KAYAK.COM BECOMES FIRST TRAVEL SITE TO COMBINE USER-GENERATED CONTENT WITH FARE AVAILABILITY
NORWALK, CT - March 2, 2006 - Kayak.com continues to lead the meta-search 2.0 revolution by launching "Trip Ideas", a community-based forum that encourages users to create and share travel destination "wish lists" with other users. Unlike static lists found on the Internet, Kayak.com is the first travel site to provide real-time fares and availability for every destination listed, which makes the leap from research to booking just a simple click away.
"Trip Ideas is the first phase of what we call 'Kayak Alive' which emphasizes user-generated content that can be shared with friends and other Kayak.com users," said Dean Harris, CMO of Kayak.com. "Similar to popular hotel review sites, Trip Idea lists are third party endorsements of destinations, hotels, events and more. Consumers will use Trip Ideas to research vacation options, share favorite destinations, or discuss travel plans with friends and family."
To create a personal Trip Idea or view those created by others, go to the "Fare Buzz" tab on Kayak.com. Users can create an original list or use an existing list found elsewhere on the Web. To add a new Trip Idea, consumers complete a simple form with Trip Idea name, category and a list of three or more destinations. Fields for additional content, URL and photos are optional. In addition to user-generated lists.
Kayak.com aggregates destination lists from leading Web sites such as Travel Channel; Travel + Leisure; GolfDigest; Lonely Planet; BudgetTravelOnline.com, the Web site of Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine.
To find the best fares for destinations on a list, consumers simply enter their departure airport into the Kayak Buzz toolbar at the top of the page. A Kayak Buzz list displays Trip Idea destinations and the best fares found by Kayak.com user over the past three days. For detailed itinerary information on the fare,
click on the destination name or pinpoint on the map.
A text bubble appears with destination description and itinerary specifics including airports, price, dates of travel and when the fare was found by a Kayak.com user. Click the "search now" link to search for updated fares and availability.
Consumers can easily browse Trip Ideas by the following topics: recently posted, most popular, category (beach, family, romantic, skiing, singles, etc) or enter a specific search term such as "Whale Watching" or "Caribbean." All lists can be emailed to friends and family or saved in "Your Trip Ideas" for later viewing and use. Registered users can receive Kayak Buzz Alerts for their favorite Trip Ideas, and starting March 9, receive RSS feeds.
In addition to Trip Ideas, Kayak.com announces the following additional enhancements:
Consumers searching for flights can now more efficiently book hotel and rental car or register the itinerary for a Fare Alert with the new "Also on Kayak" section. Links are located on the top right corner of the search results pages. Users can now book one-way rental cars on Kayak.com.
About Kayak.com
Created by co-founders of Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia, Kayak.com is a comparison-shopping Web site that helps consumers make informed decisions in their travel planning. The site, which launched February 7, 2005, offers a comprehensive search engine that scours over 100 travel sites, providing prices and itineraries for hundreds of airlines, more than 103,000 hotels and all leading rental car companies. Kayak.com is the first to integrate consumer and professional reviews and other relevant travel information with real-time prices and availability. Kayak.com?s investors include Sequoia Capital, America Online, Inc. and General Catalyst Partners.
If you are a nerd, you might be wondering what Kayak.com is made of. The short version: it's AJAX served up by Apache, Tomcat, Java 5, with Perl and Ruby operational glue, all running on Linux and developed (mostly) on Mac OS X Tiger. We use MySQL when we need to do databasy things. We've recently started using memcached.
Kayak.com Technology
If you're not crying from boredom yet, read on for further details.
AJAX. We didn't know we were making an AJAX application when we started. We thought we were just being clever. Then somebody mentioned to us "Hey, nice AJAX application." After some googling around to make sure we weren't being called abrasive soap powder, we said "Gee, thanks, AJAX is definitely the wave of the future."
Java 5 isn't the greatest programming language in the world. It's probably not even in the top ten. But there are a ton of great, free, widely tested libraries to do everything under the sun, and it is quite efficient. Java 5 is the latest marketing version, which is also known as 1.5 to us nerds. The latest version adds a bunch of syntactic candy to the language so it doesn't look quite so rusty next to C#.
Perl, of course, is the great do-everything of scripting languages. It is not exactly elegant, but it is supremely powerful in qualified hands.
We've started to do some work which we might normally do in Perl with a newish language called Ruby. I'm all smitten with Ruby: it has much sexier object-oriented structure than perl. I'm thinking of asking her to the prom. Don't tell my wife.
MySQL is a modern, easy-to-use and free or very inexpensive (depending on how you use it) relational database. It is very reliable, and very fast. I'm not saying that you should take your gigantic multi-site global banking system and port it to use MySQL, but for maintaining data about all the hotels in the world, it's just fine.
memcached is a totally awesome distributed memory cache. It works for many languages, but we use it for Java. It is super-fast, super-efficient and helped us eliminate dozens of redundant server-specific caches that had poor hit rates. I can't believe this functionality wasn't built in on so-called "network" operating systems years ago.
We run the Kayak.com web site on Linux because it is free and it works. We don't even use those Linuxes that are "free" but cost $795. We figure those are for chumps who are afraid to take responsibility for technology decisions, and need a vendor to yell at when stuff crashes. There is no one to yell at when our stuff crashes, but we can handle it.
Most of our engineers develop the Kayak.com software on Mac OS X. This is the new operating system for Apple computers that is basically like Linux (in that it works well) and like Windows (in that it costs money). You could also say that it is unlike Linux (in that it has a nice GUI) and it is unlike Windows (in that it does not have viruses and spyware), but that would be mean, and we would never say anything like that. One of our engineers actually does use Windows for programming, but we buy him candy to keep his spirits up.
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