Blog homeI have just been reading an interview with Kayak CEO Steve Hafner (published on USA Today) – the interview is well worth reading if you have 5 mins (read the interview)
Here is a quote from the interview:
We have new features every week, believe it or not.
The last one we added, which is in beta, is a collaboration feature. If you go to any of the search result pages, you’ll see a link on the top of the page that says “share” or “collaborate.” It’s the first time (in which) any travel company has allowed multiple people to look at your search results. This allows you to look at flights or hotels and compare in real time with friends. If you pin a flight or hotel, the hotel shows up on the top of your friends’ search results. It’s pretty cool.
I agree it is a pretty cool feature and I will take Mr Hafner up on his offer. I won’t believe they launch a new feature every week.
According to the Kayak Twitter feed (yes there is such a thing) the new search feature was released at the end of October (6 weeks ago).
Check out our new search collaboration feature. Look at live results with a pal. On flight/hotel results, click ’share.’ (See Tweet).
So Mr Hafner says in his interview they release one new feature a week – admits this collaboration feature is the last one that they added, but actually originally announced it 6 weeks ago!
No wonder Mr Hafner gave us the option not to believe him about launching new features weekly!
Is it Friday yet!? I hope Kayak have a sense of humour.
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Hey Alex -
While releasing a new feature each week sounds pretty aggressive, I have noticed that Kayak has been doing a huge amount of UI testing to their homepage and search results page.
During the past month they switched their “normal” homepage search box into something that vaguely looked like TripAdvisor’s homepage search, then tweaked it slightly again last week. Likewise, they recently started integrating user reviews via TravelPost (owned by SideStep and, thus, now owned by Kayak) into their search results and began showing larger photo thumbnails within individual listings, too.
While I doubt this amounts to a new feature per week, they probably do test minor (and major) front end design changes pretty frequently to see how it impacts conversion rates.
- Pete
Hi Pete
2 further angles for consideration!
If you launch 4 new features per month (because you do a monthly release schedule) does that count as 1 per week!?
…. and, if you release an improvement to an existing feature – is that a new feature release? Does something have to offer different functionality in order to be classified as a feature release!????
Oh dear, talking myself into circles again.
Quantity isn’t equal to quality though.
On the other hand: first to release = first to fail, and move on to something more successful more quickly.
DJ
It seems to me that one feature per week is too much from an end-user point of view. But I believe they do a lot of research and testing with how their user interface could be improved. They are the Number 1 travel meta search engine and they want to stay in that position.
I will publish tomorrow my interview with Faisal, Managing Director for Kayak Europe.
Guillaume
hotel-blogs.com
I find Steve Hafner’s comments puzzling. In conversations with various Kayak executives I understood that A simple and clean site is in their DNA. Their whole content/community world is buried under the “Buzz” tab.
When I discussed incorporating more planning and community, the simple answer was that Kayak does not want to distract anyone from the search and click on ad routine. One cannot argue with the results!