I’m not subtle in my love for Kayak. So I’ll be forward about my unabashed affection for the new Kayak Explore tool.

I previously claimed that Kayak Buzz was for people dreaming of heading out on an adventure. But Explore takes that power of dreaming to the tenth degree. You just pick where you’re leaving from and how much you can spend. If you want, you can narrow by when you’re looking to go, but it isn’t compulsory. It’s amazing. I might just buy a couple of flights for next spring because of it.

While convincing a friend to join me for my ski trip, I was re-introduced to Buzz, a feature on Kayak which I highly recommend if you’re still scheming up your next adventure. You enter your city and a general area to which you’d like to travel, and you receive a list of options within a certain month. It’s a fun way to help you decide where you will be going.

Mashable is taking nominations for the best travel website for the Open Web Awards. As someone who thinks a good deal about travel and the internet, I felt obligated to participate in the process. But when it came time to submit my nomination I had to pause for a little bit.

Sure, just the other day I was pitching Kayak as the best site for finding flights, but I don’t think that necessarily makes it the best travel website.

After some long thought I nominated maps.google.com. Whenever I think about going anywhere – from lunch on a Tuesday to Morocco – the first site I open is Google Maps. It’s the stuff my travel dreams are made of. It helps me get the lay of the land long before I arrive, and lets me plot and scheme on routes like no other map could. So there you go, for the moment that’s what I consider the best travel website.

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.