People who shop for price rather than destination will find Kayak's Buzz a very useful tool. But what if you have a specific location in mind and it's not on the list of top destinations?
Let's consider a trip from Memphis to Beijing, because the capital of China does not appear on the Memphis "Asia list" this particular day.
One technique is to enter the destination as a starting point. A reverse search shows a good fare from San Francisco to Beijing ($780 USD). If I'm in Memphis, I can now search for a cheap fare to SFO. But there are better options in this case.
Another possibility: I can search from cities that are more likely to have Beijing travelers. Beijing shows up on Detroit's Asia list at $819. Atlanta's lowest recent fare was $784. There are many flights between Memphis and those two cities.
Now I have several itineraries that are based on the actual fares travelers have searched in the past few days. They aren't sale fares with strings attached.
Many travelers enjoy shopping for a destination strictly by price. Services such as Site59.com have thrived on this type of traveler.
If you're that flexible, it only takes Buzz a second or so to provide a list of cities that can be very affordable.
What are my golfing vacation options from New York? Assuming I don't really care where I'm going, I simply enter New York and Golf in the Buzz interface.
At this moment, several Florida destinations show up at $95 USD roundtrip. The tool box says these fares were found two days ago and apply to a trip more than two months in the future. San Diego comes in at a very frugal $137 under similar terms. Dublin, Ireland is the lowest international destination at $307. The Dublin golf outing is set for early February.
You can see in this example that such tools have their limits. Booking a February golfing vacation near Dublin is not very appealing. But in the process of the search, I've found a very reasonable fare to a beautiful city. My golf clubs could stay at home.
Click "next" to the right for other places in cyberspace where you can search actual fares rather than sale prices.
