Kayak updated its search engine last week with a new “Weekend” feature that I’ve been tinkering around with for the last couple of days. It’s basically a modification to their canonical search routine that lets you make your search solely over any weekend period instead of nailed down to specific dates.
For example, if you know you want to go to Boston to see a friend some time this summer, you can select the weekend function, choose July, departing Friday, returning Monday and get queries for all weekends in July. The results will automatically give you the lowest price on the market, but if you want to exclude certain weekends you can do this on the left task bar.
In my case, the most useful aspect of this feature is for the “getaway” factor. Once in a while I get the itch to just get out of town next weekend and run a broad search across many cities over many dates. Now I can just run quick searches by changing the destination city and rerunning the query. Now if they had space for ambiguity in the destination and the dates (ie, I want to go anywhere, any weekend in August), that would be keen. I’m wondering if that query is too complicated for Kayak to handle though.