Last night, Yahoo signaled that it is serious about competing in the travel price-comparison search market in the wake of Kayak’s recent $200 million acquisition of Sidestep. Yahoo Travel put its FareChase property, formerly a tab, front and center on the travel homepage. FareChase is now the default search engine for pricing flights, hotels, cars, and vacations. [Update: Yahoo says it is not the default for everyone. Some people will see it, some people won't].
Yen Lee, the CEO of travel search startup Kango and a former general manager of Yahoo Travel, noticed the change and offered this analysis on Kango’s blog:
It seems like just yesterday that the travel sector crowned Kayak the undisputed heavyweight champion of price comparison search following their acquisition of SideStep. But wait! It looks like Yahoo has (finally!) unveiled FareChase, the price search engine they acquired back in 2004. On the Yahoo Travel homepage, the Travelocity booking engine is no longer the default search option, it has been re-labeled ‘classic search’ and FareChase is the default search.
. . . Presumably this brings a new competitive element that Kayak might not have expected (let’s be serious, four years after the acquisition, did ANYONE expect Yahoo to finally launch FareChase?).
Sounds like the move surprised him. That Travelocity deal must have been pretty lucrative, even if it was from another era. Could Yahoo be sacrificing short-term profits for the bigger game of maintaining and capturing market share?
Lee also notes that Yahoo searches more travel sites than Kayak, which could help it ferret out better prices. Of course, as a tangential competitor to Kayak (although Kango is more about travel planning than pricing), it is in his interest to point out new threats to its business.
Regardless, it may now be Yahoo that is facing the threat. According to comScore, the combined traffic to the Kayak and Sidestep networks in December in the U.S. was 6.3 million individuals, which is within striking distance of Yahoo Travel’s 7.3 million. Price shopping is perhaps the main draw to any travel site, so Yahoo has to step up its game to maintain its lead position.
I was on Kayak last night and I couldn’t get the searches to return anything when I was searching multiple sites. They may have some integration or traffic issues right now following the acquisition.
Ha ha, yeah i don’t think they will take any traffic from the people who use kayak, farechase has had no innovation for as long as they have existed all most, Kayak has it’s easy interface that gained traction. It’s really just Kayak, FareCompare and FareCast left of the players to fight for market share from the OTA’s.
Farechase was one of the best vertical search engines for the past 3-4 years. It’s nice to see that it get the ‘hot’ spot after such a long time
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James, I would be more careful with those statements.
Let me remind you (without taking away any of the success my friends at kayak have had building a business) that Farechase was the first to build travel search application. Kayak was started as a copy of the application Farechase built.
True, not a huge amount of visible change on Farechase functionality recently, but the Yahoo team has done an *amazing* job building a business around it to a level that it can replace their old Travelocity deal, and that is not to be taken lightly.
This is a smart move for Yahoo. I’ve been a long-time FareChase user and have always found it to have more comprehensive carrier listings for air travel than its merged competitor. Isn’t that why you use one of these in the first place? As for Kango, they are not playing in the travel price comparison world — as a private beta user I know first hand they are focused in on the travel planning and more of what you do after the travel purchase is made.
You’d be surprised about how few people know about Kayak outside the “2.0 circle” compared to Orbitz, Travelocity, and the older sites.
This move should give Farechase a lot more exposure.
Hmmm - looks curiously like the recent version of AOL travel.
I have been using farechase for years now!
Never even heard of Kayak until they doled out $200 million to sidestep.
I like the interface of the classic Yahoo Travel.
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I just used Yahoo Farecast yesterday to book a flight from Detroit to Phoenix and found the service fast and easy to use.
Brian and Stuman,
Good job on selling SideStep!
RAUL
Yahoo! mat be finally waking up again. Good for them.
@6: the number of monthly uniques would indicate that web 2.0 is mainstream if you are insinuating that only the hip & cool web 2.0 SOMA crowd know about Kayak.
Farechase looks really, really slick. Some pretty ridiculous front-end engineering going on there. Somewhat unbelievably, no hate from me.
Very nice interface.
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Farechase is NOT the default option, classic still is (at least for me). You have to select the Farechase checkbox first.
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There are other sites in this space I have found which are also intriguing in that they allow you to search Kayak as well as many other travel search. Perhaps you would call them meta-meta search sites? One example which does a pretty good job is http://www.lowfares.com …
Calling this a release of FareChase is somewhat untrue. It’s more pusing it to front and center. I’ve been using FareChase, on Yahoo, for quite some time now.
The Travelocity interface was much better…Yahoo will definitely suffer a loss in share in the short term. Much easier to keep what you have versus stealing share from someone else.
looks curiously like AOL travel lol