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Continuing the E-Commerce Times' exploration of travel-planning Web sites, I paddled over to Kayak this week, and after a few minutes of playing around with the site, I was inexplicably struck with the desire for ice cream. Specifically, Haagen Dazs' five simple ingredients ice cream. No doubt, you've seen the ads: The five simple ingredients are sugar, cream, milk, eggs and chocolate -- or passion fruit or mint or brown sugar.
On second thought, perhaps it's not so inexplicable after all.
Kayak's site is a joy to behold and navigate. To the left are six ingredients -- I mean, options -- for hotels, flights, cars, deals, vacations and cruises. To the right is a stark field asking for departure and arrival dates.
If you hold with the school of thought that the use of white space in graphic design is a good thing -- that is, an element used to deliberate advantage in composition -- then you will love Kayak.
Kayak's embrace of simplicity does not stop with the front page.
The Web site only differs slightly from its more established aggregators, such as Travelocity or Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE). It searches for the best deal for a particular flight or hotel or car, and then it sends you directly to that company to complete the transaction. Yet somehow it manages to carry out this task in a very straightforward, streamlined manner.
418 Options
I typed in a request for a flight from Baltimore's Washington International Airport to San Francisco for Halloween. In response, I received 418 possible roundtrips, ranging from US$339 on AirTran to $664 on United. At this point in my survey of travel Web sites, if I still had any expectation that prices would vary significantly from one to the next, Kayak would have eliminated it once and for all. The $339 option, for instance, led me to four possibilities: a $339 ticket on Orbitz (NYSE: OWW), a $339 ticket on Cheaptickets.com, a $339 ticket from AirTran and a link to Expedia to check rates myself. There I found the same ticket for $325.60.
Other fields -- the deals section, for example -- were equally straightforward. I spotted California in the destination section. One click later I saw a $272 ticket for the first week in 2010. Not quite the time frame I had in mind, but never mind: The point is, it was easy to find.
Not that the site is devoid of any sophistication. It has nice touches such as your most recent searches; late breaking fares departing from your home airport, and in the Buzz section, the ability to see the top deals according to recent searches (1.9 million recent searches, to be exact).
Privacy Policy
Like all sites in this genre, Kayak tries to get an email address from its visitors -- offering little explanation up front of how it will use it, other than the promise of customized results, email fare alerts and saved results. It did ask for my home airport, though, suggesting that I wouldn't be bombarded with fare alerts from Baltimore to Bangladesh.
What won me over was its refreshingly upfront privacy policy. "What's yours is yours. The [personal information] that you chose to share with us is not going anywhere off of our site," is the blunt promise.
It takes the time to explain -- albeit somewhat glibly -- that requests from law enforcement personnel will be honored. Not that I am expecting this to be an issue for me, but after years of writing about privacy policies, omissions and sugar-coating tend to irk me. I sign up for the notices and use an email address I actually check on a regular basis. I have officially become member number 11,319,144.
Less Clutter, More Treats
It's a club that looks very interesting, if you like travel trivia, for which I've developed a taste after reviewing the industry's online offerings. Kayak slices up its travel demographics for various destinations. Washington, D.C., for example, is the sixth-most-popular destination this week for Kayak visitors. Interest in Sofia, Bulgaria, surged by 52.3 percent this year, and in Santiago, Chile, by 33 percent this week.
There are the usual Web 2.0-ish features most travelers have come to
expect, such as fare and flight alerts, along with nice touches such
as mobile 
apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. There is even a
labs feature for the truly travel-obsessed, where users can download
search widgets and watch live as other visitors search the site.
I'm sold: Kayak has managed to eliminate the unnecessary clutter that
is endemic on travel Web sites and still give me what I need -- along
with a few options I didn't realize I needed until I saw them. Yum.
Talkback: 
