Kayak

User comments from HackerNews frame Kayak as a metasearch product that searches airline sites on behalf of users. One highly-upvoted comment notes that while Kayak was 'pretty much king of the hill for a good long while,' users almost always get better exception service when booking directly with the service provider: 'you'll almost always get better exception service if you are booked directly with the service provider than if you're booked as a 3rd party customer or a code share.' Users also report that direct airline booking costs are 'usually similar or even a little less expensive.' A significant limitation repeatedly highlighted is that Southwest fares are entirely absent from Kayak's results — Southwest 'does not believe in distributing their fares through the metasearch or OTA channel' and actively prevents scraping. Several users praise Hipmunk as a superior alternative that 'beats the nearest competition by a mile.' There are also references to a legal investigation into Kayak's acquisition by Priceline regarding whether stockholders were harmed. Technical users discuss the inherent difficulty of maintaining accurate real-time pricing without direct contractual arrangements with airlines, noting that scraping leads to stale or inaccurate fare data. Some users criticize the airport-centric design, which requires users to know specific airport codes rather than searching by destination type (e.g., 'ski destinations').

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