Experience File: Kayak.com

By Leigh Duncan

With all my business, wedding and family-visiting travel, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time searching for airline tickets lately. Even with modern search tools, the process can be laborious -- especially when coordinating people from different areas of the country. That's why, when I discovered Kayak.com, I decided to spread the word. My sentiments, in summary, are "Hot dang, and hallelujah!"

Kayak.com is a great case study that illustrates the power of customer centricity in usability. My hope is that a tour of the site will remind all of the many well intentioned business and marketing executives how important it is to "press the envelope" on usability in a proactive manner. It's important to pay ongoing attention to user tasks and intentions to structure intuitive, usable and ergonomic tools that drive usage and profitability.

The online travel booking arena has come a long way. However, it's still rather easy to become dissatisfied with the search tools offered by popular travel sites. While Orbitz.com, Travelocity and others offer rather robust search capabilities, they often place the impetus on users to do acrobatics to find what they really want. For instance, users must often start over, in order to "tweak" search listings to better "fit" with individual need. This often wastes time and energy, and can also produce frustration.

For example, say that I've posted a search on Orbitz.com. After doing so, I desire to "tweak" that search to filter for specific departure times. I'm forced to either scroll to view specific times, or start my search over to enter my departure criteria. This is cumbersome. From a task-based perspective it's fairly common for a user not to be "ready" to "tweak" a search before viewing an initial "blanket" result. This challenge applies to a number of scenarios. For example, if I want to compare prices or flight times across the three airports out of which I often travel, I may have to conduct multiple searches.

While some of the sites offer helpful comparison grids illustrating fares out of several airports, or "fare alerts" that show lower fares into different airports, these don't help if you need to compare multiple search dimensions, such as price, departure time and airport. For example, if I want to filter out certain airlines from my search, most of the time I will be forced to manually scroll (and scroll, and scroll) to obtain required information! If, in the context of such acrobatics, fare information is presented to me on several screens, the impetus is then placed on me to remember the fares. This becomes more difficult for me as I age...

There's a reason that Kayak.com was voted Travel & Leisure Magazine's top Travel Site in the category of "Search Aids". Boy, do they deserve it! The site is an ergonomic, robust, responsive mega search engine that is made for people like me and you.

To resolve the challenges of today's modern travel sites, Kayak offers one-click filtering, sorting and search adjustment, making it incredibly easy for an individual to weigh price, timing, airline and other considerations that impact the purchase of an airline ticket. The search tools, which serve as left-hand navigation, are entirely dynamic, allowing the user to customize every search with the simple use of slider bars and check boxes. Users can filter by number of stops, airline, airports, and adjust listings by price and flight departure times. Fabulous!

Using the side navigation, adding other airports to your search is a one-click process. The list will dynamically update based on the user's action. The default setting will always list the fares from lowest to highest, although the "sort" function on the list is also dynamic and adjustable.

Want to narrow the search results by price or departure time? Just bump the slider bars to tailor the list. Interested in showing only the flights after 7pm? Slide the departure time bar over and viola! The interface is simple and no-nonsense. When you're ready to purchase, Kayak will link you to sites for ticket purchasing. The sidebar even offers a "snapshot" view of fares by airline for your convenience.

Beyond usability and robust filtering capabilities, another Kayak benefit is that the engine also searches low fares across discount travel sites, including CheapTickets.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, HotWire and others. That's rather convenient for those of us who have noted fare differences between those sites.

The one caution I would issue for Kayak or any other travel site relates to data synchronization issues. Kayak searches multiple flight and fare databases. Because fares change frequently and flights are being booked every second, it is possible for searches on any web site of this nature to become quickly outdated - even if only by seconds - due to communications lag time between systems. I've encountered a few fare pricing hiccups on Kayak related to this issue. However, I have largely found the information to be reliable, and this problem could occur on any travel site.

For those of us into "geek speak" you can find out how the braniacs at Kayak built the site just by visiting. They're very open kimono about their technical construction. As a snapshot, they're using AJAX (no surprise), Java, Perl and Ruby, running on Linux. The site was developed on Mac. The innovation doesn't end with the Kayak.com web site, either... they're experimenting with some cool stuff to enable users to access Kayak on mobile phones, instant messaging applications, from the desktop and other devices. They even have an app that ties Kayak to myspace.com.

So, what does Kayak mean to the major travel sites? Well, for now, the relationship is a symbiotic one. Kayak is actually magnifying the lack of search usability on other sites and supplementing the lack of functionality thereof. In the future, however, who knows? Imagine what happens when Kayak functionality covers full-scale travel services, including hotels, car rental, packages, etc. It may not be long...Someone smart may purchase Kayak... or Kayak may get a huge round of VC and take over the world. Stay tuned...

In short, KUDOS to Kayak! These guys know the travel industry and they know technology. Most importantly, they know the customer and are providing the robust kind of search tool that can save consumers and small businesses time, money and effort. Wishing you every success, guys.