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Providing information key to Kayak’s fast rise as travel site
“Personalization” is the key to fast-growing Kayak.com’s rise that backers think will bring it to the top ten travel sites by the end of this year, says co-founder and CEO Steve Hafner.
“The problem with most travel sites is that you have to ask for something very particular such as what city you want to stay, whether you want a 4-star Marriott that has to be within five miles of the city center and so on,” he said in an interview with TravelMole.
What Kayak does is gather information on the individual and offer the type of intelligent choices that a travel agent might provide.
“Users the second time will get better results. By the fourth time they use Kayak, their preferences are fairly well established,” he said.
Observers might think other travel sites could do that as well, but Mr Hafner says that is not the case for two reasons.
“One is it’s very hard to have the type of massive data base you would need. Second, its technological challenge,” he said.
Mr Hafner said there is no real competition to Kayak in part because of the technical difficulties of emulating it.
“There are a couple of Web sites out there trying really hard to build a great Web site but the technical challenges are tough because these days you can’t just build something with a three-man engineering team,” he said.
“Our basic concept is to have a travel site that shows you everything and doesn’t try to sell you anything,” he said.
He said Kayak, which went public on 7 Feb. of 2005, is already in the top 15 of travel companies.
In common with Google, Kayak is funded by small referral fees when users book their travel.
The company is growing by as much as 50% a month, according to Mr Hafner.
The only complaint so far, he added, is that Southwest Airlines is not included in the site.
“They’ve been very successful in training their users to go directly to the site. I also think they don’t like seeing air fares shown side by side,” he added, partly because Southwest is not always the lowest in price.
Report by David Wilkening
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