Travel comparison site Kayak just opened access to its search data. Best known for aggregating travel deals on roundtrip flights, hotels and rental cars, Kayak is now offering the public a peek under the hood. The company is laying bare its most popular destinations and searches via a new trends page. The site offers users a look at what people are searching for, where they’re searching from and the most searched hotels in the company’s top 50 most popular cities. With the travel industry slowly recovering from what has been a tough two years, this data can go a long way towards reinvigorating businesses.
In addition to the most popular searches and destinations, Kayak is also offering users a look at the Kayak Travel Index. The data from the Index tells users how much the average traveler is willing to spend to visit a particular destination. While economic stability would affect many of these trends, short spikes are often more likely related to peak season rates and seasonal factors. For example, in mid July travelers were willing to pay 25% more for a trip to Seattle, but since then as the weather cools so does the willingness to spend. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Travel Index shows a completely different set of travel spikes.
With information from 404 travel sites including Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, and information on more than 150,000 hotels, Kayak trends offers a great snapshot into the demographics of a destination’s most frequent visitors.
Says CTO Paul English, “People have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on KAYAK in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends. We’re happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public.”
