Novel Trip Ideas from Kayak.com
Just last night, a patron came to the desk and asked, “Do you know of any good places to search for plane flights online?”
As a matter of fact I do, my friend.
I’ve been a big fan of Kayak.com ever since some friends of mine recommended it to people coming in from out of town for their wedding. This travel metasearch culls through different airline and travel search sites to help you find flights, hotels, rental cars, and cruises. An account on this free service can can store customized searches complete with alerts, a log of past searches, your home airport, and preferred airlines, which makes searching very easy if you come back often. Once you find your desired travel choice, clicking on a link will take you to the site where you actually book and pay for your chosen options.
The service is very easy to use, and even with so many search options, it’s pretty streamlined and intuitive. I showed the patron how to use the search, inputing the home airport, the destination airport, and the dates of travel, and he said, “Wow, you did all the work, now all I have to do is find the flight.” It is that simple, but there are also enhanced features to the site that help you refine your search, like widgets that let you specify the time spans of when you want land going and coming, adding area aiports to your search, the number of stops, and tweaking your travel dates and times. Other features include a matrix view of all of your flight options (a la, say, Orbitz or Travelocity), a graph to show you the prices over a period of time to help you time when you buy, popular sales and travel destinations, and prefab searches for major cities across the globe (on the bottom of the home page).
And those are just the toys for the airline flights. The hotels search uses Google Maps to map out the hotels and their proximities to each other and places of interest (you can even input an address of your choice and go from there), and you get details about each property as though you were looking directly at the hotel site. Car rental searching is just as easy.
The patron periodically had questions, but usually by the time I walked over to help, he’d figured it out. I was able to answer questions about how etickets work, travel insurance, how to pick out seats, and how airlines vary in their policies. A few other patrons came up to the desk as I was discussing the etickets with the patron, and they said, “Wow, this really *is* Information! Who knew you guys knew all this stuff!”
Now they know. 
As if I didn’t love Kayak.com already, a theme for a recent weekly newsletter was “Novel Trip Ideas,” like visiting Dickens’ London and staying in A Room With a View in Florence. Too cute. It’s definitely worth checking out. Heck, it would make a cool library program series: get a bunch of widely-traveled patrons together, have them give presentations, include a mini lesson on sites like Kayak.com, travel reservation tips (especially for online booking), and show of your travel book collection while perhaps having the traveling presenters talk about which books, sites, and people recommendations helped them plan their trips. If you do it, let me know, I’d love to hear how it goes!
Tags: technology
