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I'm interested in everyone's thoughts about Kayak. My feeling is that slowly but surely, the travel sellers who buying leads from Kayak will start paying less.
by colinsidoti 14y ago
I'm interested in everyone's thoughts about Kayak.
My feeling is that slowly but surely, the travel sellers who buying leads from Kayak will start paying less. So while I see it as a successful business, I'm not really sure where they're planning to go from here.
- aliston 14y agoIt will be interesting to see how Kayak fends off increased competition from imitators/similar sites... Google, Bing, Hipmunk etc. Google actually owns ITA, which is the source of about 40% of Kayak's data. Whereas 5 years ago, Kayak had a pretty lucrative niche as a nice UI on top of other people's data, their survival will depend on aggregating across a wider set of sources: hotels, cars and cutting new deals with airlines.
- rdl 14y agoAs a user (a pretty hardcore travel optimizer, buying either absolute cheapest complex fare, or "value" premium fares), Kayak is one of the few travel sites I actually like. Someone from there (CEO? CTO) has posted on hn and/or quora and seemed really smart, too. Obviously they're in quiet period now so won't be commenting. They seem pretty flight-optimized, at least for me, which is a much lower source of revenue than hotels. If they can grow their standalone hotel res business, or add hotels to flight purchases, they'll be worth a lot more than even being totally successful on flights. (I book all my hotels direct with starwood or with the property on negotiated rates, though, or use airbnb or a few specialty negotiated-rate networks like Tablet).