One of America’s largest travel search engines, Kayak.com, branched into Europe today with the launch of its UK website.
Kayak.co.uk will provide real-time prices and itineraries from more than 120 travel suppliers including airlines such as British Airways, Air France, bmi, easyJet, Ryanair and Air Berlin. The engine will also search online travel agencies such as ebookers.
The service aims to make user-generated content a central element of the site, helping shoppers to recommend the cheapest deals to each other. The UK site will initially concentrate on flight deals, and will introduce hotel and car-hire data next year.
Kayak's technology allows pages to continuously update without having to be refreshed. Another feature is a forum for online bargain hunters who can report the deals they have found to others on the site.
Currently only in its beta format, from December 14 Kayak.co.uk will have the same "Buzz" feature as its US sister site. This displays the 25 most popular destinations as searched for by Kayak users. It also provides price history graphs, so shoppers can identify the cheapest times to book.
Among the site's directors are Greg Slyngstad, Terry Jones and Steve Hafner, the men behind industry giants Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.
“British travellers have suffered through the biased results and service fees of online travel agencies and the primitive functionality of current travel search engines,” said cofounder and CEO Steve Hafner.
Rival sites such as Travelsupermarket.com are not concerned by the increase in competition, however.
Chris Nixon, general manager of Travelsupermarket.com, said: “It really is just healthy competition. We have spent a lot of time this year establishing the depth of our product, something Kayak will not have as a newcomer to the UK market.”
Mr Nixon also believes the new website may run into trouble due to its advanced page-updating facility. “Once they get bigger they will start making a large number of hits on the providers in order to remain so up to date. This can cause the providers to suffer high costs
"We have been able to build relations with providers and now hope to double our business next year.”
Kayak plans to launch further European sites in France and Germany next spring.
