Name: The Future of Online Travel Booking
Uploaded: 2017-08-18
Duration: 3 min 33 s
Description: KAYAK CEO Steve Hafner talks Momondo, booking hotels with Alexa, and why he stays in Airbnbs.

Priceline is just recently or in the process of acquiring Momondo group which is based in Europe and also owns Cheapflights. com. Right. That's right. We closed the acquisition a couple weeks ago. Many reviewers probably won't be familiar with either brand, Momondo or cheapflights, because they're not US brands really. They have a similar mission to Kayak but they are leading in Europe. All these brands have similar visions which is we want to make online travel easier for people we think that kayak back in technology is superior to what they built, they build great brands and have audiences of people using them. The goal is basically to use the kayak back here to power their front ends. Actually have a better product and service for their people. What's next? How are we going to be booking hotel rooms in the next five years? [ UNKNOWN ] technology company at heart, so we're an early adopter of anything that is promising that makes online travel easier, so I think we're the first travel company that introduced a chatbot for travel search. And then we followed that up with Slack, and Facebook Messenger, and Google Home. Most recently, we're the first company to allow you to book a hotel room using voice over Alexa. It's best suited right now for repeat bookings or same day bookings. So for example, you can say Hey, I'm looking for a hotel in New York tonight. Try the rates at the Hilton. And we'll come back with the prices, the rate, have you stayed here before, do you want me to book it, and if you say yes, we'll book it for you. I think where all this is going is any place a consumer has travel intent, any platform anywhere in the world, we want to be able to Provide an easy way for them to use [ INAUDIBLE ] services. For you and me we probably won't use voice as much. When I look at my kids they're very familiar with text and voice. I think there is going to be a segment of the population that will naturally use those new platforms. But you still have to maintain all of the other stuff for you and me and for my grandparents, for example. So when I first starting using Kayak, right after it launched in 2004, one of the things that really drew me to it was it was doing which is doing fare prediction. Telling your consumers whether or not they should hold off on buying airfare with these price predictions. Now you see a lot of other new apps on the market place that are offering that same opportunity, Hopper being one of them. Right. How is that technology improving since you first launched it. Sure, I mean price forecast is something that we debuted with many years ago as you rightfully noted. And what it basically does is we want to help consumers make an informed decision about where to go and when to travel and when to buy. And to make that technology work, you need lots of data points on fare changes and availability. So the bigger you get, the more accurate your fare predictions become. So, it's a pretty easy feature for someone to replicate in terms of saying, hey, I can tell you to wait or to buy. But unless you have a big data set, you actually can't give an accurate answer. With regard to some of the other companies that you mentioned. They have fair predictors, but it's not nearly as accurate or comprehensive as what Kayak has. How are you doing most of your travel booking? Besides just going to Kayak. It's funny. I do most of it on Kayak, but there are areas where Kayak doesn't have the comprehensiveness that I'd like. So we don't have selfless airlines, for example. So if I want to travel to see my folks in Texas I have to look at Southwest Airlines on a website. If I'm looking for an AirBnB room in Stockholm, I have to use their website in addition to Kayak. You do stay in AirBnBs. I do when forced to. How does someone force you to stay in their AirBnB? You know when you have a big family like I do. I've got five kids Hotel rooms are problematic. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

KAYAK CEO Steve Hafner talks Momondo, booking hotels with Alexa, and why he stays in Airbnbs.