Vayama is a travel website that allows you to easily find cheap fares using a Flash based interface. Like Expedia, you set the travel cities (arrival and departure), dates of travel and number of people travelling. Vayama then goes out and get the valid fares for flights that fit. The map at the top of the screen shows a visual representation of the flight, which (not surprising) is extremely useful. Its so much easier to see what the connections are for the flight. (When flying out of Ottawa, there are rarely direct flights to anywhere.)

There are a number of user interface improvements that you get in Vayama versus plain HTML sites. For starters, you can click on the map itself to set locations for departure and arrival. Sliders on the left allow you to easily filter results based on travel time or cost. Unlike most sliders that I've seen, these ones actually work (hello Aeroplan website on Safari). The site also integrates blog entries into the application (under "getting around" navigation item).

The site is an improvement over HTML based sites, but still has some improvements that can be made. Clicking on the maps is a bit difficult unless you zoom in, and filtering out results could use some small animations to show that its filtering the results. Otherwise, this is a welcome improvement from what I normally go through for booking flights. Hopefully some mainstream sites will start incorporating elements from this site into their own.

If you're looking for something fun to do, try repeating the title of this post 10 times fast.