I travel by airplane twice a year (plus or minus one) and it seems every time I fly, there are new online tools. First, years ago, Expedia allowed me to find low prices across multiple carriers. Then Priceline debuted, allowing travelers to “name their own price.” Although I’ve experimented with the tool, I never used it for booking flights.
One of my favorite tools is SeatGuru, which has seating configurations for many different aircraft on a variety of carriers. Before you choose your seat when booking a flight, you must check SeatGuru to determine which seat locations provide more legroom (good) or are next to restrooms (bad).
Last time I traveled, I found success with SideStep, which searches more airlines for rock bottom price and is highly configurable. A site which provides is Kayak.com.
I’ve never been on a cruise, but if that’s how you roll, Kayak is now offering metasearch for cruises, so you don’t have to go back and forth to individual travel sites to find the best deals. At first glance, it’s as easy to use as the flight search, but the travel dates are less flexible.
Updated February 6, 2012 and originally published January 11, 2007. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
Rank: Platinum
Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Flexo,
If you haven’t tried http://www.Farecast.com too book your flights, give it a look. It actually predicts whether prices will go up, down or stay the same in the next week … and quite accurately so far in my experience.
Thanks mstein88, I’ll try that out when looking into my next set of travel arrangements!
If you’re interested in cruises, http://www.vacationstogo.com is a good source for cruise pricing.
FT
http://www.milliondollarjourney.com
Just wanted to comment on SeatGuru, that thing is a life saver! When booking my business flights it is great to be able to check seats ahead of time. I’ve had some prime seating locations thanks to that site.
Another nice web2.0 travel search engine is Trabber.com which is mostly developed using AJAX – http://www.trabber.com