Kayak.com is a travel search engine website based in the United States. Founded in 2004, it aggregates information from hundreds of other travel sites and helps users book flights, hotels, cruises, and rental cars. Kayak combines results from online travel agencies, consolidators such as Orbitz, and other sources such as large hotel chains.
Kayak doesn't sell directly to the consumer; rather, it aggregates results from other sites then redirects the visitor to one of these sites for reservation. Thus, Kayak.com makes money from pay per click advertising, when the consumer clicks-through to one of the compared websites (For example, when the consumer is redirected to the Orbitz website).
The company was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of leading online travel agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terrell Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia. KAYAK is headquartered in Norwalk, CT and has R&D centers in Concord, MA and Santa Clara, CA. The company launched a beta site in May 2004, and