Not the canoe boat thing. No, I’m talking about the website and especially the app.
Kayak isn’t new. Even I have been using it for years. I don’t travel overseas often, but when I do, it’s indispensable and thus, it remains one of my favourite apps.
You can use it to book cheap flights and hotels, but then travelstart is probably the best local option for that. You can use it to track flights, but you’d probably want to go down the flightradar24 route for that.
So why Kayak? Because its biggest strength is that it is particularly brilliant at compiling your itinerary, and it has a genius way of doing it. Each time you get a confirmation email from your airline, your car hire place, your ferry, your hotel or your train company (or whatever), simply forward it to kayak and they put everything together in a handy little virtual pack for you.
You can see the bare bones of this at a glance (flight numbers, times etc) and then with a single click, you can get the detail (seat numbers etc). It even stores the original email for you to refer back to if you need to.
Oh – and you can share the itinerary, either as a read-only or a collaborative editable file.
So simple. So brilliant.
One last thing – a really nice touch on the latest update is the app background changing to a photo of your destination. Suddenly, I’ve got Tinsley Viaduct and those infamous cooling towers on my phone and it’s piquing my excitement to head to the frozen North.