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Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B
- personlurking 14y agoAnyone have any idea if Kayak will be integrated into Priceline or if it will remain its own company?
- colinsidoti 14y agoIt's own company: http://www.tnooz.com/2012/11/08/news/priceline-buys-kayak-for-1-8-billion/ http://www.tnooz.com/2012/11/08/news/priceline-buys-kayak-fo...
- daakus 14y agoI hope this doesn't kill the current best UX that hides the junk in this industry.
- duck 14y agoThere is always http://hipmunk.com http://hipmunk.com, which I think has the best UX of any of them (although maybe it is lacking some features, but none I would use anyhow). Edit: Doh, fixed the link!
- JoshTriplett 14y agoThat's hipmunk.com, not hipmonk; however, it looks like they own that typo domain and redirect it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bradleyjg 14y agoI agree their UI is somewhat nicer, but they don't have all the features. In particular they don't have one way.
- photorized 14y agoHipmunk looks interesting, haven't seen it before. Minimalist is the way to go, I think. Can't stand busy travel sites that try to be everything to everyone.
- dmbass 14y agoI've found Google Flights[1] to be a much better experience than either. It is stupid fast and has a great interface for comparing prices if dates are flexible. [1] http://www.google.com/flights/ http://www.google.com/flights/
- ssharp 14y agoHipmunk's visualization is a great way to show the flight times. I also love the tabs they use to open different searches. I live equal distance to three airports and can quickly compare prices at each.
- calbear81 14y agoTo compare prices between three airports in the same metro, couldn't you use the "include nearby airports" function and just look at the filter list and see the lowest price from each? Just wondering if you've tried that vs. running 3 different searches.
- bgarbiak 14y agoI'd recommend www.skyscanner.net, at least for the European users. Sure, they lack simplistic interfaces of Hipmunk or Kayak but when it comes to actually finding the cheapest tickets and best connections on the old contintent low fare airlines market they're, IMHO, the most reliable.
- daviddumenil 14y agoI'm a big fan of skyscanner. Being able to ask questions like 'what are the cheapest flight from my local airport over this weekend' make for fun trip planning.
- taumeson 14y agoFun fact: Both are located in Norwalk, CT., about a 5-10 minute ride from each other. Priceline is located almost on the Darien border and Kayak is nestled in South Norwalk (SoNo). I gotta believe this proximity lead to board member and executive coziness.
- makmanalp 14y agoFun fact #2: Founders are co-founders of travelocity, expedia and orbitz. It's a tightly knit yet competitive biz :)
- hluska 14y agoI can't escape the feeling that that fun fact is why stories like these have hit the wires: http://zlkdocs.com/KYAK-Info-Request-Form-463 http://zlkdocs.com/KYAK-Info-Request-Form-463 To save you from reading that document, a law firm has decided to 'investigate' whether Kayak's board "breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders by failing to adequately shop the Company before entering into this transaction and whether priceline.com Incorporated is underpaying for Kayak shares, thus unlawfully harming Kayak stockholders." Another firm has announced it is conducting another investigation (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/block-leviton-llp-investigates-kayak-222900689.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/block-leviton-llp-investigates...). Not sure if it relates to whether or not Kayak adequately shopped around the company....
- jarek 14y agoBreach of fiduciary duty lawsuits are very common for all major acquisitions. For the law firm it's high potential reward with relatively little downside. The mere fact of one or two being filed means pretty much nothing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dude_abides 14y agoJust 4 months after IPOing and right after reporting record earnings! It looks like they perfectly timed it right at their peak.
- riviera 14y agoSad day today. I hope they don't touch it!
- donretag 14y agoYou mean by having Captain Kirk do commercials for them?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- antoko 14y agoKayak is great (was?) but Hipmunk is more than up to the task of filling the void if Priceline ruin Kayak. Congrats to the Kayak folks I guess, when they got into the industry they really raised the bar. Before Kayak I remember having to use Expedia and Orbitz and just having to accept their crappy UI because there simply were no alternatives.
- jobu 14y agoHopefully Priceline will learn some improvements from Kayak and not try to force changes the other direction. Kayak has a great UI overall, but the explore interface is pure awesome: http://www.kayak.com/explore/ http://www.kayak.com/explore/
- photorized 14y agoVisually that kind of interface is very appealing, but fares may be misleading... once you start the booking process, you will end up with completely different numbers. Typically, a featured "as low as $" air fare is a red eye, 8 hour connection time etc. I was going to output specials myself too, but then commented them out - as they hardly ever apply. That being said, Kayak does have a great UI, and their iOS apps are eye candy.
- bduerst 14y agoHipmunk has a much better interface, and considering it's also an aggregator, much better at helping me quickly find flights or hotels.
- smattiso 14y agoRelative volatility of KYAK was 3x the normal amount during the day. The news was released after hours. Long live insider trading!
- makmanalp 14y agoOr, it could be that they were releasing their Q3 financials today.
- 3327 14y agoagree 100% its an epidemic.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agoInsider trading sends important price signals to the market. The alternative is LESS information.
- oh_sigh 14y agoThat's completely idiotic, and I hope you feel ashamed of what you wrote. The problem isn't more or less information, it's that insider trading creates two classes of people: Those select few "in the know" who can reap massive profits by getting an illegal phone call, and the suckers.
- lacker 14y agoThis ad hominem comment is inappropriate. It is certainly not "completely idiotic". There is a lot of intelligent discussion on the issue in some places. For example: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0306f.asp http://www.fff.org/comment/com0306f.asp .
- Shinkei 14y agoThis is not an "intelligent discussion." Did you read this article? He sets up a straw man by comparing specialized knowledge to facts in his first argument. Everyone can know the odds in Blackjack by card-counting, but no one should know the next card in the deck. This is a better comparison of insider trading because using statistics and predictions of market activities based on 'guesses' is perfectly fair, but actually knowing materially negative news that is confidential puts you at an unfair advantage in a market system. I mean, how far would you take the argument... so can the CEO sell his shares before the news? What about the FDA committee chair? How about if a scientist shorted shares before rendering his judgement that the drug should not be approved? Insider trading is just another way for the privileged and wealthy to get richer and small investors and pensions to get robbed.
- photorized 14y agoI don't like any of the existing travel sites, so even had to write one for friends and family (we like pick a random place and just go): http://www.somewherenice.net/ http://www.somewherenice.net/ This was put together over several weekends, so don't be too harsh on me. :)
- andrewcross 14y agoGo for all the feedback you can get, harsh or not ;)
- photorized 14y agoOK thank you :)
- photorized 14y agoMy current goal is to minimize, and have 5 words and 2 graphics on the home page, nothing else. TLDR etc. don't know how yet.
- jngreenlee 14y agoI like it, I've been looking for something like this. Some features (dreaded feature creep!) I'd love: 1. Map interface with little lines from my home base airport to the possible destinations - It's just fun to see. 2. Sliders to increase/decrease budget - Dynamically adding/removing routes as I change the $$ limit. Maybe these would only take another weekend to add? </joke>
- calbear81 14y agokayak.com/explore solves this problem for ya.
- photorized 14y agono it doesn't, not for me or anyone I know at least. I can elaborate.
- smackfu 14y agoFrom the Kayak IPO S-1: In particular, for the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Expedia and its affiliates, including its Hotels.com and Hotwire subsidiaries, accounted for 25% of our total revenues. Also during this period, Orbitz and its affiliates, including its CheapTickets and ebookers subsidiaries, accounted for 19% of our total revenues. I guess Priceline wants to get a first shot at all that business, and then to get paid by their competitors for bookings they don't get.
- photorized 14y agoI am curious what their contracts with all these parties looked like... Booking providers seem to like exclusivity. Btw, anyone from Travelocity here? Would love to share some feedback about your platform.
- arbuge 14y agoRelated: Expedia has an API... http://developer.ean.com/ http://developer.ean.com/. Haven't checked it in a while - looks like only hotels are available now (no flights, cars, cruises, etc.) Of course, not saying that Kayak went through this route - this is just something available to the hoi polloi.
- photorized 14y agoI looked at Expedia for somewherenice.net, and didn't choose them for that reason. Needed to be able to package the whole trip, from airfare to lift tickets, so ended up working with Travelocity.
- colinsidoti 14y agoIn recent times, Kayak has been shifting to push customers directly to airlines and hotels, instead of pushing them through online travel agencies like Priceline. I suspect this is Priceline admitting that it (and other OTAs) are losing relevance in preference for the meta-search model. Smart move, and I don't think they're dumb enough to ruin it. Read up on how successful Priceline was with their Booking.com acquisition.
- colinsidoti 14y agoAlso, I wouldn't be surprised if we see another OTA scoop up Hipmunk soon while it's (relatively) cheap.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dbecker 14y agoI'm not remotely worried about priceline ruining kayak. Kayak was the best interface before hipmunk, and it may (or may not be) the best interface now. But there will be more improvements in travel buying interfaces... whether those improvements come from kayak or someone else, Kayak's current interface will seem kludgy in a couple years.
- d23 14y agoThe title looks like it reads $1.88. I thought they had pulled some legal gimmick to screw them over.
- yawgmoth 14y agoSince everyone seems to be putting in their 0.02$ on which sites they use for booking, bing.com/travel is also very good. The buy-wait prediction is fantastic.
- johnbenwoo 14y agoThat was from their acquisition of Farecast, which was a great product - glad it's still surviving post-MSFT acquisition
- calbear81 14y agoIt's good to see people still using Farecast! Most of the original team is now working on other startups including Decide.com, Medify.com, and Room77.com.
- _casperc 14y agoThis may not be the place or time to ask this but here goes anyway: How do the travel indexing sites like Kayak get their data? Surely they don't index or consume APIs from the travel companies individually?
- tonystubblebine 14y agoA company called ITA, now owned by Google. http://www.fastcompany.com/1666092/google-acquires-airline-data-company-ita-get-ready-google-flight-planner http://www.fastcompany.com/1666092/google-acquires-airline-d...
- baltcode 14y agoAnd where does ITA get it's data. I assume there must be a few competing standards, and the airlines use one of them to give their data to ITA. Why can't other companies get the data directly from the airlines?
- calbear81 14y agoITA get its data from ATPCO (http://www.atpco.net/atpco/aboutatp.shtml http://www.atpco.net/atpco/aboutatp.shtml) the clearinghouse for flight data.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- casca 14y agoKayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go. It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.
- scotth 14y agoHave you tried out Google Flights? I've been told it's based on this same technology, and has a much better UI. And be sure to click around. It has some interesting tools, like prices for flights to your destination flown out of nearby airports.
- patrickod 14y agoI believe that ITA software is owned by Google. They license it to others as well.
- brianbreslin 14y agowow google flights is super fast!
- edouard1234567 14y agoMy guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...
- cshesse 14y agoIt could have something to do with the fact that Google owns ITA.
- edouard1234567 14y ago
- edouard1234567 14y agoThat's really bad news for Expedia. When you book a hotel room directly on Kayak, over 90% of the bookings go through expedia and hotels is where these travel agencies make most of their money. (Not airfares, they have become a commodity, thanks to Kayak :) )
- gordonbowman 14y agoI think this is a great acquisition by Priceline. They are going for market share here to get ahead of Expedia et al. A big part of their growing business is in Europe via Booking.com, so with Kayak they beef up their market share here in the U.S. in a big way.
- FaceKicker 14y agoPretty tangential, but why is it that none of the flight search engines include Southwest? I realize that Southwest doesn't give their fare info to whoever the other airlines give it to, but what's stopping someone from just scraping southwest.com every hour or so for the current fares? Or even if scraping is against their TOS, couldn't they hire one data entry employee to manually go through and add Southwest's flights every day? Or is it somehow illegal to publish Southwest's prices? I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.
- muratmutlu 14y agoI booked a Southwest flight last week using Kayak. Try it for yourself, here's a screengrab from just now http://cl.ly/image/3j0Z2m1Y2N44 http://cl.ly/image/3j0Z2m1Y2N44
- FaceKicker 14y agoInteresting, I've never noticed Southwest results in my Kayak searches before (maybe it's new). But when I try it, it doesn't actually give the price as in your screenshot, it just has a link labeled "Info" (which goes to the southwest.com homepage) where the price would normally be. I wonder if it has something to do with you being in the UK?
- muratmutlu 14y agothat's weird, when I booked my flight I was in the states...might be certain routes or something?
- calbear81 14y agoSouthwest does not believe in distributing their fares through the metasearch or OTA channel. They want to own the customer and make sure there's only one destination to book Southwest fares and that is Southwest.com and it's worked out pretty well for them. The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.
- fouadz 14y agoAnyone can explain me where they get all the deal ?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- antonpug 14y agoGreat. Now Kayak will become a hell of a lot more "biased". Priceline does not give nearly as good of results as Kayak.