Lifehacker.com is one of our favorite websites providing us with suggestions and ideas in order to get things done. Over the last week, lifehacker.com has asked its readers for suggestions and opinions on what the best travel websites are where affordable tickets and hotels can be found.

After their initial request for suggestions, lifehacker.com has created a shortlist containing 5 popular and well known travel websites after which users could vote for their favorite website. The following websites were included in the shortlist;

Kayak
Kayak is a travel meta search engine, crawling over 140 travel websites to find the cheapest fares available for airline tickets, hotels, cruises and car rental. Available rates are presented in a structured manner, providing users with a clear interface and plenty of options to filter and tweak results.

Yapta
Yapta, your amazing personal travel assistant, is an airline search engine which emphasises on tracking airline prices before and after tickets are purchased. Before potential purchases, Yapta enables customers to track a flight and have it send an alert whenever the flight tickets drop below a set price. After the purchase, Yapta keeps monitoring the flight and informs customers whether they are elegible for a refund when the rate keep dropping.

Live Search Farecast
Live Search Farecast is a meta search aggregator similar to Kayak where Farecast is also offering price predictions on tickets that suggest whether it is the right time to purchase tickets. Earlier this year, Farecast was purchased by Microsoft, who rebranded the service to Live Search Farecast.

Priceline
Priceline, which is one of the major online travel agents, made its name with its Name Your Own Price system. While the name your price system is still available, Priceline has evolved into a full featured travel website offering good deals on all kind of travel services and products.

Sidestep

Sidestep, once the 2nd largest meta search engine behind Kayak, has been subject of a takeover earlier this year. Kayak has taken over Sidestep, after which it closed most of Sidestep domains and forwarded customers to the Kayak domains. Still, some Sidestep domains are still active featuring services, products and technology similar to Kayak’s services and products.

Other travel websites which deserved a honorable mention were skoosh, isango, flyertalk, vibeagent, travel-savings, studentuniverse and insidetrip. Find brief introductions to these honorable mentionings here.

In total, close to 1000 people voted for their favorite travel websites, resulting in over 600 votes for Kayak as the most popular travel website. Obviously customers prefer meta search when searching for travel on the internet, where customers are no longer loyal to specific brands and more and more focusing on finding the lowest rates.

related items

• Financial round up for Expedia, Priceline and Orbitz (Q2)
• Ryanair signs partnership with priceline’s booking.com

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