ClickZ: Travel Vets Launch Beta of 'Google for Travel'

Seeing existing travel sites as beholden to their sponsors, veterans of Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity teamed together to create Kayak.com, a site that crawls more than 60 travel sites to create pricing charts for hotels and airfares. The public beta will add car rental prices before launch, according to Kayak executives, scheduled for later this year. The ad model will be similar to that of Overture's listings auction.

Veterans of Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia have teamed to launch a new travel search company, Kayak.com, a public beta of which launched this week. Executives say it will possess Google-like objectivity, Amazon.com-like personalization features and an Overture-like ad auction model, when it launches officially later this year.

Like Yahoo!'s Farechase, currently in beta testing, Kayak.com crawls a wide variety of travel providers' sites — more than 60, in Kayak.com's case — and presents the results in a matrix. The company currently returns results for airlines and for hotels, but it plans to add car rentals before it launches later this year. Users can adjust airline results by checking or un-checking airlines, and tweaking sliders for price or flight times. With hotels, users can refine by distance from a given location, by price or by star rating. The site has both Flash and HTML interfaces, which users can toggle between.

"We all recognized about a year ago that online travel really hadn't fulfilled the vision we all had," said Steve Hafner, co-founder and CEO of Kayak.com, who formerly helped found Orbitz. "We wanted to facilitate informed decision making by consumers and really put an end to cross shopping."

Kayak is part of a new generation of online travel companies that are more like search technology players than travel agencies. Other players include SideStep and Mobissimo, and Yahoo!'s FareChase. More established firms like Travelzoo, with its SuperSearch product, are also getting into the travel search game.

"It's no surprise that there are some new and late entrants into this space," said Kelly Ford, vice president of marketing at Travelzoo. "When you think about it, these are the cross hairs of two of the top things happening — search, and giving consumers more choice, and online travel."