My new favorite travel site

First, in the words of Liz Lemon: "It's not product placement! I just like it!"

Until about a month ago, my travel site of choice was Kayak.com. I preferred it far above any of the commercial travel sites. Now, Kayak has been usurped by the most commercial of commercial sites. But I'm a sucker for functionality.

I'm talking about www.bing.com/travel. It's owned by Microsoft. I know, right? Perhaps you are one who has seen a million commericals about this site. I think I was the last person to have heard of Bing. Thank you DVR and HTPC for shielding me almost entirely from ads. In any case, I finally did stumble upon it (through an ad on this blog of all places!), and I wanted to share it with you all as you watch fares into Miami next May.

Like Kayak, Bing gives you all these handy sliders that let you specify things like you want to depart between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., you don't want to come back to a different airport you flew out of, you don't even want to see red eyes, etc. But the unique part is that it actually tells you whether it's a good idea to book your flight now or wait.

Here's an example of me searching for Christmas flights (I will probably not start looking for cruise flights until February or so):

You can see in the box in the top left it's telling me to wait on this fare. Right now the arrow is orange. Last week it was red and pointing straight down, signaling that fares were likely to drop $50 or more. And it was right; this week they were down $30 and still dropping.

You can get more detail if you click the arrow:
Handy, right? We have enough time before the cruise that we can watch these price charts and buy at the lowest available fares. If you save $40, that's a t-shirt on board (or 5 Rum Runners, whatever you prefer)!

Hope this is helpful. P.S. Microsoft, please send me a check now.

In other totally unrelated news, are you excited about @NKOTBCruise!? Go check out their past tweets if you missed the big announcement on Wednesday. (No revealing comments about this please. Let's see if BHs are able to keep a secret. But eeeeeeee!)