| Website | kayak.com |
| Blog | blog.kayak.com |
| @KAYAK | |
| Category | Search |
| Employees | 101 |
| Founded | 1/04 |
| Description | travel search engine |
| Total | $223M |
| Series A, 2004 AOL General Catalyst Partners | $8.5M |
| Series B, 12/04 AOL General Catalyst Partners Sequoia Capital | $7M |
| Series C, 5/06 Accel Partners | $11.5M |
| Series D, 12/07 Accel Partners General Catalyst Partners GoldHill Capital Lehman Brothers Norwest Venture Partners Oak Investment Partners Sequoia Capital Trident Capital SVB Financial Group | $196M |
Kayak is a travel search engine. It indexes hundreds of global travel sites to help you find the right flight, hotel, rental car or cruise line. Once you’ve found the way you want to travel, Kayak allows you to choose from which site you want to make your purchases.
The company was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of leading online travel agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terrell Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia. KAYAK is headquartered in Norwalk, CT and has R&D centers in Concord, MA and Sunnyvale, CA. The company launched a beta site in May of 2004, and launched publicly in January of 2005.
KAYAK maintains advertising agreements with over 4,000 travel suppliers and online travel agencies including nearly every leading airline globally, most global hotel and car rental operators, and the leading online travel agencies including Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline. The company also has several affiliate marketing partnerships. KAYAK provides ‘white label’ products within other branded web sites including America Online, Comcast, USA Today, Roadrunner, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Pricerunner, and About.com.
Kayak is built on a Java, Apache and Linux platform. It uses XML-HTTP and Javascript to create a rich UI.
| Website | kayak.com |
| Blog | kayak.com/news |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | January 14, 2004 |
| Tags | travel, search |
KAYAK products include flight, hotel and car rental searches, including additional search features such as multi-city searches, flexible date searches, weekend searches and a large number of filtering tools. The site provides searches for cruise ships, vacation packages and special promotional offers or deals across the websites that it searches. The site also provides a number of other features including: calculating additional fees that may not be included in the listed price, such as extra baggage fees; alerts for price changes based on desired price, destination and date parameters; and mobile applications for iPhones and Blackberry devices.
The TravelPost site includes hotel reviews and hotel information from thousands of online travel sites, hotel sites and review sites. KAYAK also operates an advertising network across its sites and its affiliate sites.
