Kayak assumes you want a round-trip fare, runs through the schedules of the airlines and providers, collects the information and displays it in a very intuitive list.

The display panel has 3 tabs.

List View
This is the View that shows details for the flights they discovered. It shows the price, airline, takeoff, landing, stops (and flight duration). To see all the details, click the "details" link. You can also email or bookmark the result.
The details is, indeed, detailed. Note the aircraft type, and flight duration
Matrix View
Sorry, not the movie .. but a snapshot of which airline is offering at what price and what number of stops. It's laid out in a table with the lowest fares for each "stops" category highlighted.

Chart View
If your travel is flexible, or if you're able to plan well, this chars is your friend. You will find two graphs in this view and each will indicate the date that has the lowest fares.

Month - The first graph has the lowest fare shown on a daily basis. Savings can easily be 30% or more. Generally, it's a good idea to [link]travel Tuesday thru Thursday[link] unless it's a holiday. Three Month Trend - If you have even more flexibility in your travel plans, you can see a trend in fares. Kayak is a great tool and prices should be checked against airline fares, but it's a great time saver. Best of all, it's fast. I ran a search for flights from LAX (Los Angeles) to ORL (Orlando Florida) with no departure or arrival restrictions and checking nearby airports.

Kayak's results showed at least 11 airlines, 6 airports around Los Angeles, 3 airports around Orlando, found 557 results and took about 15 seconds! It gets my vote!