I’ve heard quite a bit about the UK launch of Kayak, initially from my husband when he was searching for a second hand kayak to purchase. He found it rather frustrating that this travel site kept appearing. It does seem a bit of a strange name but I’ve read pretty good things about Kayak UK, a review in a Webuser, an internet magazine giving it 4 stars out of 5 and listed by the Independent newspaper in it’s “101 Really Useful Sites”.

Kayak is touted by its founders as the world’s largest travel search engine searching hundreds of travel sites to give you the widest possible choice of flights, hotel and car hire options. Kayak aims to make the process of researching and booking travel as much fun as the trip.

Well as they say “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” so I carried out a search for a single room in Edinburgh for 2 nights from the 11 – 13 December 2007. The cheapest room with Kayak was £23 at the Merith House, a bed and breakfast near Leith a couple of miles from the city centre. The next cheapest option was the Frederick House Hotel at £34 per night in the same street as the Merith House. I did the same search with Hotels Combined and the cheapest room was £24 at the Osbourne Hotel in a central location. Hotels Combined had a few other options at under £33. I would say that the Hotels Combined site gave me a wider choice of budget accommodation in more central locations.

I clicked on to the Kayak blog anticipating that the blog of a travel site which aimed to make researching and booking travel fun would be bursting with interesting content, to discover that the most recent post was dated the 20 August 2007, almost three months ago. Have they forgotten they have a blog?

So in my very brief trial, Kayak UK did not seem to perform that well, more of a damp squib than a sparkling performer. What’s your experience of Kayak?