Online travel search giant Kayak.com launches in UK

US travel search engine Kayak.com is making an assault on the UK online arena with the beta launch of its first European website.

Claiming to provide the industry’s most powerful flight search, Kayak.co.uk will enhance its service with hotel and car rental search. Kayak plans to launch in France and Germany next spring.

Kayak’s flight search provides real-time prices and itineraries from more than 120 travel websites including British Airways, Air France and bmi; low cost carriers easyJet, Ryanair and Air Berlin; and online travel agencies such as ebookers and wegolo. 

Users can search one way, return or multi-city, with the company claiming to be the only travel search site that offers flexible search, which is the ability to search up to three days before and/or after a preferred travel date for the best fare and itinerary combinations.

Kayak will be the first website to bring ‘airfare predictability’ to the UK on December 14 with three features that provide consumers with the airfare pricing history on flight searches to help make an informed purchasing decision, the company said.

The elements are:

*Best Fare History – displaying the 100 best prices found by other Kayak users searching the same route over the past 36 hours.

*Best Fare Trend Graph – charting pricing for city/date pairs found by users over the past 90 days.

*Kayak Buzz – displaying the lowest fares to the 25 most popular destinations from any airport or city found by other Kayak users, with the results displayed on an interactive Google Map.

Another Web 2.0 feature is Kayak Forums, user generated content which allows consumers to share and request travel tips, stories and additional information with other users.

Forums are searchable by region (Africa, Asia, Canada, Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Mexico, Middle East, South America, South Pacific and US), topics (Adventure Travel, Budget Travel, Family Travel, Romantic Getaways and Sports Travel) or key words. A “watch” can be placed on forums of interest which alerts the user via email once a message is posted to that specified forum.

The site will feature dates, distances and currencies which have been customized for the needs of UK travellers. Search results go directly to the UK versions of the sites searched, so users can purchase tickets directly in sterling.

More than 225,000 UK travellers visited Kayak’s North American site in September.

Steve Hafner, Kayak.com co-founder and CEO said:  “British travellers have suffered through the biased results and service fees of online travel agencies and the primitive functionality of current travel search engines.

“Our launch in the UK brings a superior interface, innovative functionality and focus on user-generated content and personalization needed to improve the online travel planning experience in the UK.

“British travellers will finally have access to the site dubbed by industry experts as the ‘poster child’ of Travel 2.0 and listed among other Web 2.0 leaders YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.”