um, well, it was untold. But now we told it.

You may have heard about our free application for iPhone. With it, you can search for flights, hotel rooms and cars, and book them directly where you want, even by making a phone call. It's been pretty popular: we have over 550,000 unique activated users so far.

Free Service Helps People Manage Their Travel Plans After Booking

Norwalk, CT, November 11, 2009 – KAYAK (kayak.com), the world’s leading travel search engine, launched KAYAK Trips, a free itinerary management tool that easily consolidates travel plans from multiple travel sites into one web-based itinerary. To use the service, people simply forward booking confirmation e-mails from travel suppliers and online travel agencies to their KAYAK user account.

Paul English, KAYAK CTO and co-founder said, "We’ve already made it simple to compare hundreds of travel sites at once. Now we’re making it easier to track the bookings you make across any of those sites including one-click sharing of your trip details with your friends.”

I’ve heard that Peter Drucker said there are only two functions of a business, product innovation and marketing. I guess we missed that class. You see, we’ve always had a "build it and they will come" approach. And they’ve come… quite a few in fact. So what does he know?

If So, Can You Save Money On Flights When Other People Are Scared?

I ran a quick analysis of US flight search data over the past two years on KAYAK sites, to find out the flight pricing trends on Halloween.

I looked at average selected airfare prices on Halloween vs. the overall average for the past two years. Prices were 5% less on Halloween. That's not a massive difference, but across such a large sample, it's statistically significant. Then I looked at other dates when people might be afraid to fly - Friday the 13th and September 11th. I found an even bigger difference here - average selected airfare prices were 12-14% lower than the average for the past two years.

Version 1.3 of the Kayak iPhone app is now available in the iTunes Store. We've fixed a lot of bugs, and replaced the scrolling/wheel date selector with a calendar. On the bug side of things, the app now crashes a lot less, the false "no internet connection" bug is fixed, and all of the disappearing results problems are fixed. We hope you like the calendar for trip selection. You can swipe to pick you trip with a single stroke, or you can touch the start and end days of your trip. You can also adjust the end points of your trip by touching and dragging the start or end day. Picking a round trip can be done in one touch, whereas the old wheel-based selector needed at least six touches. More importantly, since it's a calendar view, you can see the day of the week, and get a better "feel" of when your trip is. Read more »

Baggage Fee Calculator, Hotel Rate Calendar and Custom Airports Launch in Time for Summer Savings

NORWALK, Conn. – May 11, 2009 – Despite the economy, 95 percent of the more than 4,100 who participated in KAYAK’s Annual Summer Travel Survey plan to travel this summer. More than 41 percent said the recession did not affect their summer plans in any way which is double the number from KAYAK’s 2008’s survey.

Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has wanted custom airport selection on Kayak flight search. And now, in the greatest human achievement since Stonehenge and the merger of Drakes and Hostess ("all your snack cakes are belong to us"), Kayak gives you what we call:

(wait for it)

"Kayak Custom Airports."

Suppose you are Jay Leno, you are in Burbank and you want to fly to Paris. But you don't like LAX or Long Beach airports. For most of the life of the known universe (13.5-14 billion earth years), you would have been COMPLETELY unable to find flights from BUR, ONT and OXR to CDG on Kayak.com with one click. But lo:

We thought it would be interesting to see how the swine flu has affected user travel search patterns.

The data below shows the relative change in user search activity from last week to this week, to and from Mexico.

CMO of IMG Worldwide Joins to Lead Aggressive Offline Marketing Plan

NORWALK, Conn. – April 23, 2009 – Kayak.com, the world’s largest travel search site, today announced the appointment of Robert Birge as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Birge will manage all offline marketing, advertising and public relations activities, including the planned launch of a major offline advertising campaign. Birge will report to Kayak.com Co-Founder and CEO Steve Hafner and will be based at the company’s global headquarters in Norwalk, Conn.

We are really excited to announce that Kayak is now available for your iPhone and iPod in the Apple App Store. We're selling it for the pretty much the best price possible: FREE. That's the most important part of this post. We have an iPhone app, if you have an iPhone and you travel, you should download it. The rest of this article is the story of how we made the iPhone app. If you are not a software developer, the intense boredom rays emitted from the information herein is likely to melt your temporal lobe. You'll wake up in two or three hours with a face full of keyboard and a keyboard full of drool. OK, now that all the "norms" have gone away, let's get to it. First, some background: a wicked long time ago, back in 2004, my old boss called me up and said "Hey, we're starting a travel web site, come to Harvard Square for a meeting." And I said, "That's boring there are already like 12 travel web sites. Read more »

Choice of Destination and Type of Transportation Most Affected By Economy

“Search By Segment” Launches;

Offers Another Way to Compare Hundreds of Search Results

Each Kayak employee interacts with a few consumers each day; we don't believe in outsourcing our finger on the pulse. These interactions are usually by email or telephone.

Today, a gentleman arrived at our software development lab seeking help. He lives nearby and had taken the initiative to find us when the online service didn’t meet his needs. We're glad he did because it was a mutual learning experience.

Mr. Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad needs to be in Greenland in June for the purpose of hand delivering a scholarly religious text he has authored. This hand-crafted work-of-art requires personal delivery.