Kayak Files for $50 million IPO | Hacker News Reader

Kayak Files for $50 million IPO

techcrunch.com

83 pointsojbyrne38 comments

Does anyone know of any other solutions for this kind of data other than ITA? Are there any open/cheap APIs for getting at scheduling/price data? I hear Hipmunk is using Orbitz currently to power their results (or so someone said on that recent TechCrunch article in the comments). Does Orbitz have some API? Would be a fun data set to play with if one is openly available, though I love what Hipmunk is already doing.

Kayak has an api (limited to 1000 searches / day): http://www.kayak.com/labs/api/search/

I believe that Orbitz will require you talk to someone in order to get access to their api.

Thanks for that info. That's a great start for what I'm looking for.

The lack of open/cheap APIs is probably the biggest factor that keeps innovation in travel so slow.

My company, Adioso (YC W09) has a free API in beta. It's what's used to power http://destmapper.com/. Coverage is limited but soon to start expanding rapidly. Email me - tom at adioso dotcom - if you're interested.

You should check out Everbread http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/03/23/stealth-travel-search-en...

A really really impressive piece of technology.

While Orbitz might offer an API, I believe that underneath the hood they also use ITA. ITA currently have no competitors in this space.

TC article keeps referring to revenue and net income as compared to a year ago which was a notoriously bad year for the travel industry. So these growth numbers don't really mean anything. Would be really interesting to see where Kayak stands in comparison to 2007 & 08.

Kayak's S1 filing has a lot of interesting nuggets of information. The data you're after is on page 29:

2007 Revenues / Net Income: $48M / ($4.36M) 2008 Revenues / Net Income: $112M / $5.1M

Keep in mind they acquired SideStep at the end of 07.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/0001193125102...

I didn't realize that the Kayak founders have a member from basically every other major competitor. I would love to hear that story.

I think if you look at any large website in the travel space, that holds true, it seems to be an especially incestuous industry. When I worked at Tripadvisor (owned by Expedia) we had significant numbers of people in our group from Travelocity.

Odd. I wonder why that is. I suppose it has to do with gaining the knowledge to work in the space. Once you do, it's probably easier to find a job with other companies in the same space.

Luckily for them, flight search is such a small [1] industry.

[1] orbitz, chapoair, hipmunk, expedia, travelocity, farecompare, cheaptickets, hotwire, priceline, kinkaa, zoombu, cheapflights, etc

Funny enough, these sites (including Kayak) are pushing users away from flight booking and towards hotel booking because the margins are much larger.

kayak.com defaults to hotel search now, for example.

While the major guys move towards hotel booking, startups are tackling a lot of different problems in travel. This feels like perfect time for kayak to be raising money to compete. More here http://khuyi.tumblr.com/post/1592395981/online-travel-ripe-f...

Careful, they default to whatever search you ran last :)

Well, then the default default is hotels.

The article implies that Kayak may have had privileged information about the Justice Department's investigation of the Google-ITA deal, or else they would have held off on the IPO. Now there's a story I'd like to read.

Interesting. I've played around with Kayak's API, but has anyone used it for any projects? I'm curious what others think.

As for the IPO... good luck to them!

Interesting how much money they get from other travel booking agencies. These are basically referrals of referrals.

Revenue? What's the profit?

"Net Income was actually down for the first three quarters to $6.2 million from $10.4 million in 2009."

I'm surprised it's valued that low. We constantly hear about all kinds of shitty sites getting millions in funding.

50m is not the valuation; it's the amount of stock they're selling.

How is that different from the valuation?

If they have 100 shares of stock and are selling 2 at the IPO for 50M then the valuation is much higher than 50M. Just because it is the IPO doesn't mean 100% of the stock is for sell. If they are putting out 20% of their stock then their valuation is 250M.

Thanks! I always thought IPO means 100% of the common stock is sold.

so what is kayak's actual valuation?

Looks like a flop.

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