www.kayak.com – is a budget hotel, car and flight finder operated out of the UK. Just to demonstrate for you exactly how incestuous the online travel booking community is: KAYAK is brought to you by the same guys who started Orbitz who are the same guys who started Travelocity who are the same guys who started Expedia. Unlike these companies, however, KAYAK is not a booking site. It’s a “travel search engine”, which hunts through other travel sites to match your request. Kayak lets you choose whether to book through travel websites or online travel agencies, which helps get you better prices. KAYAK has been lauded by BusinessWeek, Forbes, TIME Magazine, the A.P. and many other accredited publications.

So far so good.

I have to admit, KAYAK isn’t much to look at. It’s pretty much just a blank page with some awkward, orange and blue text. There are no flashy graphics or hip deal alerts common on booking sites. That all changes though once you actually conduct a search.  Once you’ve entered in a few details about where you’d like to go, a host of information and prioritization options pop up. You can search for a hotel by name, by amenities, by proximity to a specific landmark, number of stars. It’s all very straight forward, very fast and very good.