social // potato chips

I purchased my first airline ticket, a round trip ticket to Seattle to attend college, and used my return flight for the holidays.  I remember going to a travel agency where an actual agent used her database to search for the best deals she could find across various airlines.  It was a big hassle—because I had to physically go to the travel agent, and repeat my trip if deals or desired fares were unavailable.

You can say goodbye to the days of relying on travel agents.  In recent days, the power of searching and purchasing a plane ticket has been turned to consumers.  The travel industry has taken popularity online, through OTAs (aka Online Travel Agencies) where consumers can search and coordinate their own flights and vacation packages.  Kayak.com and Expedia.com are both popular OTAs in the Internet world.  While Expedia has been around longer, Kayak.com is a new face that is making ground and paving a new path.  The matrix at the bottom shows the pros and cons of the two websites.

Expedia.com has been around longer, and seems to focus on vacation packages.  With abundant ads throughout the website, as well as promotion of activities and places, the website’s trend leans toward users who prefer travel shopping as an experience.  While an end user may initially go to Expedia with a travel itinerary in mind, he may find himself window shopping outside of his original agenda.

Kayak.com provides a newer platform, and places their focus on providing data rich information that caters to web savvy travel searchers.  They contain more search advertising than display advertising, and provide many ways to manipulate data to the end user.  An end user will most likely find his desired travel information within his first search due to the amount of data Kayak.com provides and its vast ability to filter results.

I can’t say that one OTA is better than the other, because everyone absorbs and retains information differently.  Personally, I prefer Kayak.com because 1) website loads faster, since there are very few images to load, 2) I enjoy having all data presented initially, and then allowing me to control, and 3) I feel that Kayak.com provides cheaper results.

Either way, be sure to do your research.  OTAs are relying heavily on social media to capture deal seeking holiday shoppers in all of us, so we might as well make use of it.

Happy Holidays