Dreaming of lime gerbils in a cheese sauce

err, that's really sucky. glad to hear you made it in the end.

but kayak.com (and, from the looks of it sidestep.com) aren't actually travel agents. they're search engines, they do not and can not sell you a ticket, they just tell you the fares they were given by the places they queried.

as you rightly pointed out, airfare.com is a travel agent (one of many orbitz.com clones?)-- they're the ones who botched this, not the aggregator who pointed you at them.

as an analogy, there's no point in refusing to use google search anymore because one of the search results includes an online merchant who ripped you off...