Kayak

Kayak is a travel search engine. In 2004 this company built a reliable product delivering a lot of value to the customers. On average kayak.com web-site had about 5 million visitors per month for the past year. This company seems to be a good investment opportunity because of their stellar product, strong management team and large size of the market.<br /> <br /> The Kayak search engine is designed to compare and contrast prices acr... More >>

Kayak is a travel search engine. In 2004 this company built a reliable product delivering a lot of value to the customers. On average kayak.com web-site had about 5 million visitors per month for the past year. This company seems to be a good investment opportunity because of their stellar product, strong management team and large size of the market.<br /> <br /> The Kayak search engine is designed to compare and contrast prices across numerous travel web-sites (airline ticket and cruise prices, car rental and hotel rates). The market for travel services with on-line search option is quite fragmented with several big players, such as Expedia, PriceLine, Orbitz, as well as a variety of small players, such as Travelocity, Mobissimo, etc. However, Kayak's revenue generation model is designed to take advantage of such fragmentation: search results on Kayak include information from competing web-sites and kayak.com charges other websites per-click referral fees; another revenue stream is per-click targeted advertisement.<br /> <br /> The main barrier to enter this market is availability of the efficient search engine for price comparison, which is protected by trade secrets and in-house "know how's". As an additional layer of protection, Kayak also has a patent on the design of a marketing campaign based on per-click advertisement (WO2006074243/US2006155598).<br /> <br /> Kayak has an extremely qualified management team. The team members bring to the table many years about travel search engine development. Strong management combined with financial support and advice from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners gives kayak.com a very strong position in the market. Gross revenue year-to-year increase of more than 250% in 2008 is a good evidence of it.<br /> <br /> In year 2008,gross revenue of top 3 players in the market was ~$5.7B (Hoovers) with year-to-year growth of more than 10%. Kayak's 2008 gross revenue was $12.4M (Hoovers). Taking into account the size of the market, the revenue growth of kayak.com should not be limited by the size of the market.<br /> <br /> For all the reasons stated above I believe Kayak is a good investment opportunity. << Less

I\'ve been using kayak.com for a few years now as a source to purchase tix for flights. I find that their filters are great. After you determine your initial flight search, you can filter it down from # of stops, flight times, airlines, airports, flight duration, etc. And if you sign up (and create a login), you can also search flexible dates (3 days before and 3 days after your original flight dates). <br /> <br /> I find this ... More >>

I\'ve been using kayak.com for a few years now as a source to purchase tix for flights. I find that their filters are great. After you determine your initial flight search, you can filter it down from # of stops, flight times, airlines, airports, flight duration, etc. And if you sign up (and create a login), you can also search flexible dates (3 days before and 3 days after your original flight dates). <br /> <br /> I find this site extremely useful for my flight searches compare to expedia.com or orbitz.com. I have not tried yapta.com which I have seen has gotten good reviews as well. <br /> <br /> I\'ve used this site once for a car rental and it was great using all the filters to narrow down my search to find the right car (at the best price). I haven\'t used it for hotels so not sure how great the rates are compare to other sites. <br /> <br /> Overall, I think it\'s an extremely useful site to book flights. The site is very easy to navigate through and you can modify your search quickly as well. And the best part is that it goes straight to the airlines w/out any additional fees (unlike orbitz and expedia where I\'ve seen that they add a few dollars to the price of the flight). << Less