Check out Kayak for a new take on finding air/hotel/car fares
If you haven't seen it yet, Kayak.com offers a very interesting twist on traditional travel booking sites like expedia, orbitz, hotwire, etc. The spartan front page is brings to mind the contrast of google to yahoo, in its simplicity.
Yet even that front page belies some magic. As you start typing in a city name, when you've entered enough for it to identify one or more it will offer a pop up list from which to choose. This was particularly helpful when I was looking into a flight to Edinburgh, and I wasn't quite sure of its spelling. As soon as I typed "edi", there it was. International Falls equally takes only 3 letters to find. Sweet.
Even nicer, note that the top of the page offers a drop down of "past searches and saved profiles". Very nice. And the past searches are saved without any effort on your part--the way good interfaces should.
But the magic doesn't stop there. Once you've selected your location and timeframe, when you're shown the resulting airfare or hotels found, it not only lists them with sortable columns (expected these days), but it offers something that none of the others do (yet): sliders to limit the results--in real time. No need to repost the page. So if you're looking at airfares and want to see only those that leave in the morning, slide the "leave" "time range" slider to the left and watch as fares start dropping off the result list.
Some of us have seen similar demos in Flash--but this is NOT flash. It's Javascript (a boatload of it, judging from the view>source). Anyway, I'm not here to pick apart or even figure out the implementation. I'll leave that to others. I just delight in a real-world application of the kind of nifty user interfaces that we have been promised.
There are apparently still more hidden gems if you choose to register for the site and personalize things. I haven't done that yet (haven't seen a need to, and haven't heard what magic awaits). If I do and it's noteworthy, I'll pass it along.
It's not all just gee-wiz interface benefits, either. I just got a two-night stay in Orlando at the Days Inn Maingate (3-star with pool and more) for just $38. Sidestep was showing the same hotel for $54, and sidestep often beats the rest. (I'll do a writeup on SideStep soon. Yet another magical mystery tour.)
I do have just one bummer to note on Kayak: for some reason, when it comes to searching for cars, it doesn't search across all the vendors but instead makes you choose one. Don't know what's up with that, but perhaps it's some temporary situation.
Anyway, add kayak.com to your list of favorite travel sites. I think you'll like it.