Kayak Explore – How you may end up in a Country you can’t Pronounce!

Kayak Explore is particularly useful for finding cheap flights because it allows you to search for flights based on your budget rather than a specific destination. You can enter your departure city and a date range, and then set your budget using the filter options provided. In the image below, you can see I’ve selected Las Vegas as my starting point. I would suggest starting with only this field (the from field) completed. Keep in mind the more fields you complete means more filters are applied and will limit the results that are returned. Kayak explore works best if you are flexible particularly with dates. If you are able to travel at any time the results might surprise you, and you might end up with some fun results! Remember, traveling is about adventure so why not open yourself up to the possibilities and consider wandering to a new location based off kayak explore shows you?

Besides the from field, the field I use second most is the Budget slider in the left column. This is helpful to me so I’m not influenced by destinations outside my price point. The other options for filters are first on the top row with Destinations and Dates of travel. Then on the left column Number of Stops, Budget, Duration of flights, and Type of Trip. Remember, the more filters you use the more limited the results you will have. Once you’ve set your filters, Kayak Explore will display a map with various destinations marked as pins according to the cheapest available flight prices. You can then click on a pinned destination to see more details about the flights available, including the airlines, flight times, and any layovers or connections.

I recommend first searching without any filters then applying filters after you have seen the initial results. Another trick I use is considering flying from other airports. Since my home airport typically isn’t the cheapest I will also input other “from” airports to see how the prices change. The results are sometime so much lower that is is worth it for me to drive potentially hours away for flights from another airport. Consider if I am flying my family of six and find flights for $100 less per ticket, I could save $600. If I can drive from SLC to Las Vegas, while it is a long trip, it would only cost me around $130 in gas with gas prices close to $4/gallon. I also have to consider vehicle maintenance and parking ~$20/day. Even with these costs it still can come out significantly cheaper to fly out of an alternative airport as tickets can be much cheaper since SLC tends to be an expensive airport to fly out of.

Additionally, Kayak Explore has a “Explore Destinations” feature that can help you figure out specifics for a specific destination you might be considering. A nice feature of looking at a specific destination is the price trends area. This can help give you a sense of whether you are booking at a good time in regards to pricing.

Explore Destinations provides users with a range of useful travel resources and guides for each destination, including information about local customs, top attractions, and recommended restaurants and bars. This can be particularly helpful to start planning for travelers who are visiting a destination for the first time and want to make the most of their trip.

Overall, Kayak Explore is a powerful tool for finding cheap flights and one of my favorite tools to use to start out my trip in a budget friendly manner. There are other tools we will discuss in other posts like Google Flights, but I always start with Kayak explore.

Have you had experience with Kayak Explore? Do you like it as much as I do? If you have any other tools you like to use please share below so I can check out your recommendations!