Skift Take
Steve Hafner acknowledges that flight ticket purchasing on Kayak still "sucks." He candidly admits that Kayak is taking some design inspiration from the Airbnb website, which he says balances exploration and transactions without overwhelming the user.
Earlier this week we released our latest Skift Trends Report, “Travel Metasearch: What's Coming Next," which takes an inside look at the hottest sector in travel and how it really works. The report conveys how hotel brands, airlines and online travel agencies compete; discusses business models; and provides insights on trends and metasearch best practices. It is the most definitive state-of-the-market report on this big-growth sector in travel.
In preparing the report, Skift spoke with Kayak CEO Steve Hafner about Kayak's life within Priceline, and the state of the industry. Parts of the interview are extracted below.
Six months or so after Priceline completed its $1.8 billion acquisition, Kayak CEO Steve Hafner likes the competitive cards he's been dealt, and it isn't merely about being part of Priceline, with its nearly $60 billion market cap.
For one thing Hafner, who acknowledges that TripAdvisor, Trivago, and Google are formidable competitors, thinks it will be really tough for smaller competitors to break out of the pack and catch up with the larger players.
"You know one thing about being big , Kayak being big, Trivago getting bigger, and TripAdvisor being three times the size of us," Hafner says, "is each of these companies can A/B test lots of different experiments, and as a result of that each of these websites gets 1 to 2 percent better every month. The small guys can’t keep up with that level of innova
