Kayak.com Makes Way Up the Web Food Chain
November 16th, 2006 by Ian
We all know the big guys in the online travel field: Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz. There are some new players however picking up ground quickly. The heavily promoted priceline.com with television ads by William Shatner are indeed funny, but take a look at this:
Kayak.com just began outranking cheaptickets.com and priceline.com this week after passing hotwire.com eariler this year. Granted, people like me are helping that along by posting articles, but I do it because I know they have a great site and was interested to see how they fared against some others.
This article on the Chicago Tribune website sums it up, beyond the obvious that they offer much cooler tools than the others. I love the buzz map.
Earlier this year, Kayak launched “Trip Ideas,” a community-based forum that encourages users to create and share travel destination “wish lists” with other users (click “Buzz” on Kayak’s homepage). You can check out ideas for trips in categories from adventure to golfing to romantic. The sources of information include Travel Channel, Travel + Leisure, GolfDigest, Lonely Planet and BudgetTravelOnline.com.
Clicking on “adventure,” a list of ideas comes up including a list of the top 10 roller coasters in the U.S. and the top 10 African safaris.
“Similar to popular hotel review sites, Trip Idea lists are third-party endorsements of destinations, hotels, events and more,” said Dean Harris of Kayak.com.
Companies like Expedia cannot be trusted. EXPEDIA ruined my trips and tried to keep (steal is the right word) the money for services that they failed to provide. Just search for “EXPEDIA complaints” in Google or Yahoo and you will read horrible stories (including mine, click on my name to read about my case) from people that used EXPEDIA.
Good luck
John,
Good point. Not like I care about the success of kayak.com, but it is another reason why they are better as they take the visitor to the airline website, not book through their own system.