Vertical Travel Search Engine Kayak CEO Steve Hafner (Part 2)

SM: What gave you the idea for Kayak?

SH: Orbitz was a great company, but it never fulfilled on its original mission which was to help consumers find great airline and hotel deals. The reason it did not fulfill it’s original mission is because we could not convince every airline, hotel, and rental car company to list their products and services on Orbitz. Half of all the consumers who came to Orbitz were just doing a search and then booking directly because they did not want to pay an additional fee to Orbitz.

I thought it was odd that we were really a search service which did not do search very well, and we were definately not giving consumers what they wanted which was the ability to book direct.

That was the genesis of the concept of Kayak. I bounced my ideas off of the former CEOs of Travelocity and Expedia. They all agreed that none of the companies fulfilled the vision of a one-stop shop. We all decided to start a new company. The result was just two weeks after I left Orbitz we incorporated Kayak.

SM: Tell me the story of Kayak. How long did it take you to assemble a team and get your service launched?

SH: It is a bit funny how things change the second time around. I had the benefit of doing Orbitz first. I knew how to build a team and structure contracts. I knew how to build an organization. As a result Kayak built a whole lot faster than Orbitz did. We incorporated within three days of the initial Power Point presentation. We had twelve employees on staff within 10 days. We had our first distribution agreement with AOL within two and a half months. We did not have business cards or a company name yet! We launched the Alpha site five months after we started. They public launch was about 10 months after we started.

Contrast that with Orbitz. We started in 1999 and we did not launche ot the public in June 2001. It was a much shorter gestational period at Kayak because we knew what we were doing which was something we did not know when we were doing Orbitz.

SM: You said your observation coming out of Orbitz was that consumers did not have a one-stop shop, so what exactly did you do at Kayak that addressed that issue?

SH: Kayak is not a booking site, it is a search site. We help users find deals from all of the other travel websites. There are thousands of travel websites out there, so depending on when you ask the question and how you ask the question you are going to get different answers. We thought by doing a bit of what Google does, which is build a very simple and sleek interface which goes out and searches on behalf of consumers and brings the results back in a comprehensive display, we would give consumers a choice where to buy. We felt that would enable us to give the consumer great service and so far that seems to be working.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Vertical Travel Search Engine Kayak CEO Steve Hafner
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