kayak

kayak.com

Intended Audience
People who need to fly somewhere but are more invested in finding the cheapest flight than any particular airline loyalty. Cheapies. Me.

Usefulness of Content
I think Kayak is pretty great. I use it as sort of a Wikipedia for flight prices--what Kayak does is produce an amalgam of amalgams, if you will. Instead of searching Orbitz, and then Expedia, and then Travelocity to find the cheapest flight, you can use Kayak, which will search all of those for you, and then link you to whichever site has the cheapest flight (sometimes it's the airline's direct web site). Kayak also allows you to easily tweak the displayed results according to stops, airlines, departure times, airports, layovers, and all kinds of other neat stuff, in addition to price. Another neat feature is the chart, which can either be helpful or give you hives---it shows trends in fares for your chosen destination over the past 90 days. Theoretically this will help you decide if it's a good time to buy or not, but usually it just makes me sad that I didn't decide to buy my tickets three months ago.

Design Consistency
Kayak doesn't look like any other flight search site, mostly because it's so plain. I appreciate this. Also, you get realtime filtering, which negates any need for clicking around through multiple pages.


Ease of Navigation
I think Kayak is easy to use, as a reference tool. The only negative going for it is that you can't actually buy the tickets on Kayak--but it never claimed to be a purchasing site. It just does the work for you. Sometimes this stinks because by the time you've selected the flight you want, you follow Kayak to Orbitz or something and then Orbitz is all, hey, that flight isn't available! And then you're totally bummed and you have to start over. But as an aggregate flight searcher (except Southwest, which isn't a member of any flight searchers), Kayak is tops.