Not long ago I mentioned Vayama as another great travel search site. Today I found Mobissimo, and I think it might replace Kayak and Vayama as the first stop of my travel searches. Mobissimo searches Vayama as part of its regular routine, so its at least got that covered. Even better, the Mobissimo OneBox search is the fastest way I have found to search for a flight -- once you understand its very simple methodolgy. At OneBox, you type your entire flight search into one box, no more selecting dates from pop-up calendars. For example: enter "Chicago to London, Sep 26 - Oct 13" and it immediately starts responding with flights. Even better, for exploring vacation ideas, you can do this: "London to Asia, Sep 10 - 20" and the site will return various flights from London to different airports all over Asia. Nice. There are more features to explore beyond these few. All in all, a very clever site. Start with the tutorial, if you are interested.
NOTE: Based on the comment below -- don't skip going to Vayama directly if Mobissimo/Kayak doesn't pull up the flight you are looking for. Vayama doesn't make all of its flights available to the other search engines so you might be missing something! Good information
...or not. The blog has experienced a waffle. Apparently, Mobissimo (but not Kayak? Not sure on that.) does show all Vayama flights.
Wednesday, May 21
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3 comments:
Hi Keptman,
Thanks for your kinds words about vayama.com, and kudos to you for being able to differentiate aggregator (ie: metasearch) sites such as Mobissimo and Kayak from booking sites such as vayama. It never ceases to amaze me as to how many bloggers and even "professional travel journalists" are unable to make this simple apples-to-oranges comparisons. Lumping us all together is like comparing a search engine such as Google with an online store such as Amazon. You may do a search for a certain product on Google and wind up buying it on Amazon, but you never actually buy anything from Google itself. For online travel, sites such as Mobissimo and Kayak are the search engines, and sites such as vayama are where you'll ultimately be taken to buy your tickets. Those metasearch sites are our partners, not our competitors, so you can continue to use them to find many, but not all of vayama's fares.
Unfortunately we do not display all of vayama's fares appear on either Mobissimo or Kayak (or any other metasearch site) due to cost limitations and some other external factors. It is sometimes possible that vayama (as well as other booking sites) could in fact have lower available fares if you check them directly on our site (or other booking sites). Thus while metasearch sites are certainly a convenient solution and a logical first stop when planning travel, they should not be considered reflective of all fares that vayama (or other sites) have to offer.
Best regards,
Matt R
Senior Manager - Communication & Airline Content
vayama.com
mattr@vayama.com
I may have been too quick to replace my faithful Kayak. Mobissimo has some oddities I don't like. If you do a multi-city search, it just drops you into Orbitz for the search. It also seems to ignore dates when you use its 'looks very cool' activity search. Still some room for improvement!
Unfortunately I incorrectly advised in my previous post that vayama does not distribute all of its fares to Mobissimo. While not all of our fares are featured on other metasearch sites, Mobissimo does in fact display vayama's full content. We apologize for the error.
Matt R
Senior Manager - Communication & Airline Content
vayama.com
mattr@vayama.com
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