Kayak

Kayak has a very clean home page with ads confined to the right hand column. It searches the various sites, but the results are returned on its own summary page as well as in individual windows from the multiple booking sites. Kayak’s (kayak.com) list can be sorted by price, airline, takeoff or landing time, and number of stops. The best price was $319 on JetBlue. United was found on page two for $339. While none of these sites have access to search Southwest, Kayak has a button to take you to the Southwest site. I preferred Kayak to Bing, but it still required you to go through several pages to find the best flights.

Rating: Fair to Good

Hipmunk

Hipmunk takes a decidedly different approach. It has a simple front page, just a single box with no ads, where you fill in the cities and dates of travel. It displays the results in a horizontal bar graph, with the price along the vertical axis and the time of day across the horizontal axis. The length of the bars represents the departure and arrival times. You can easily see your layover times for multi-segment flights. The results can be sorted by price, duration, times or airlines. I found Hipmunk to be the quickest way to find a flight by time of day, airline and duration. Unlike most of the other sites, Hipmunk returns all of the results on a single page. Once I chose my outbound and inbound flights I had the option to buy the ticket from Orbitz. The best fare found was $339 for the same United flight.

Rating: Good