Last week Kayak announced merging with SideStep, a rival travel search tool, after securing $196 million from Sequoia Capital. Both websites offer a similar end product – price comparison services for an array of travel products and earn revenues through advertising and referrals of travel bookings. The websites will remain separate according to the announcement made by the companies, but the combined customer base is likely to increase leverage with travel suppliers and agencies for better availability of fares & rates. In addition to the potential for increased booking fees, more information should attract visitors and grow the ad inventory.
In November 2007, Kayak was ranked 8th within the Travel Agencies category, followed by SideStep which ranked 9th. Among the travel meta-search tools, Kayak and SideStep each captured the largest market share of visits in November 2007 – 3.59% and 2.75%, respectively. While both websites have increased their market share from November 2006, the market share of competitor sites Booking Buddy and Cheapflights.com have also been growing.


Kayak has the highest share of returning visitors (defined as returning is the past 30 days) among the travel tools with 41% of the visits coming from repeat visitors in Nov. Booking Buddy followed with 34% returning visitors. While leisure travel tends to be a less frequent purchase, the repeat traffic does show signs of loyalty among the user bases of some of the websites.

In Nov, Kayak and SideStep referred the highest share of their traffic to the Transport (e.g. air and car rentals) and Destination & Accommodation categories among the 5 sites included in this analysis. These are important metrics which provide insight into the ability of the sites to delivery travel researchers (and ultimately buyers). Transport was the strongest category since researching airfares is a common use for the meta-search tools, receiving 19% of the downstream traffic from both Kayak and SideStep. Hotel referrals are particularly strong for SideStep, where almost 14% of traffic in Nov visited the Destination & Accommodation category followed by 5% for Kayak.