What I am saying is that yes, they seem to find good prices. But they show a zillion little options for AA (more on this in a minute) at the expense of showing fewer options for the other carriers. For example, looking for a flight to San Jose, Costa Rica, they show just two options for flight times. But when I search on Hipmunk or ITA, there are many more flights and times available, at competitive prices. And sometimes it is worth paying a bit more for a better flight time or shorter trip.
I am not a fan of American Airlines, and now I am even less of a fan. Looking for tickets to Marrakesh, Morocco, I found some flights on Kayak that seemed to fit the bill at a good price: about $1560. But when I was redirected to the AA site to actually purchase the tickets, they were either totally unavailable or the price was higher, by about $150 a ticket.
I spent an hour on the phone, talking with their customer service (who hung up on me twice while "transferring me." Then I finally spoke to a supervisor in the the tech department, who insisted their prices were "static" and didn't change except once a day, though I pointed out that they had changed three times that day alone on Kayak, and actually INCREASED in price by $150 while I was actually on their web site "due to increased demand..."
In all, I could not convince them that the prices quoted were indeed advertised, and the routes which they claimed were were not available, were laid out on the internet.
So what is it then? Bait and switch? False advertising? Or worst of all, gross incompetence?
Seriously. Do you think I will ever fly American Airlines, or US Air now, based on this experience?
And in my mind this taints Kayak as well.
So I bought the tickets... from Hipmunk dot com. The route I found was not even available on Kayak, with Air Canada (very good carrier) and the flight time over is only 21 hours (compared to 30 hours with AA) two stops (compared to three with AA) and a 17 hour, one stop return (compared to 20 hours and 2 stops). The price was $1559, and yes, when I went to buy the tickets they were available as advertised.
PRICE ANALYSIS
The cheapest I ever saw the price advertised was $1493 on KLM. The average price fluctuated from $1575 to $1675. At $1559 I think I did pretty well.
COMPARING THE WEBSITES
I did a search for tickets from SFO to SJO (San Jose, Costa Rica) in December.
Using the same travel dates, here are the prices and a few notes:
Prices, lowest to highest:
Kayak $670 *
Hipmunk $688 **
ITA $688 ***
Momondo $696
Orbitz $697 ****
Cheap Tickets $697 *****
Priceline $697
Fly $721
Google $750
Travelocity $1007
Bing $1029
Yapta $1029
Mobissimo $1030
Expedia $1053
Jetradar - $1499
*Kayak - multiple close airport search, allows ±3 days, not as many flight options offered
**Hipmunk - good prices, allows ±2 days, lots options, "agony"
*** ITA - lots of options, for example they showed $650 and $660 options on another date
****Orbitz - nice chart
*****Cheap Tickets - nice mix of Orbitz and ITA