A big part of what made Kayak good was that it was (is?) a solid data product - basically a gigantic farm of scrapers and crawlers glommed together with direct-from-provider (airline, hotel etc) data ingestion pipelines and coherence protocols that flowed into massive unified local cache databases. All this to ensure that you, as a customer, saw the most up to date and widest variety of information possible.
When Kayak IPO'd, it was around the time that ITA software (massive airline data provider you've never heard of) got sold to google, and there was a lot of hand wringing over whether this'd spell the end for Kayak. But even then it looks like ITA supplied only 42% of flight data (check out the S1 filing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510...), the rest from other data providers (Amadeus etc), online travel agencies, or individual airlines.
So given that, Hipmunk's focus on "we're gonna make the UX so much better" was admirable (especially given the state of a lot of the competition), and it pushed everyone to do better in that regard, but always felt a bit naive as a business strategy to me, since I think most people will pick the site with the slightly worse UI and better / cheaper / non-stale flights rather than the other way round. Especially in a non-premium race to the bottom industry like online tickets. And getting quality data takes a big team and lots of money and infrastructure, as well as lots of business relationships.
But I always thought they were a cut above a lot of the other competitors which were bad UIs mangled with dozens of ads thrown together in a slapshod way on top of the same 1-2 data providers.
Thanks! I have the vague impression that there are fewer stale or missing flights on Kayak than competitors, but I haven't done a bunch of comparisons recently, so I'm very interested in what others think.
A big part of what made Kayak good was that it was (is?) a solid data product - basically a gigantic farm of scrapers and crawlers glommed together with direct-from-provider (airline, hotel etc) data ingestion pipelines and coherence protocols that flowed into massive unified local cache databases. All this to ensure that you, as a customer, saw the most up to date and widest variety of information possible.
When Kayak IPO'd, it was around the time that ITA software (massive airline data provider you've never heard of) got sold to google, and there was a lot of hand wringing over whether this'd spell the end for Kayak. But even then it looks like ITA supplied only 42% of flight data (check out the S1 filing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510...), the rest from other data providers (Amadeus etc), online travel agencies, or individual airlines.
So given that, Hipmunk's focus on "we're gonna make the UX so much better" was admirable (especially given the state of a lot of the competition), and it pushed everyone to do better in that regard, but always felt a bit naive as a business strategy to me, since I think most people will pick the site with the slightly worse UI and better / cheaper / non-stale flights rather than the other way round. Especially in a non-premium race to the bottom industry like online tickets. And getting quality data takes a big team and lots of money and infrastructure, as well as lots of business relationships.
But I always thought they were a cut above a lot of the other competitors which were bad UIs mangled with dozens of ads thrown together in a slapshod way on top of the same 1-2 data providers.