Publicly traded travel site Travelzoo has launched the beta version of its new comprehensive airfare search engine, Fly.com. At first glance, Fly.com is a Kayak-look alike (except that Fly.com searches are limited to airfares only). The two sites offer virtually the same search options, except that Fly.com’s price comparison sites are limited to Priceline and Hotwire, whereas Kayak offers comparison searches on Priceline, Hotwire, Expedia, Travelocity and Airfare.com
What differentiates Fly.com from Kayak is the way in which a user can see the listed flight information. Fly.com includes a summary view, where each airline’s lowest and highest prices is listed. The user can then click on the airline to see the flight times and ranges. Also, the user can see the economy, business and first-class prices in one search. And Fly.com’s results include “Why Me?” boxes, which inform travelers about amenities on a specific route or airline. For example, a “Why Me?” box attached to Virgin Airlines informs the user about Virgin’s in-flight entertainment options. While some of these may be innovative, it’s doubtful that these differentiators will be enough to drive people away from a more comprehensive site, like Kayak, where a user can also search for rental cars, hotels and package vacations. That said, Fly.com does seem to have at least a few advantages – for one the site lists American Airlines flight options, whereas the airline company ditched its listings on Kayak. Update: American actually returned to Kayak in October.
Travelzoo created buzz around its $1.8 million purchase of the domain “Fly.com” in January. Undoubtedly, Fly.com is a highly desirable domain name, but history has dictated that success does not necessarily correlate with a good name (just take a look at the Pets.com fiasco). Hopefully, Fly.com can figure out a way to truly stand out in the sea of travel search engines.
I guess we will see if the domain name was worth the money, given that this seems to be its real competitive advantage.
Anjali Sen
good god, that is some handy ripoff work. So much so that I will not use it.
From a business perspective though, Kayak has done all the design work. All travelzoo needed to do was probably spend a total of $2M to basically buy Kayak minus the marketing efforts. The promote fly.com to its email marketing list and voila, you have instant money machine. Makes lots of sense. Not cool if you are kayak, but makes sense.
I get American Airlines results on Kayak just fine.
Travelzoo is a simple email marketing firm. their audience is not tech savvy and will appreciate this domain within their first 6 seconds of landing on the page.
I imagine them marketing deals to fly.com via their weekly top 20 deals. And marketing write-offs will certainly offset the 1.8m cost that other $10 domains would have needed to spend to reach this audience.
Check out AIRFare, an air application that uses the kayak api. http://merhl.com/?p=160
Some of the features are
# Filtering search results
# Direct Hotel calling
# SMS messages of flight/hotel information
# Saves your recent searches offline
# Saves your itineraries offline
# Settings for default location, airlines, etc.
So long and thanks for the spam.
gaaaah i hate stupid spam like this
Sorry this wasn’t ment to be spam, just thought it was a related topic since they were talking about Kayak, sorry, please delete this comment if need be
spam!
Found a post about AA returning to Kayak:
http://blog.kay...rn-to-kayakcom/
Took me 2 minutes to find. Seems like a little bit of research before posting a story couldn’t hurt.
This has to be one of the biggest rip-offs of any site I have ever seen.
Creating a competitor to Kayak is fine. I’m sure there’s room for innovation and competition. But this is like taking Kayak, putting a few different colors on it and giving it another domain name. You might as well just use Kayak if it offers nothing else.
This reflects poorly on TravelZoo and shows they don’t have good intentions if they are trying to pass this off as their own.
$1,800,000 for a domain name!? That’s a pretty high profit margin for whoever sold them that, 180,000 X return on investment.
Somebody seriously needs to mash Orbitz with couchpotato.com and let people that live in really good spots monetize on that.
http://www.couchsurfing.com/
I meant cross orbitz with couchSURFING.com
wow, these domains are all so similar.
So… good. It seems we’re not in a recession after all.
thats a nice website.
that’s a lot of money for a 3 letter domain, I wonder if it’s worth the money in the long run.
Its a good website.
Why to do it?
The travel search engine market is ‘done’ after
Kayak took sidestep and yahoo bought fatechase.
Http://twitter-1.blogspot.com
Its a good and usefull website that help me to find my plane flight schedule :p
Anyone found a site like this that pulls in decent discount/budget/regional airlines?
How does this compare with yapta.com…doesn’t it do the same thing with tracking?
I hear kayak is good, but the name kayak is a bit strange for air travel. While its a good site, i always get an image of wading through water, not a good image for airplane passengers.
I am glad to see someone else immediately noticed the differences (or lack there of) between Kayak and Fly.com.
It should also be noted that Sitestep.com is also a competitor that they ripped. Even though kayak and sidestep merged, I think it is worth noting.
I wrote a blog about this on my travel website as well, because I couldn’t believe they would waste a domain name like this. I didn’t even know they paid 1.8 mil for it either.
If you actually screen shot Fly.com and Sidestep.com, and opace one of the images, the designs are ridiculously similiar as well. The boxes are mere pixels apart.
Kudos to Kayak/Sidestep, cold pricklies to Travelzoo for lack of innovation.