AP: AOL Aims to Lead Internet Travel Purchases

AOL will announce today that it will invest in online travel comparison shopping service Kayak and will offer its inventory in a special shopping site to be launched in 2005. The deal is a blow to Travelocity, the current provider of AOL's travel inventory, which suffered an almost identical blow last summer when Yahoo went in the same direction, purchasing travel shopping site FareChase. This news comes on the heels of a just broken story that industry analysts predict the online travel market to account for about one in three transactions in the roughly quarter trillion dollar travel market within the next five years.

Both Expedia and Travelocity complained that Kayak aggregated their results, and Kayak subsequently stopped harvesting data from their sites, although it does not appear to have significantly changed the breadth of the site's travel offerings.