Kayak: A Detailed Review 2017
What is Kayak?
Kayak is a fare aggregator website that is owned by the same company (Priceline Group) as booking.com and agoda.com. Not just for hotels, it also compares prices on flights, cars, holidays, and trains. It really does offer a good all-in-one solution to cover most, if not all, travel booking needs. The home page gives a bit of inspiration in the form of eye-catching photographs each linking to one of its more popular destinations.
The site has a good amount of smart tools to help you with your searches. You can see at a glance if travelling on a different date would save you money. This is ideal if you are flexible. If you are ultra-flexible, you can set a price alert. Kayak will e-mail you when a flight reaches an acceptable price. There are lots of filters available to narrow down your search, and they provide prices from many different sources to save you a lot of legwork.
Are they a big company?
Kayak is a worldwide company, with sites in over thirty different countries and eighteen languages. They have won many awards over the years, and it is easy to see why. The site is extremely useful from an early stage of trip planning. Clicking on accommodation in London, for example, shows me lots of helpful graphs showing the cheapest and most expensive times of year to visit. They also show just how much of a decrease or increase you are talking about. This ranges from a 14% decrease in January, to a 21% increase in June. You can also see that the average cost of a hotel room is slightly cheaper at the weekend.
You can also see average prices for this weekend, tonight, and in general. A range is given from the cheapest to how much you can likely get a 4-star hotel for. They also let you know the most popular neighbourhoods in case you are unfamiliar with the area.
All in all, Kayak seems to be a very attractive, easy-to-use website that offers a lot of functionality. It is free to use, gaining its income from referrals to the sites that sell the flights and accommodation for example. The price you pay is not inflated. We highly recommend you give it a go. It may well be your new favourite travel booking site!
Have you used Kayak? What do you think of it?
