KAYAK: Flights, Hotels & Cars

There are others. But kayak is top of the game. I have been using kayak since 2015 and have been to Europe every year since 2015 for under $500 round-trip from both coasts. Do yourself a favor, and download KAYAK, and ensure you are saving the most you can on flights by doing so. Do. Not be afraid of using flight aggregators within KAYAK. Many of them are just fine if you’re able to go with the bare bones and no customer service and the chance of a middle seat. The aggregates that stand out to me, and personally have used are: my trip, go to gate, kiwi and edreams. Know that these and the many other aggregates within KAYAK will have you feeling nickel and dime for every little service that they themselves offer. Always remember that once your ticket is booked and actually ticketed through the airline, you can get your customer service directly from the airline for most issues that don’t involve refunding or exchanging your ticket. Kayak is definitely the epitome of value and in that aspect Kayak does what it does well. Filters are very good and quite accurate, however, It often lacks common sense routing and pricing with more complex itineraries, but multiple one ways or point to point works flawlessly. Try to avoid complex itineraries as much as you possibly can. Try to do separate bookings for anything over 3 to 5 legs that are not point-to-point because KAYAK will not give you the best and most efficient routing and/or pricing. There are multiple renditions of this same platform that share the KAYAK interface. They literally work identically. Enjoy the world!

Overall the app does its job. There are plenty of reviews singing its praises so I won’t go into those. I’ve run into a few frustrating bugs navigating this software. This complaint is more minor but on the website you can add a Known Traveller Number to your traveller profile. Firstly I can’t find this field on the app at all, which seems strange. Second my KTN from TSA precheck has letters in it, but the field sanitizer on the website only allows you to save the number if it’s literally a 9 digit number. Whoever implemented that feature clearly had no ideas that many KTNs have letters in them, so I am unable to enter my KTN properly. This is an extremely obvious bug that should have been caught during testing. My more major complaint concerns my Kayak account being based on my Apple account. In this situation, I’m able to add emails, but the primary email on my account is a cryptic apple ID email which I do NOT want shown. Despite this I am completely unable to change my primary account email, even though user accounts not based on Apple accounts are able to do so. I am also unable to unlink my Apple account to attempt to re shuffle my emails, meaning the only solution may be to delete my account and re create it. The fact that I have to go through such lengths for a workaround shows extreme short-sightedness when implementing Apple SAML Single Sign On, and little thought to the surrounding user experience. I’m appalled that product planning thought this was an acceptable feature to release.

Kayak has been a fantastic company to use for anything travel! & has continued to impress me with their fun and very easy to use features. Airline companies often set standard pricing for their flights and the caveat that the normal person is looking for it matching all these flights with their specific needs i.e. layover timeline, # of bags, airline make/model, & flight times. A ‘Good Deal’ is a very generalized term and many other apps use that as their main means of persuasion when in fact it’s clear that sites like Kayak are so good at categorizing exactly what meets your needs and alining airliners to your schedule, like advertised they have a multitude of tools like bag number and layover timeline settings with a accurate representation of what the cost will be regardless if it is two separate companies. If you choose a flight selection that has a 2 hour layover for one airliner and you select ‘book’ the airliners website which it directs you to within the app has that selection already selected. I could go on and on about how easy and secure this app is to use so please give it a try.