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One thumb down for Kayak.com

by Jerry Guo on Dec 17th 2007 at 2:30PM

This might be a controversial position, but I'm not a fan of Kayak anymore. It's gotten rave reviews for being an all-you-can-eat airfare conglomerate that doesn't even charge you a buck (it works to aggregate data from other for-profit aggregators like Orbitz). People have also been saying it's great for multi-city searches and car rentals comparisons.

To all that, I say bah humbug! I just tried to book last-minute tickets to Peru using the site and the fares it gave me were completely outdated. I wasted at least an hour trying to track down a ticket that I could actually buy; each time I got excited about a fare, it would tell me the system was outdated and the ticket was no longer available.

At first it showed me some ridiculous 3-stop connections to Lima for $1,000, which is quite a steal this late in the game. But those were gone. Then it showed me some 2-stop connections for $1,200 through Spirit Airlines. But when it connected me to the airline's site, it abruptly changed the prices to $1,500. In its defense, Kayak did get most of the erroneous data from Orbitz, which on its own suffered the same problems.

Maybe I'm just grumpy I have to pay $1,500 for the tickets.

Filed under: Peru, Airlines, Budget Travel

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Richard Dec 17th 2007 4:40PM

Jerry... what you encountered was nothing more than a net version of bait and switch marketing.

billo Dec 17th 2007 9:02PM

Jerry,

I'm sorry you ran into some stale fares on your recent search; we try hard to make sure that fares are accurate, but it's a tricky problem, especially internationally. It's the number one focus of our programmers, and we are approaching the problem from many directions.

Richard is wrong in this case: Kayak has nothing at all to gain from bait and switch, and everything to lose. Since we only make money by building a large audience of trusting users, errors hurt us.

See http://www.kayak.com/help/pricing.html for more. I encourage you to report price errors when you find them, so our search team can track them down. In many cases, we can correct stale data in different feeds and make things better for the next user. The feedback link is the best way to do this; every feedback gets read by a human. http://www.kayak.com/feedback/

Best Regards,

Bill, chief architect @ kayak

MC Dec 17th 2007 10:13PM

Jerry - I have to agree with you on this. While I find Kayak as a good place to start, and it works OK for finding rental car rates. However, I have often found the flights it pops up to be idiotic flight plans or not available. In the end, I usually end up using it to get the rate, and then (outside of Kayak) go to the airline/rental car site or call the airline/rental car.

Case in point, a flight from my home town to Halifax Canada. Leave at 1:30pm in the afternoon, fly to Chicago, have a 20 hour layover, arrive in Halifax at 2:00pm the next day, and this is where it gets good: Leave Halifax at 2:30pm (yes, 30 minutes after arrival), and then spend 25 hours to get back home.

Sam Dec 17th 2007 11:03PM

I find that it's best to use Kayak as a tool. kinda like a what flights are available search engine... I dont think I've ever gotten THE CHEAPEST deal from Kayak.. pretty close, but never the cigar.

Sam Dec 18th 2007 8:51AM

ohh right. and you may want to check out http://www.yapta.com/ it's kinda a sexier Kayak

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