Leading global meta search site KAYAK processes 1.5 billion queries for travel information every year. The global positioning benefits both suppliers and customers in India. “For our suppliers, we have the advantage of scale with hundreds of thousands of user queries per month across flights, hotels, rental cars and vacation packages. KAYAK operates 40 plus international sites, which help our suppliers to expose their products to travellers across the globe,” stated Abhijit Mishra, country manager of India, KAYAK, adding that India is one of the key markets for KAYAK in APAC.
As a global tech company, innovation is a top priority. KAYAK’s UI is continually-optimised for added simplicity. “We conduct on average, 30 experiments a month to drive innovation and optimise our UI. We believe we have the strongest technology team in the travel industry,” said Mishra.
Along with search tools, KAYAK also offers tools that help with both planning and managing travel, like ‘Price Forecast’ helps people decide whether to buy now or wait, ‘Trips’ for organising their bookings/itineraries; while the ‘Explore’ helps in finding a destination within the budget.
“Explore tool provides the Indian travellers a much easier way to figure out destinations within their desired budget, and at the same time, explore some new destinations which were not on the top of their mind before,” mentioned Mishra.
The company is focused on being mobile-first – but seamless across devices. “Globally, one-third of our traffic is on mobile and that number is growing. Mobile is a key strategic priority for KAYAK; we want our users to not only use us for travel planning but to allow us to assist throughout their trip,” added Mishra.
KAYAK has witnessed significant growth in searches for top domestic destinations, e.g. Kolkata has seen a year-on-year growth of about 120 per cent on searches. For the outbound segment the top destinations remain New York, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Bangkok. Destinations like Amsterdam and Munich have seen a lot of interest in recent times.