Friday, October 08, 2004
Travel Vets Launch Beta of 'Google for Travel'
Veterans of Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia have teamed to launch a new travel search company, Kayak.com, a public beta of which launched this week. Executives say it will possess Google-like objectivity, Amazon.com-like personalization features and an Overture-like ad auction model, when it launches officially later this year.
Like Yahoo!'s Farechase, currently in beta testing, Kayak.com crawls a wide variety of travel providers' sites -- more than 60, in Kayak.com's case -- and presents the results in a matrix. The company currently returns results for airlines and for hotels, but it plans to add car rentals before it launches later this year. Users can adjust airline results by checking or un-checking airlines, and tweaking sliders for price or flight times. With hotels, users can refine by distance from a given location, by price or by star rating. The site has both Flash and HTML interfaces, which users can toggle between.
Read the full article at ClickZ Network