Opera Browser

We've had some trouble with the Opera browser recently. It used to work on kayak.com, and now it's broken. There is good news for you Opera fans out there: our pals at Opera gave us some Javascript to fix the AJAX-ing of results. That fix is currently planned to go out on April 13. It would be sooner than that, but some other stuff that is happening makes it troublesome. You really don't want to know the details.

In the meantime, here are two workarounds for Opera:

1. when you are doing a flight search (or hotel search), wait for the little green bar to progress all the way across. Then hit refresh. Your flights will appear!

2. Try basic mode kayak. It's kind of, um, basic, but it works with almost all browsers. Even really old ones. No AJAXy goodness, of course. Mr. Miyagi says: basic on, basic off.

Better Travel Searching for All

Kayak.com is one of a number of new travel "meta-search" web sites. As a group, we are tiny in comparison to the large online travel agencies, and we face many of the same challenges.

One of these challenges is a smooth hand-off from our search results to booking sites, especially airline web sites. We are proposing an interface that airline web sites could implement, and all travel search engines (including our competitors) could use, that would make this hand-off a lot better for the user.

Read about it at flyapi.org. We're interested in comments from other travel search sites and from travel suppliers, such as airlines and travel agencies.

New Search API is live

In today's kayak.com patch, we updated the search API to include flight segment data, which includes cabin, equipment type, wheels up/wheels down on all segments of a trip, along with some more stuff. This was based on feedback from some early users of the API (thanks Bryan and John at Stanford!).

Also, the documentation is now correct regarding the _sid_ parameter.

Kayak Search API Update

The flight and hotel search APIs have been out for about a week and a half. We had a few glitches but they are now fixed. We've received feedback from several users that are trying it out.

One particular issue that came up several times was a missing parameter in the API specification: you need to include the "_sid_" parameter in EVERY request once you
receive the session ID from the initial get session request. A fix to the API doc is in the pipeline, and should go out on our next patch this week.

One user reported a problem with the quota system (1000 searches/day by default). If you are experiencing any quota problems, please let us know.