Following up on Kayak.com
The other day I shared my love of Kayak.com. I glowed about their interface and their effectiveness at giving the best price.
It was this last point that got me into a little of a pickle. Eli rightly pointed out that he was shopping for some airfare and took my advice. Yet when he compared Kayak to ATA's web site he found that ATA was offering better prices on their own site.
So what gives? Here's what Kayak's staff had to say in response.
Hi Sam. Thank you for mentioning Kayak.com in your blog. We really appreciate it.
Kayak.com gets pricing and availability from more than 100 travel sites. For air, we get prices and availability three ways:
- Supplier direct through a XML (airline, hotel, online agency, consolidator, etc). This is our preferred method.
- Through ITA software (airfare and pricing engine that takes fares directly from supplier sites)
- **Scraping or Spidering
Our business development team is currently discussing a direct partnership with ATA and we hope to have a XML connection from ATA soon. Drop them a line and give them a nudge.
**I believe your email is referring to spidering or scraping sites. We only scrape one site now for a number of reasons:Now that we are a leading travel site, the amount of traffic we would send from scraping would crash the supplier\x82\xC4\xF4s site. For instance, if Kayak.com sent 50,000 people to your blog, what would happen? Airlines are improving their own sites but are still unable to handle this much volume, all at once.
We receive more comprehensive search results using other channels. Our search engine is more powerful than our supplier friends, so we are able to show more itinerary combinations. For instance, if we spider Delta, their site will only show a handful of itineraries BUT through XML or ITA, we can display all available itineraries.
Please let me know if I can answer additional questions. I hope you will continue to use and enjoy Kayak.com.
Kellie Pelletier
VP Communications
and...
Sam,
Nice blog entry. It's amazingly accurate; you know more
about the travel business than most folks.Regarding the cheaper fare found on ATA than on kayak, here is
some more info.You already know that the airline ticket business is complicated,
with lots of interests in cooperation and competition at the same
time. Flight prices and availability are very volatile. Because
of this, it's very difficult to cache fares, the way a horizontal
search engine (like Google) caches scraped web pages. (We at
kayak like to think of ourselves as a vertical search engine, one
that specializes in travel stuff).So travel search web sites (like kayak and sidestep and mobissimo)
do "live scraping" of web sites to make sure that the fares
are relatively "fresh." However, you'll note that I
put "live scraping" in quotes because if we really did
visit 100 web sites and fetch the fares the moment you
did a search, we would crush all the airline web sites
with our traffic, and they would not want to be our friends
any more.So we have a bag of tricks that we use to minimize load
on the airline sites. Sometimes these tricks include
special APIs the airlines have, sometimes we use Sabre-like
systems (we don't actually use Sabre: we use something
called ITA) and infer fares into web sites. It's complicated,
and there are some Heisenberg effects. And sometimes we do
actually scrape sites live.But the short of it is that, some small percentage of the time,
we will either miss cheaper fares that are available
on a given site, or we will show a cheaper fare that is
no longer really there. These errors tend to come in
clumps: usually for a given airline for a given city pair and
dates. We spend a lot of time trying to reduce these
error rates, but I can almost guarantee they will never
completely go away.Think of them as the equivalent of "404 document not found"
errors on google.Feel free to write back if you have any further questions.
-Bill
(Bill is Kayak's Chief Architect)
and...
Hi Sam,
Thanks for the accolades in your blog :)
(I believe that another engineer is or has already responded to your
feedback .. if not, lemme know).Jim
(Jim is Kayak's Director of Technology)
Kayak lived up to my expectations of a relatively small web 2.0 enterprise, they responded quickly and effectively to my question.
So here's a caveat to my first review: Kayak is way better in my experience than the web 1.0 travel sites but like the above e-mails point out, there are still a few technical limitations to overcome. In the meantime I will continue to go to Kayak first and then compare their best rate with the airline's own site.
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Who is this guy?
I would point out that because Kayak uses ITA, a significant number of the fares they show are not correct (either higher or lower)and the user has to recreate the whole search all over again because they send you to the front page of the airline's website. The big difference between Kayak and the others (farechase, sidestep, and mobissimo) is that kayak IS NOT doing a real-time query. Their UI might be pretty and their PR good, but the total user experience is very poor, particularly for international searches. Do a search to any city and europe and click on any fare not provided by onetravel or another travel site....