Pros & Cons
Of all the travel apps in the App Store, Kayak PRO (99 cents) should be your go-to resource for searching and booking. Kayak, which also offers a free version of its app, lets you search flights, hotels, and car rentals with the greatest of ease. It pulls in information from partners, such as Booking.com, any time it can't fill in all the details alone, or when another site will quite frankly offer you a better deal than Kayak can. For all these reasons, plus excellent usability, Kayak PRO is a five-star iPhone app for travel, and a PCMag Editors' Choice.
Flying High
For searching and booking flights, Kayak has long been my first stop any time I need to book a complicated journey. Both the Kayak website and mobile app give me the right kind of control over the filters I include in my flight searches.For example, both the mobile app and website have tools for including and excluding specific airports within a geographic area, so I can look for options departing from both LaGuardia and JFK airports, while keeping Newark out of the mix. On an iPhone, it's a tough juggling act to include all the necessary tools for advanced searches and also make them accessible to the user, easy to find, and easy to use. But Kayak does it.
Creating multicity itineraries is just as simple thanks to an extremely well-designed interface. This is a feat even Orbitz doesn't yet attempt on the iPhone. An option for multi-city journeys does exist in Orbitz's iPhone app, but when you tap it, the app says it will now whisk you away to the mobile-optimized website where you can carry out your search, because the app itself cannot support it.
If Kayak cannot sell you the seat on the flight directly, it will loop in a partner that can. Sometimes the partner is the airline itself, as in a search I completely recently that connected me directly to Delta, without ever leaving the Kayak app. Occasionally, the app bumps you out to another website entirely, which disrupts the experience. But overall, I like that Kayak knows when to rely on partners to provide services it can't.
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Rest Easy
With Kayak, searching and booking hotels is equally simple and straightforward. You can look for last-minute deals, or book in advance, and the app now includes results from some alternative accommodations as well, like apartment rentals and hostels. That was formerly a sweet spot I had only seen tackled in an iPhone app by Hipmunk. I thought it was a great feature, so I'm thrilled to now see Kayak doing it, too.Just as with flight search, hotel searches in the Kayak mobile app offer the right balance of features and simplicity. A dynamic map displays hotel results by location, and with prices prominently shown, too. You can also view results in a list with a quick summary of the most important information: a thumbnail image, name of the hotel, price for one night, and star rating. Tap on any result, and Kayak pulls up even more relevant information, including more photos, a summary, and snippets of user reviews (including date written so you know how recent the complaints and praises are), which are always important to me in making a final decision about a hotel.
The user reviews often come from outside sites, such as Booking.com, and I appreciate that. The sentiment, as I see it, is: If Kayak doesn't have the capacity to provide something the user needs, it finds another partner that can, and offers it anyway. It's that attitude that gives me confidence in Kayak.
Drive On
Reserving or pre-paying for a rental car in Kayak is similar to finding a hotel in that the app gives you a great balance of filters that are simple to use. You can filter by the class of car you need, services offered in the rental deal (such as unlimited miles) and even include or exclude car rental companies. You can also filter the results by distance or price.
Final Thoughts
