Articles tagged “kayak”

Skift sat down with 17 online travel CEOs over three months to better understand what matters to them as they look at the future of travel booking. Understand the trends, buy the e-book.

Hotels -- yes they do -- have to live with the fact that they move a lot of rooms through powerful online travel agencies. Platforms like CheckMate's can enable hotels to better communicate with their guests despite the involvement of the third parties.

Jones is now headed into a territory where few have survived, but if anyone is prepared it is he.

Expedia Inc. is following the TripAdvisor playbook on Trivago, which could go the spinoff/IPO route one day. The Priceline Group, meanwhile, is focusing on Booking.com and new-prize OpenTable as priorities while being measured about Kayak's international expansion.

Kayak started the direct-booking trend among travel metasearch sites, but now CEO Steve Hafner says improvements have been made on partner sites so direct booking is no longer a priority and can hurt, rather than help, turning lookers into bookers. Have the conditions really changed or is this Priceline Group-speak?

A metasearch-like advertisement on an online travel agency site isn't going to get anywhere near the the sort of clout that sites such as TripAdvisor, Google and Kayak can wield, but it enables OTA sites to get into metasearch in a modest way to appease consumers' inclination to comparison-shop without taking a lot of the risk.

2014 is turning out to be a consolidation year, with big getting bigger. But there is lots of interesting jostling beyond leaders, and that's where the action will be rest of the year. Airbnb's rise has been spectacular, and will continue to break through on the charts.

Priceline CEO Darren Huston has been aggressive with acquisitions in his short tenure, although it is possible that discussions with OpenTable began with the prior regime. Still, having acquired Kayak for $2.1 billion in 2013, and maneuvering through the pending $2.6 billion buy of OpenTable, Huston probably has his hands full for now.

The top 10 U.S. travel advertisers in paid search in 2012 also filled out the top 10 in 2013, although their positions changed somewhat. This shows how difficult it is for travel startups and other companies that were not early adopters to break through and get their messages out to consumers.