Wegolo.com: My new favorite low cost flight-booking engine

From next week, my traveling schedule is exciting but ridiculously hectic. Madrid-Seville-Madrid; then Madrid-Dubai-Muscat-Dubai-Madrid, then Bristol-Darlington-London-Madrid, all within the month of June. I’m short on time at each destination so want to fly where ever I can to save time but don’t want to break my bank either.

Madrid is not a very well connected city for cheap flights, the only budget airline here is Vueling, but the places it flies to is limited. Also, trying to go to individual budget-airline websites and booking on multiple sites is just a pain in the neck, so after a few hours of being depressed looking at my possible flight bills, I was thrilled when I found Wegolo.com.

It’s awesome because it searches 75 airlines that are ONLY budget airlines, to your destination. It gives you all flight options, you can search dates before and after your selected dates, and it completely omits traditional airlines — so all the options it shows are the cheapest possible. Because of the number of airlines it searches through, it’s easy to book multiple flights from multiple destinations without having to get off the site — it just makes things so much easier!

All information is updated in real-time, there are no hidden costs, all airlines they search have: e-ticketing facilities, you can buy with Visa, MasterCard and American Express, and booking confirmations in English. I’m quite relieved to find this site! Do check it out.

Insidetrip.com: the metacrawler that rates travel quality

Last week, news of a new search engine, Insidetrip.com, hit the blog-o-sphere and due to an unfortunate fascination with cookingforengineers.com I just got around to testing it this weekend.

Like most aggregators, Insidetrip provides a wealth of data, and I think you can feel pretty confident that they’re finding you the lowest available price on your itinerary. But anybody can do that these days.

What makes their engine special is the other factors that they display along with the fare — factors that rate the quality of the trip. Some, like number of connections, are obvious, while others such as aircraft age are more subtle. But depending on which of these factors you find important, you can leaf through the various fares to see what’s available at a particular “Trip Quality”, as they put it. They even go so far as to rate every itinerary by its quality, so you can easily pick out the least strenuous trip.

The one thing I feel is missing so far is the ability to flex search. It’s so important for me to use the ± 1 day function when booking an itinerary; that extra day can cause significant price fluctuations. After all, I and many other people would probably chuck all of the comfort, speed and ease factors out the window if the ticket was twenty bucks cheaper.

All in all it’s a great site though and I recommend taking a look at it. It may be a little too busy for my likes, but I think many people will find it very useful.

Gadling’s favorite booking engines

Running a travel website and all, you might say that we here at Gadling have broken all of the travel booking engines in and tested them to their limits. I’ve seen Orbitz, Sidestep, Mobissimo and Kayak born and grow into giants, watched as the grass roots, moccasin-wearing efforts turned into corporate, power-tie monoliths.

Throughout our years of booking, favorites have emerged. It used to be that I would go through several different search engines when I was looking for a ticket to compare multiple prices, vacillating between one and the next and the next. But now I, and most Gadlingers alike share a common engine.

The clearcut winner for Gadling’s favorite airline booking engine?

Kayak.

Kayak is a new breed of search engines called a metacrawler, a tool that searches multiple engines as well as private websites for the lowest published fare. But in addition to the ability to do this, Kayak has a clear, efficient engine that fluidly searches across a wide variety of parameters– all without overwhelming you with ads or useless chaff.

Keep it real, Kayak.

Kayak gobbles up Sidestep

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that metacrawlers are the new big thing in travel search engines. In addition to querying the canonical search engines like Orbitz and Expedia, metacrawlers also search airline home pages and other sources to create a “fuller” search query.

Over the past few years I’ve been preaching the benefits of Kayak and it looks like they’ve started to gain traction (you can send my consulting check to my office, thanks). And with a solid market segment, Kayak has now turned their eyes to the competition. Sidestep, the second most popular metacrawler recently announced (internally) that Kayak put up the $200 million to buy them out completely. This will make Kayak the metacrawler source out on the interwebs.

Much as I preached about Kayak, I’m a little concerned with the über corporate route that they’re taking. Speficially, I’m concerned that their new powerhouse corporate entity will overshadow their original grass roots mentality. With agreements with Priceline, Hotwire and Expedia that can automatically bring up windows during a query, Kayak is starting to get that corporate stench that only a true multi-million dollar company can produce.

Despite my concerns, Kayak’s developers continue to maintain a strong relationship with its users, always responding to queries from myself and Gadlingers alike. Please, please, try to keep your travel-hungry masses in mind as you take over the metacrawler world, Kayak.

Sex, dolly buster, Britney Spears and burrito: which country Googles what the most?

Big Brother named Google is watching and there’s a tally of the number of people in countries who search certain key words. It’s a fun little tally, though, although I’m not sure what the findings mean. Are these people’s obsessions or just musings? I think another interesting tally would be words that countries don’t Google. For example, “sex.” This wins top place as the word typed in the most in Egypt, India and Turkey. I think in some countries Googling sex might find that person in a world of trouble. I also want to know what a Dolly Buster is. Is it a beer? A buxom blond? I could look it up, but I’d rather ask you all.

Here’s more of the top searched words and the countries where the people are Googling them. I say this list also indicates where Internet access is more easily available–and perhaps who has desk jobs.

  • “Jihad” – Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan
  • “Terrorism” – Pakistan, Philippines, Australia
  • “Hangover” – Ireland, United Kingdom, United States
  • “Burrito” – United States, Argentina, Canada
  • “Iraq” – United States, Australia, Canada
  • “Taliban” – Pakistan, Australia, Canada
  • “Tom Cruise” – Canada, United States, Australia
  • “Britney Spears” – Mexico, Venezuela, Canada
  • “Homosexual” – Philippines, Chile, Venezuela
  • “Love” – Philippines, Australia, United States
  • “Botox” – Australia, United States, United Kingdom
  • “Viagra” – Italy, United Kingdom, Germany
  • “David Beckham” – Venezuela, United Kingdom, Mexico
  • “Kate Moss” – Ireland, United Kingdom, Sweden
  • “Dolly Buster” – Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia
  • “Car bomb” – Australia, United States, Canada
  • “Marijuana” – Canada, United States, Australia
  • “IAEA” – Austria, Pakistan, Iran