Ever since I started traveling back and forth to St. Maarten, I've used Kayak.com to find my flights. They search the actual websites of almost every airline, as well as searching other search sites (like orbitz and expedia), and then report back the results, with links to each individual fare. You book the flight off of the actual site with the lowest price, not through Kayak, which means they don't take an additional fee for themseleves, like most other travel sites. However, I've noticed lately that Delta, US Air, and Continental were not showing up anymore, so I sent them an e-mail to ask what happened. I did not, for a second, expect a real answer from a real person, since that almost never happens anymore. Much to my surprise, this morning (not even 24 hours after sending the e-mail), I had a reply from one of the Kayak.com employees. He actually ran the same search I did, so he could see what I was looking at, and gave a response to each of my questions. Turns out that orbitz didn't show up because Orbitz doesn't provide travel to St. Maarten (which I knew, but forgot). Continental didn't show up because there were only flights requiring overnight layovers, which Kayak never displays. US Air and Delta can show up, but you have to do a flex-date search. I'm not exactly sure why they do that, but it's apparently some sort of necessary business decision. In any case, with an extra 30 seconds of work, you can get US Air and Delta to show up. If you are flying to or from St. Maarten and want to search those airlines, just click on the "dates are flexible" option, and run the search. When you get the search results back, just un-click the boxes for all the days that you don't want to fly. Slightly inconvenient, but it works perfectly and it's a whole lot more convenient than searching each individual website.
So, if you ever need to find a flight anywhere, make sure you use Kayak.com. Service like that is not easy to find anymore! And, they do happen to always find the cheapest flights.
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