Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/
Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.
nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...
The best thing about Google Flights is how fast it is. The +/- 3 days (or whatever) options are never really exactly what you want, and while Google Flights also doesn't let you execute really powerful searches, you can at least manually search at a rapid pace (<1 second per search rather than >10 seconds on other sites).
Re:Get away with Google Flights
by ThatAdamGuy on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @08:16PM
(#9110820)
IshKebab, we really do work hard to make Flights fast (the amount of data we have to keep cached is pretty insane, IMHO!); thanks for the kind words!
re searches... it's our hope that -- for most folks and most cases -- our filters + our tips will suffice. But if there are specific power features you're looking for, let us know via the Feedback option and I'll do what I can to bribe, er, win over my teammates :p
Google flight search seems to be really good at finding cheap routes, I'm looking at SFO -> Rome, Kayak doesn't even show the Delta flight Google shows: https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=201...
Delta flight on Google is $1293, $1840 on Kayak
Did you actually try to book the flight by following the links on both Google and Kayak? Google is showing the flight at $1809 now and it's possible that their cache was not updated.
Also, it's possible that flight is under KLM/AF instead of Delta on Kayak since Delta/KLM/AF are partners. And I see same flight listed under KLM for $1781.
It would be interesting for a travel engine to list the alternate routes and options and let people vote ion each option to provide weighting to each one based on peoples preference for each.
Unless they already do this?
If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier.
Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.