The Emergence of the Travel Meta Search Engine

Every now and again someone comes up with something that makes my life easier. When it comes to travel, I’m all ears. In the late nineties it was Priceline. The thought of naming you own price for airline tickets was awesome! I did that for a while until I considered the value of time. It doesn’t allow you to bid on exact flights. Once you choose the days you want, you are at the mercy of the machine. I consider my time valuable. My time away is twice as valuable, and is not something I am ready to gamble with.

Over the next few years, others followed, lots of others. Hotwire, Expedia, Orbitz ,Travelocity and  Cheaptickets came out of the woodwork. Soon, planning a trip meant sitting for hours with legal pad in hand, jockeying for the best price-schedule arrangement. Then came the Meta Search Engine.

These function like the ones we know and love. (Nextag, Pricegrabber etc..) Similarly, they aggregate results of several travel searches at once. Now you can let the site do some of that work for you. You will likely need to refine your search, but for a broad search they come in handy. They are especially useful when you want to check prices for trips to multiple destinations.

Recent round-trip searches on Kayak.com yielded these results:

Colombia: $309
Nicaragua: $298
Ecuador: $490
Ukraine: $570
Slovenia: $822
South Korea: $900
Argentina: $800
Chile: $1,000
Tanzania: $1,300
Ethiopia: $1,360
Australia: $1,400
Vietnam (Hanoi): $1,400
Nepal: $1,470
Brazil: $800
Myanmar: $1,600
What’s out there? There are a handful of major players. Kayak.com seems to be in the lead and is affiliated with at least two of the others. Wego.com, formally Bezurk, is a company based in Singapore. I’ve never used it but it looks promising.

Kayak.com

http://www.kayak.com
http://www.sidestep.com (Kayak)
http://www.pinpointtravel.com (Kayak)
http://www.bookingbuddy.com
http://www.cheapflights.com
http://www.itasoftware.com
http://www.sidestep.com
http://www.mobissimo.com
http://www.pricegrabber.com
http://qixo.com/
http://www.travelzoo.com
http://farechase.yahoo.com

As with anything else, you need to exercise some caution and common sense. The flaws are mostly with the referenced websites themselves. You’ll get to know these well. Sometimes taxes/fees are included and sometimes they are not. Some sites display the lowest prices initially, then are sold out when you finally get to the order page. These instances can be frustrating but at the end of the day, I give the MetaSearch concept thumbs up.

Mike Collins