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Comments (2)
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Save/ShareOne of our most loyal blog readers, Iolaire McFadden, noticed something similar about Travelzoo's recently launched airfare search engine Fly.com and TripAdvisor's new Flight metasearch feature. Both of the sites look like the largest metasearch site, Kayak. Iolaire points out:
"They appear to use the same layout, refining results top left, various flight information refinement settings mid-left, such as number of stops, flight time range, airlines cabin types, etc.… And flight information is in the middle of the page with ads on the right. does it a tad better than Fly.com by including their standard site navigation around the search tool, but still… I guess Kayak deserves some kudos on the product placement… But still I wish Fly.com and TripAdvisor were innovating beyond what has been done."
Well, I thought Iolaire had a good point. The sites do look similar. But neither TripAdvisor nor Travelzoo's Fly.com are using Kayak's services. They developed their remarkably similar search engines on their own.
I asked Kayak CEO Steve Hafner what he thought about the design of the two new rival metasearch sites. He gave the same statement he recently provided the L.A. Times Daily Travel & Deal Blog
"Kayak.com welcomes the competition since it should help grow the metasearch category—hopefully to Kayak's ultimate benefit. We are flattered by how many design elements TripAdvisor has chosen to mimic from our site.
While the visuals may be similar, ultimately it's the caliber of the results that distinguishes the category leader. We offer the most comprehensive, relevant search and we continue to invest in the tools and brainpower to make our site easy to use for everyone. Kayak offers more money-saving technology than any other travel site including Flexible Search, Kayak Buzz, Airfare History Charts, Real-time Collaboration, and our new Hotel Rate Calendar. Plus, Kayak is available in 11 countries worldwide.
We're also very excited to compete with TripAdvisor on hotel reviews. In just a few weeks, Kayak.com will re-launch TravelPost, the world’s most comprehensive travel site for hotel reviews, descriptions and rates. TravelPost will search hotel information and rates from more than 200 travel sites and displays hotel reviews from leading review sites. We've applied our industry-leading filtering and sorting tools to hotel reviews which allows TravelPost users to find the most relevant reviews from people like them. Plus, TravelPost incorporates the Kayak easy-to-use, clean, uncluttered user interface."
It's war!
EARLIER
Kudos to TripAdvisor for including fee estimates in its new fare search tool
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Thank you for the follow-up, that just makes the similar look and feel even worse! I just assumed Kayak was selling turn key solutions.
*** I apologize to Kayak.com for assuming they sold their interface as-is. ***
I wonder if Tip Advisor and Fly.com are using the same vendor, or if they replicated Kayak.com independently...
My personal feeling is the similarity are close enough that they probably will have to adjust it. As it is the copy cat look would have driven me to Kayak thinking it was the same engine.
Posted By Iolaire McFadden on March 9, 2009, 3:27 PM
But didn't Kayak find some helpful "design inspiration" from Google's search interface?
I agree with Steve's point that it's not necessary the front end design, but the backend technology that really makes the difference.
In my opinion, the fly.com functionality is underwhelming at best compared to Kayak and other flight meta-search sites.
TripAdvisor's flight search, however, is impressive. They've added additional filtering tools that are relevant and helpful to travelers, and clearly did their homework prior to launching this new service.
Overall, I think the increasing competition between Kayak and TripAdvisor will be beneficial for consumers, not to mention rather fun to watch!
Posted By Pete Meyers on March 12, 2009, 6:24 PM