Kayak.com is a travel search engine website based in the United States. Founded in 2004, it aggregates information from hundreds of other travel sites and helps users book flights, hotels, cruises, and rental cars. Kayak combines results from online travel agencies, consolidators such as Orbitz, and other sources such as large hotel chains.Kayak doesn't sell directly to the consumer; rather, it aggregates results from other sites then redirects the visitor to one of these sites for reservation. Thus, Kayak.com makes money from pay per click advertising, when the consumer clicks-through to one of the compared websites (for example, when the consumer is redirected to the Orbitz website).
History
The company was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of leading online travel agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul M. English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terry Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia. KAYAK is headquartered in Norwalk, CT and has R&D centers in Concord, MA and Sunnyvale, CA. The company launched a beta site in May 2004, and launched publicly in January 2005.
In late 2007 Kayak bought SideStep, another travel search site.
In March 2011 Kayak accepted a partnership with Bing to provide results in the U.S. from multiple cities, airports and airlines in the travel search section. By partnering with Kayak, Bing can differentiate itself from the competition and improve its position in the industry.
Financing
KAYAK has raised $230 million to date; its investors include General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital (led by Michael Moritz), Oak Investment Partners, America Online, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Tenaya Capital. It was named one of TIME Magazine's "50 coolest websites" of 2006. In November 2010, Kayak filed with the SEC to raise up to $50 million in an initial public offering.
Technology
Kayak is built on a Java, Apache, Perl and Linux platform. It uses XML-HTTP and JavaScript to create a rich User interface.
Consumer Focus
KAYAK employees respond to consumer inquiries on a regular basis and thereby stay in touch with how design decisions affect users, including even having engineers answer a "hotline".
