Kayak Opens Access to River of Travel Search Data
Travel comparison site Kayak just opened access to its search data. Best known for aggregating travel deals on roundtrip flights, hotels and rental cars, Kayak is now offering the public a peek under the hood. The company is laying bare its most popular destinations and searches via a new trends page. The site offers users a look at what people are searching for, where they're searching from and the most searched hotels in the company's top 50 most popular cities. With the travel industry slowly recovering from what has been a tough two years, this data can go a long way towards reinvigorating businesses.
In addition to the most popular searches and destinations, Kayak is also offering users a look at the Kayak Travel Index. The data from the Index tells users how much the average traveler is willing to spend to visit a particular destination. While economic stability would affect many of these trends, short spikes are often more likely related to peak season rates and seasonal factors. For example, in mid July travelers were willing to pay 25% more for a trip to Seattle, but since then as the weather cools so does the willingness to spend. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Travel Index shows a completely different set of travel spikes.
With information from 404 travel sites including Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, and information on more than 150,000 hotels, Kayak trends offers a great snapshot into the demographics of a destination's most frequent visitors.
Says CTO Paul English, "People have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on KAYAK in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends. We're happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public."
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That's an awesome tool. Tried to see http://www.kayak.com/trends/Moscow_Russia.14713.html
You can see at the bottom the most searched hotels, where most of the audience is from, etc. – pretty amazing. We run http://waytorussia.net and their seasonal data seems to be _very_ accurate.
The next step is to integrate this info into APIs if they haven't done it already.
Ironically, most copyright lawsuits are "strikingly similar." ;)
It does appear that there may be a trade dress issue. However, what I found interesting is the fact that the two images above are not "strikingly similar." They do look somewhat alike. Yet, as many people here have commented, many travel sites have "like" layouts.
I think Kayak has a long, uphill battle, if they wish to pursue legal action in this matter.
As with many of these suits, "legal action" may be a red herring. The idea that Microsoft may be a defendant for copyright infringement caught my attention. And honestly, this is the first I've ever heard of Kayak.com.
Which, may be the Kayak's true intention. Nothing says "look at me" like a publicized lawsuit.