The Stingy Traveler Chronicles: Flights

Ever since I've been old enough to have my own money, I've been a stingy girl. When I was ten years old I lent my dad $20 to pay the pizza man and then hit him up with interest charges until he paid me back. I remember that for some reason this really bothered my brother. I vaguely recall that his problem was not with the ungenerous terms of borrowing that I extended to family, but with the fact that I didn’t really understand interest, a concept that he, a learned middle-schooler, had mastered months before. Without the requisite knowledge of percentages, I was forced to charge my father arbitrarily at a rate of $1-2/day (although, to be honest, I lost count after the first week and, when asked, would estimate a debt of about $200 every time). Eventually, my dad did pay me back by opening a savings account for $100 in my name.

Since then, I’ve grown slightly less exploitative, but have retained my knack for saving. Now that I’m heading to Europe for a year, I’m interested to see how well I can keep up my [non-]spending habits while still making the most of my experience. Although I’m not there yet, I’ve managed to do a pretty good job already by using the best website ever to book my flights.

Kayak.com: The Best Website Ever

The way I understand it, Kayak.com is basically an aggregator of aggregators. That is, it not only provides quotes for flights from competing airlines as do online travel agencies like Cheaptickets.com, Orbitz, and Expedia, but it actually compiles quotes from these competing travel agencies so that you can find the cheapest flight available with one search. Unlike OTAs (travel retailers that earn their profits by purchasing flight reservations directly from airlines and then selling them to consumers at a higher, but still competitive, cost), Kayak.com earns its profits from advertising and is therefore not in direct competition with companies like Orbitz. Rather, it benefits from providing the most comprehensive list of flight quotes from every OTA and airline available.

I’ve used Kayak to purchase just about every flight I’ve been on in the last 4 years, and it has consistently provided me with the cheapest airfares (I know because I double check other airline and travel agency websites…thus defeating the point of a meta-search engine…). It’s also straightforward and provides quotes that include all taxes and fees (except for JetBlue, for some reason), which most OTAs don’t do. The only time it has let me down even a little was when I tried to book a flight a year in advance and it turned up only a few, very expensive search results. I think this had something to do with the fact that, under normal circumstances (i.e. un-coerced by the visa requirements of the French Consulate), no one would be looking to book a flight that far in advance.

Finally, it’s cute. Check out this disclaimer, which I found on Kayak’s website under the heading “Legal Mumbo Jumbo.”