His trip is almost up, but I just learned about Terminal Man, a fella named Brendan who was sponsored by Wired to fly just about everywhere JetBlue goes in a one month. It sounds like a pretty wild ride. He’s getting a bit of a raw deal though in that he has to stay in the airports, but if you took the basic trip idea – flying an airline’s route map – and give yourself a bit of time to see the sights it could make for an great adventure

At first I thought that JetBlue was a perfect candidate for this type of trip. Since they fly all over the US it seems like you could just hop around anywhere. After clicking through their route map though, it looks like everything has you bouncing through Boston, JFK, and Orlando. If you’re going to end up going to the same places, why not extend your scope a little bit and fly the Emirates route map or fly around the US on Southwest that doesn’t require you to keep skipping back through hubs. They may not offer JetBlue’s all you can fly pass, but I’m sure that if you if you talked to them about it as an advertising opportunity then you could work something out.

When I start planning a trip on of the first things I do it go to Kayak.com and see how much the flights are going to cost me. If I’m going somewhere EasyJet and Ryanair will take me I see what they run too. But baseline is Kayak, and apparently with good reason.

Lifehacker had a post profiling their top five user recommended flight search engines. They were:

1. Kayak
2. Yapta
3. Live Search Farecast
4. Priceline
5. Sidestep

I’d never heard of Yapta or Sidestep, so I went ahead and ran a little comparison of all the five sites to see which one gave me the cheapest flights. Of course I know that each of them will perform differently for different flights, but I wasn’t worried about being scientific here, I just wanted to see in a random sample which was best. And Kayak won, hands down.

Here are the results for the cheapest round trip from London to Nairobi later this month:

1. Kayak – $547.47
2. Priceline – $574.28
3. Sidestep – $627
4. Farecast- $657
5. Yapta – $713.51

Of course some of these searches offer other services. But the service I’m interested in the cheapest flight, so Kayak wins. Farecast claims to predict whether the tickets will get cheaper in the future, but only works in the US. Sidestep has a small price predictor, but it’s the exact same as Kayak’s – except all the flights are more expensive. So I’ll just stick with the one the gives me the cheapest flights.