You may have heard tell of Kayak’s new approach to airline fees in glowing little bits of press like the Boston Globe’s Flustering Fares piece from last week. We’re excited about being able to offer travelers the option to include airline fees in the total ticket price when they search for airfare on Kayak.com. Lookout for that new offering in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we’ve added a rockin’ new feature that you can use right now:

Kayak Airline Fee Chart

We’ve been checking fees, adding airlines and rechecking fees for the last several weeks to bring you this spiffy chart delving into the intricacies of airline fees associated with economy class travel. Be forewarned that we are concentrating on North America/U.S. and Canada routes right now. In most cases, the fees listed apply only to routes in those regions. Also, we’re updating the entire chart once a week, sooner when major fee changes occur, so make sure to check with the airline directly if the presence or absence of a certain fee is crucial to your trip.

You’ll see a link to this page when you search flights, and we’ll be mentioning it frequently on the Kayak blog.

Have questions, comments or corrections for us? Feel free to get in touch with your feedback and suggestions for improving this new feature on Kayak.com!

One day, you fly free of charge with asinine amounts of luggage. The next, you’re paying up to $50 per trip to check that second bag. If you’d known the airline’s policy, you might have rethought your packing strategy, shipped excess luggage to your destination or simply brought extra cash to pay the sky cap.

I put together a quick-reference chart that lists U.S. carriers, the charges for 1-3 checked bags and links to each carrier’s detailed baggage policy.

Checked Bag Airline Surcharge Chart

** Note that airlines are constantly changing their policies and fees - so always check directly with an airline for the most accurate and up-to-date information. Also, this chart covers basic checked bag charges and does not delve into the realm of overweight bags - we’ll handle that in an upcoming post.

Do you have a travel surcharge conundrum that you’d like us to investigate? Leave a comment, and we’ll get on it.

We’ve added a new feature to flight results today. You might not notice it at first, but it can be very handy. Suppose you have some flight results like these:

Those are a lot of options on American. Suppose you like one particular outbound leg, and you don’t want to look at any other options that doesn’t include that leg. Let’s say you want to arrive in SFO at around 5:30pm. Just place your mouse cursor over the outbound leg you want, and a little green bubble will appear:

Now, click, and the outbound leg will “lock” up in the top of the results, and you’ll only see results that match.

You can do the same thing with return legs. Let us know what you think.

We’ve had Kayak Mobile for a while, a really bare bones hotel and flight search application. It’s basically designed with the idea that you are either at an airport and need a one-way flight, or you are in a city somewhere away from home and you need to find a hotel for tonight.

But more modern phones, like the iPhone, can do more with the web, so we created a UI that is somewhere in between for them. The basic idea is that you can do normal round-trip flight searches, and normal hotel searches. The biggest differences are:

• many UI elements have been dropped to fit the smaller screen
• while booking links are still present, the phone numbers for the airlines are more prominent. On an iPhone, for example, you can touch the phone number, start dialing, put it on speaker, then return to the web browser to read the flight details to the airline rep.

This is just our first cut at this. As always, we welcome your thoughtful feedback for improvements.

It’s Thursday. At Kayak, that means we’ve released a new version of kayak.com. What’s new this week:

A lot of users have asked for this, and we now have advanced technology (the engineers called it “multiplication” and “division”) to show you your flights in whatever currency you want. Got a bank account full of Phillippine Pesos? No problem. Canadian Dollars? Got it. Just sign in and change your profile preferences, and we’ll calculate the price for you. You’ll still have to pay the airline in whatever currency they sell in, but at least you’ll know what you’re spending.

We’ve added a new web site, kayak.es. If you’re Spanish, you can now use Kayak with your language, and search travel sites that will serve you better. Bienvenido!

We also have improved fare alerts significantly. You can now specify exact dates, any trip length you want, any cities you want, and we’ll alert you to the fares.

Here is how you set up an alert:

And here is what you’ll see in your email inbox:

To use this feature, go to your email preferences.

We’ve also made a number of internal changes which should improve the speed and reliability of the site, as we do every week.

If you have any comments or complaints about these new features, or anything else to tell us, please use our feedback system. A real human will read your message and answer you.

Kayak.com pulled the plug on Kayak Forums today at 7:59 a.m. The product died of malnutrition as a result of neglect.

The death was confirmed by Kayak.com CEO and Co-Founder Steve Hafner who said, “Although we will miss Forum’s sage advice, willingness to listen and ease-of-use, he was wasting away, starved for attention. Kayak.com is committed to excellence and Forums were unable to compete with over-achieving siblings Kayak Buzz and Flexible Search. Although Forums may never be replaced in our hearts, he will be replaced on the website with new industry-leading innovations.”

Kayak Forums encouraged users to share travel tips, but too few heeded the call. He listened while consumers requested advice, although few answered their cry for help. He laughed alongside travelers as they reminisced about recent trips, but only Kayak engineers cared. He even sent members personal notes when their favorite topics were being discussed but where were the thank you notes? He knew the end was near.

To honor the memory of a fallen comrade, Kayak.com will continue to enhance the Buzz product and is working on designs for Kayak 2.0—an unprecedented site redesign—scheduled to be released in May.

Kayak Forums are survived by fraternal twin, Kayak Blog and other high-flying siblings: Kayak Buzz, Best Fare History, Best Fare Trend Graph, Flexible Search, Fare Alerts and the Trip Ideas newsletter.

In lieu of flowers, Kayak.com asks that you “Tell a Friend” http://www.kayak.com/h/friends about Kayak.com.

I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unlucky charge my fantasy:
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.

Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene III

What better day than the Ides of March could there possibly be for a software upgrade? Seriously.

Today, we bring you:

1. A better buzz. Weekend trips! Non-stop!
2. Tell-a-friend about Kayak!
3. A bunch of boring technology stuff that will help us handle the growing traffic.
4. Kayak search API supports UK searches (via www.kayak.co.uk).
5. Many bug fixes, including the notorious “adding Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to profile causes google map not to show.” I know you were waiting in agony for that one!

At Kayak.com, our engineers like to spend some of their time innovating, dreaming, thinking “What if?”

You know, all the different names you can come up with for “avoiding real work.” One of our favorite ways of, well, goofing off is to invent things for the Kayak Labs page.

We’ve recently reorganized labs so it makes a little more sense. If you haven’t looked at it in a while, take a peek.

Just launched this week is 71miles.com, our newest affiliate and the first product to integrate the Kayak hotel search API. In their own words:

Most getaways are short, local trips. 71Miles is a growing network of travel sites focused exclusively on regional travel, nothing else.

We cover weekend destinations within driving distance of major metropolitan areas—Northern California today, Washington DC Metro in March, and a complete national network in the coming months. Our authoritative destination guides cover sights, activities, and hotel and restaurant reviews, written by local experts with decades of travel-writing experience for publications such as Lonely Planet, Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Fodor’s, National Geographic Traveler, and Sunset.

The Adams at 71miles were able to integrate Kayak hotel results into their destination pages very easily. They say:

“The Northern California edition of 71Miles covers travel destinations like South Lake Tahoe and Big Sur. It’s important to us that the advertising we display is useful to our users, and presented in context; if somebody is looking at South Lake Tahoe content, we want to show real-time pricing and availability for hotels in South Lake Tahoe. With the Kayak Hotel API, is was easy for us to customize the hotel ads we display. It looking like a partnership that will be ultimately be good for our users, Kayak, and 71Miles”

Got a travel site? Want cool Kayak functionality? Check out Kayak Labs for 500 ways to tweak your own site. Well, not 500, but a wicked lot.

Some web sites release new features on holidays and have clever blog posts that talk about their new features in a cleverly contextual way. Here at good old kayak.com, we don’t quite have that holiday synchronization technology yet, but we have our best nerds brilliant computer scientists researching it as we speak.

In the meantime, a quick check of Wikipedia shows that today is Fat Thursday, which sounds like a pretty stylin’ day for some new features. Kayakians, gorge yourself silly on these tasty morsels:

Blog! Yes, we have a blog now! (Yeah, we know, welcome to 2003.) This should be a much more exciting, efficient and (dare I say it) fun-tastic (HA! I said it!) way to keep you apprised of all thing things Kayak: new features, newsletters, company events, etc. Well, all the things except those about actual kayaks. You know, the boats.

Layover filtering! You asked for it! We made it! You can instantly hide flights that have you spending hours strolling ORD.

More searching! It’s Fat Thursday, baby! 3 more Accor chains (Novotel, Ibis, Mercure); Travelfusion (UK);

It’s all purty! Don’t tell me you didn’t notice our sweet rounded corners!

Sitemap! Yep, got one. Welcome to 1994!

Pin flights across searches! If you know what that means, you are a hard core Kayak user. We love you, too.

Details, details. Number of seats available on most flights shown in details area (US).

Speed! Our speed guru, Borne (his actual name) did some major tweaking, shaving seconds off of our quarter-mile time. Something about CSS compression and a Nitrous kit.

We’re working on big stuff, really huge, in the coming months. Hook your feed reader to this space, and keep apace.