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Corporate Backgrounder
What is Kayak.com?
Co-founders of Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia created Kayak.com to provide consumers with more comprehensive travel options in one place. The site searches more than 100 different travel sites and provides real-time prices and availability for hundreds of airlines, 158,000 hotels, all leading rental car companies and seventeen cruise lines. Kayak.com displays more choices of available itinerary/price combinations than any other travel site. Kayak.com even offers consumer comments and professional reviews to assist with trip planning decisions.
Kayak.com is a travel search engine or “meta-search site” and not a retailer, so the site does not sell anything. Kayak.com is especially helpful because it links travelers directly to the airlines, hotels and rental car companies to make their reservations, which means users avoid paying the high service fees charged by online agencies and benefit from incentives offered on supplier sites such as reward points, upgrades, etc.
The Genesis of Kayak.com
In 2003, founders of the big three online travel agencies (Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia) gathered over dinner to discuss the industry’s lack of customer loyalty. According to industry studies, consumers were visiting three to four Web sites before making a purchase because they didn’t trust that any one site had all the best deals. Research also revealed that the majority of consumers who searched prices and availability online ended up booking directly with the airline, hotel or rental car company.
By the end of dinner, the answer was clear: the current online travel agency (OTA) model wasn’t working. These travel executives concluded that in order to appease consumers, the online search process needed to be perfected. So, rather than taking on the uphill battle of changing consumer behavior, they would build a site that searches dozens of supplier and online travel agencies and gives the consumer a choice of where to purchase.
It Takes a Village
In January 2004, these former OTA executives, together with a savvy software engineer from Intuit, formed Kayak.com. Within weeks, they recruited a brilliant team of engineers to build the next generation of online travel.
Four months later, the Alpha version of Kayak.com launched to 500 friends, family and colleagues. The initial version was slick and easy to use. Kayak.com’s industry leading technology meant the site was fast and intuitive.
In October, the Beta version of Kayak.com launched. Even in Beta, the flight search was one of the best on the Web. Consumers and media raved about Kayak.com’s technology and content. Boy, were the price sliders a hit! Of course, the company received constructive criticism, but we listened to everyone and continued to improve and enhance.
Kayak.com launched publicly on February 7, 2005. At the time, Kayak.com searched about 60 travel sites and returned more results than any other online travel site. Kayak.com was the first to combine air and hotel deals with other relevant travel information such as consumer and professional ratings and reviews. Even today, Kayak.com continues to enhance the customer and supplier experience with bi-monthly upgrades of new functionality, enhancements and smaller tweaks.
Learn more about…
Product Features
What people are saying
What the industry is saying
Why Kayak.com is faster than those other guys
If you blink, you’ll miss something. Try it. On the Kayak.com results page, users can change search parameters and see results refresh instantly. Never seen anything like it? That’s because Kayak.com is the first travel search site to use AJAX technology.
Simply, AJAX is able to find and organize hundreds more options than other search technology. Once the consumer inputs the initial request, Kayak.com gathers and sorts all the available price/itinerary combinations and displays results according to relevancy. When a consumer interacts with the filtering tools to change their specific search parameters, the results resort instantly because requests do not go back to a server. Interested in a more techy explanation? Visit our tech page.
Kayak.com is Objective
Kayak.com will never suppress search results and will always give consumers the option of where to book using its breakthrough MultiBook⢠technology. MultiBook⢠allows consumers to choose where to purchase their preferred itinerary, either directly from a supplier, online travel agency, consolidator, and in time, offline travel agencies. Prefer to research online but book offline? Kayak.com makes it easy for consumers by listing 800- and local telephone numbers of the travel suppliers it searches alongside the booking links.
Kayak.com is a Supplier’s Dream
More than 500 travel companies are already using Kayak.com to generate consumer traffic directly to their own Web sites, including virtually every leading airline, hotel and rental car brand. Participating airlines report conversion from Kayak.com’s core search results of 12-17 percent, with rental cars enjoying over 10 percent and some hotels exceeding 8 percent.
Another 500 companies are advertising on the Kayak Network, a revolutionary patent-pending search solution optimized for the travel industry. Unlike traditional paid search, which relies on keyword combinations, Kayak Network enables travel advertisers to customize their marketing activities based on specific search criteria. Advertising messages can be targeted based on parameters including city or city pairs, trip dates, length of stay, and specific airline or hotel brands. Using these targeting tools, Kayak.com advertisers have seen click-through-rates six times higher than their untargeted placements. There are currently over 5,000 active placements running on Kayak Network.
Kayak.com Providers & Partners with Industry Leaders Bolstering Content and Traffic
As part of Kayak.com’s mission to help consumers make informed decisions in their travel planning, Kayak.com continues to partner with leading travel sites. Such providers & partners include online agencies, travel suppliers, consolidators and a plethora of relevant online travel Web sites, such as Fodor’s and Frommer’s, among many others.
To drive traffic to Kayak.com, we continue to build a vast and strong affiliate network, including America Online, Lonely Planet, About.com and a host of other link share partners. See a complete list at: providers
Show Me the Money
Kayak.com is a privately held company. It received its first rounds of funding from General Catalyst, a Boston-based VC firm and America Online. Sequoia Capital, funders of Google, Yahoo!, and Apple, among many others, led Kayak.com’s Series B round in December 2004. Accel Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm with offices in London and Silicon Valley, led the Series C financing in May 2006. In total, Kayak.com has raised more than $30 million in capital.
Kayak.com Corporate Headquarters
27 Ann Street, Suite 300
Norwalk, CT 06854 (map)
Tel 203-899-3100
Fax 203-899-3125
Co-founder and CEO: Steve Hafner
Co-founder and CTO: Paul English
Employees: 25
Internet Address:
www.kayak.com
| Kayak.com 27 Ann Street, Suite 300 Norwalk, CT 06854 (map - hotels) Tel +1 203 899-3100 Fax +1 203 899-3125 |
Kayak.com Press Contact Kellie Pelletier VP, Communications Tel +1 203 899-3111 |
Kayak Partnerships Keith Melnick VP, Business Development Tel +1 203 899-3105 |