NEW YORK — A lot has changed since I reviewed travel websites four years ago. Now the best ones reflect the new realities of travel, and offer to include luggage fees in fare calculations. That helps because $15 or $25 applied each way can turn a good deal sour.
My verdict this time: I found TripAdvisor slightly better than Kayak and Bing Travel.
Four years ago, I recommended travel-focused search engines, particularly Kayak, as a one-stop shop for airline deals. These services check multiple sites at once and let you book directly through the airlines. By contrast, online travel agencies such as Orbitz and Expedia did the booking for you — and tacked on several dollars in service fees.
I’m pleased to say that those fees are largely gone, partly a response to rising competition. Yet after trying all the sites again, I am still sticking with the search engines for their ease of use. Sometimes the search engines still refer me to an online travel agency for the best deal, but at least they’ve checked around for me.
And I can more easily use the search engines to narrow my choices based on departure times, frequent-flier programs and other criteria.
Before I get into why TripAdvisor was slightly better than Kayak and Bing Travel, I’ll note that they all work similarly. Start by typing where you are leaving from and where you are going. Then pick the departure and return dates and hit “search” or “find flights.”
You’ll get a list of flight options, which you can sort by price and other criteria. If you prefer non-stop flights, you can uncheck boxes for one or more stops. If you need to get there by noon, you can adjust an on-screen slider to eliminate afternoon and evening flights.
Kayak and TripAdvisor let you filter out airlines that aren’t part of specific frequent-flier alliances, so you can be sure you’ll earn miles. Kayak also lets you choose whether you want only flights with Wi-Fi wireless service.
Let me step back to say that no search engine is complete. It all depends on deals a search engine makes with the airlines and travel agencies. Kayak and Bing, for instance, can incorporate fares from Orbitz, but not Expedia, while TripAdvisor can pull fares from Expedia, but not Orbitz. None of the ones tested includes Southwest Airlines fares.
As a workaround, these search engines do offer easy ways to search those excluded sites in a separate window. Bing also includes Southwest flight schedules in its results — just not the fares.
Based on all this so far, Kayak would win because it offers more filtering choices than the others. But that conclusion would miss nifty features elsewhere.
Bing, run by Microsoft Corp., has Visual Search Galleries that help identify the best options based on whether you’re looking for a family vacation or a honeymoon destination, what time of year you want to travel and how long you are willing to sit on an airplane.
Bing also lets you search for multiple destinations at once, not just multiple airports in a region. If you’re being indecisive about whether to fly to Chicago, Miami or Boston this summer, plug in all three and let Bing pull up all the options.
Charts and graphs help compare fares by departure date and length of stay. They are based on what Bing calls “observation queries” — daily checks of millions of flight and date combinations, all analyzed and stored in a database awaiting your query. By contrast, other sites that recommend the cheapest travel dates generally use data from what their users recently searched, so the results are typically incomplete.
Once you’ve settled on where and when to go, Bing can predict whether fares are likely to go up or down if you wait. It’s based on the Farecast technology that Microsoft bought in 2008.
I’ve long been a fan of Kayak, but there are other options out there. I like Bing’s tools for helping me decide where and when to go — as well as when to buy. But once I’ve made that decision, nothing beats saving money. TripAdvisor came through.
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