Kayak Responds to Tripadvisor and Fly.com

Budget Travel had an interesting report earlier today on new metatravel search sites run by Tripadvisor and Fly.com. Both sites use a layout almost identical to Kayak.com, the largest and most well known of these sites. Neither site is licensing anything from Kayak.

They asked the CEO of Kayak, Steve Hafner what he thought about the design of their sites.

“Kayak.com welcomes the competition since it should help grow the metasearch category—hopefully to Kayak‘s ultimate benefit. We are flattered by how many design elements TripAdvisor has chosen to mimic from our site.”

Kayak feels that while the design is similiar, their results are superior, and they continue to invest in improvements. We continue to keep an open mind about this, and will provide our opinion, although we must, in the interest of disclosure, point out we are a Kayak affiliate. But that is because we continue to feel it is a good product. We advise everyone to check multiple search avenues when making a decision on a ticket purchase, or any big decision for that matter.

It is a mature view for a company to take. Many companies would aggressively defend their design. Kayak believes in competing on features and product. Perhaps they’ll work on something that has the same function as Tripadvisor’s fee estimator, allowing evaluation of prices with the extras added in. We welcome the competition as much as Kayak seems to. It can only make things better for consumers.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Growth Matters: Kayak.com travels with $200 million in capital (dailyfinance.com)
• 2 words for frugal fliers: Patience, Wednesday (msnbc.msn.com)