Save $5 On Airline Tickets on Travel Search Engines

I love travel accommodation search engines like Kayak because they allow you to search almost the entire pantheon of travel providers to bring you the best deals. Kayak is doubly good for places like hotels because they have integration with Google Maps to give you an idea of where all the places actually are, crucial for hotels and rental cars. If you use them as much as I have, you’ll probably being to notice one important detail - the prices listed on Kayak (and other sites like Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) are $5 higher than on the airline site itself. That $5 is Kayak’s cut for sending them your business and you can save that by simply going to the site itself and booking the ticket.

One word of warning, sometimes the airline’s site won’t have the same price. It might be that the search engine has a special deal of some sort with the travel provider (or it could be something else, who knows) but this trick doesn’t always work. I’ve also found that this trick doesn’t work as often with hotels and car rentals, there doesn’t seem to be as clean of a $5 markup.

Lastly, all those search engines won’t have two important budget carriers in their results - Southwest and AirTran (and maybe a few other smaller outfits). To get those flights you’ll have to go through the site’s own website (though some of their partners will appear in the results, such as ATA, a partner of Southwest’s).