Where are the hotels and cars on Kayak UK?
US travel search outfit Kayak conceded yesterday that it made a wee error when it announced plans for the launch of its UK website in back in December last year.
On 4 December the company said hotel and car rental functionality would be added to the existing flight search by “the end of the year”.
It turns out the announcement was in fact earmarked to go out in January 2007, but the change of plan to issue the release a month early didn’t include amending the original release.
Cue a little bit of confusion amongst eagle-eyed consumers when the New Year holiday passed off without the launch of new services on the site.
Indeed the new functionality is actually quite a long way off – “not even scheduled”, says an official.
Luckily for Kayak its flight engine is actually getting a fair bit of praise within the industry.
Consumers looking for hotels and cars will just have to bide their time for a while.
[Our now ammended original story]
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
7 comments:
I have to say Kev, when I heard about the launch UK Kayak, I was surprised that they had launched the site without a hotel search.
I am trying to understand from a technology perspective, why the roll out is so difficult. They have the user interface all ready to go, so is it a commercial thing, i.e they haven't signed up enough to the platform (seems unlikely) or maybe the sheer number of clients they have to integrate is taking them longer than expected?
dammit! i hate it when i leave the http:// off
GRRR! and when i spell my name with two rrs :) last comment i promise!
Thank you, Andrew [for getting there eventually!!]
"If you think about the product from our view, about 80% of our searches are air so it behooves us to perfect the air product before moving on to car and hotels," - Kayak spokesperson.
god they really are perfectionists eh?! You would have thought they would have it down pat by now :) Do us limeys use meta search in a completely different way?
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