Kayak.com gears up for the UK launch

After Mobissimo and SideStep, it’s the turn of travel search engine Kayak.com to enter the UK market, as its ready with the beta launch of its first European website.

As per the information available, Kayak plans to launch in France and Germany next spring. Kayak will be the first website to bring `airfare predictability’ to the UK on December 14 with three features that provide consumers with the airfare pricing history on flight searches to help make an informed purchasing decision, the company said. The elements are: Best Fare History (displaying the 100 best prices found by other Kayak users searching the same route over the past 36 hours),  Best Fare Trend Graph (charting pricing for city/date pairs found by users over the past 90 days) and  Kayak Buzz (displaying the lowest fares to the 25 most popular destinations from any airport or city found by other Kayak users, with the results displayed on an interactive Google Map).

Steve Hafner, Kayak.com co-founder and chief executive officer stated: “British travellers have suffered through the biased results and service fees of online travel agencies and the primitive functionality of current travel search engines. Our launch in the UK brings a superior interface, innovative functionality and focus on user-generated content and personalization needed to improve the online travel planning experience in the UK. British travellers will finally have access to the site dubbed by industry experts as the `poster child’ of Travel 2.0 and listed among other Web 2.0 leaders YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.”

It was in January this year when SideStep announced its launch into the UK and Ireland. And in June this year, Kevin Eyres, managing director, SideStep Europe had shared plans for SideStep’s Toolbar and Activities offerings in the UK with EyeforTravel in June this year. Eyres had said, “We are looking at the continuous addition of suppliers, specifically in the LCC and hotels segments. We are also working on product enhancements for offering’s such as SideStep’s Activities section, which brings the user a host of locally available activities while providing valuable information on those activities and attractions within the user’s destination. We are also considering expansion beyond the UK, though at this time we cannot share further details or specific markets. Introduction of Toolbar/Activities in the UK market will be coming soon.”

And it towards the end of June when Mobissimo, Inc. launched its UK site, www.mobissimo.co.uk. Mobissimo UK became the second European site operated by the company. Mobissimo had launched its French site (www.mobissimo.fr) in September 2005.

“We focus on entering the fastest growing travel markets globally to propose the best choices and recommendation tools to our users. The UK leisure travel market is very active and the UK has always represented a significant source of traffic for Mobissimo,” said Beatrice Tarka, Mobissimo’s chief executive officer had said then.