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EyeforTravel Research Case Study
The School of Mobile Vol. 2 - The Detail Chapter 1 - The Travel Buying Cycle
Kayak: iPhone Applica�on Develop-
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So who are Kayak then?
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Kayak was started in Jan 2004. In Feb 2005 the consumer site was launched.
Kayak was launched as a travel search meta site on the following pillars:
• To be u�erly comprehensive
• To provide all the info that the user needs
• To be defined by ease-of-use
A lot of Kayak’s uniqueness comes from their technology. They were
the first travel site to use AJAX. One of their benchmark goals is that a
flight search on Kayak takes no longer than a google search. Kayak are so
serious about this that they have hired a head scien�st whose role is to
make Kayak go faster. Kayak is single-minded in their determina�on to be
the best in the travel business so it is perhaps no surprise that they have
launched into the mobile space with verve and enthusiasm
Why Mobile and how did Kayak first engage?
Kayak’s Mobile Journey….
Kayak has had mobile in mind pre�y much from the get go. They had
2005: The experiment in mobile
a li�le mobile web site which can s�ll be found at
www.kayak.com/
begins with a li�le mobile website
moby. This was very basic and based on the clear use case where you
are somewhere on the road and you need to travel. It does one way
June 2007: iPhone is released and
searches to allow you to help you get home, where you need to go
Kayak realises a sea-change has
to find you a hotel room for the night when you need one, that kind
occurred, they ini�ally develop a
smartphone op�mised Kayak site
of thing. The site was very basic and made for fairly straigh�orward
mobile browsers. The mobile site was up there for a long �me and it
March 2008: Mac OS X for iPhone
never got much a�en�on or trac�on.
is released and ups the ante
from a development perspec�ve,
Kayak reasoned that this was mainly because people, at least in
func�onality is added to
the US, did not really use their mobile that intensely for the mobile
Smartphone op�mised Kayak site.
web.
Then, the iPhone came out and as you are aware, iPhone in months
became the No.1 pla�orm for mobile web traffic and Kayak thought
wow, people are actually using these things for the web. Ini�ally they
did do some things for their exis�ng mobile website specifically for
iPhone, that is, a smartphone version. Essen�ally, this was a slightly
dumbed down version of Kayak.
The site was tweaked to remove func�onality that is annoying to
use on a small screen such as an abundance of sliders etc. Further it
made things like the hotel telephone numbers bigger so that you can
click directly on the phone number as a click to call directly through
Kayak presents a �me chart view
to the hotel. op�mised it to the nature of the device.
of the best and average prices.
This lets you quickly find those
When the updated opera�ng system SDK (OS X) came out, this was
dates when prices will be best.
even be�er as it meant that it was possible to maintain some phone
real estate and so Kayak added func�onality to their Smartphone
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