In continued expansion of its business model, metasearch engine Kayak.com last week introduced its first direct flight-booking option, in partnership with Air Canada.
The new feature comes less than a year after Kayak introduced a direct booking option for hotels, which broke the typical metasearch site mold of aggregating search results but sending users to online travel agencies or suppliers to complete their transactions.
"We've decided the time is right to expand that choice to flights," Kayak said March 8 in a blog post. "Well, at least for Air Canada. As an industry leader with an innovative tech infrastructure, Air Canada was able to work seamlessly with our team to create a comprehensive and intuitive direct booking option."
Last March, Kayak began offering the ability to book hotels directly through Kayak, a program that now enables users to book 150,000 of the 250,000 hotels around the world that are included in Kayak's hotel search results.
Robert Birge, Kayak's chief marketing officer, said that while the company is only adding Air Canada for now, Kayak is committed to "improving the booking process and to providing the additional choice to book directly on Kayak."
Henry Harteveldt, principal analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, said this was a "smart move" for Kayak.
"This definitely moves Kayak further into being a transactional travel company," he said. "It helps Kayak diversify its sources of content, and that's an important offensive move for the company that it needs to take now to ensure that whether it's Google or anyone else, should they find themselves cut off from certain content sources now, they've built the path to get the content from other resources."
Birge said that Air Canada had developed a booking application programming interface (API) that Kayak was able to "plug into seamlessly." It gives Kayak access to all of Air Canada fares, ancillary services and products.
Air Canada will process the transaction and provide the customer service. This differs from the way Kayak enables direct booking with hotels, for which Kayak uses World Choice Travel, a division of Sabre, to conduct transactions and provide customer services on a white-label basis.
Birge said there are many reasons why Kayak is working with only one airline at this point and that air purchases tend to have a different pattern of customer service requirements than hotels, as well as different technology and infrastructure.
Birge would not speculate as to what other technology solutions, including plugging into a GDS, might be used if Kayak adds direct booking options for additional airlines.
Harteveldt said that by being able to process bookings through an API, it sets Kayak up to be a cost-effective distributor.
"It's a defensive move," he said. "Kayak can see some suppliers wanting to connect directly."
Kayak said it simply wants to provide choice to its users.
"We know that some of our users would prefer to book directly through Kayak, and we've had the hotel booking option out there for a year," Birge said.
Birge said that some Kayak customers don't want to leave the site to complete a transaction.
"We are improving the customer experience for people who use Kayak.com or our mobile applications," he said. "That's the primary reason."
Another reason is to accommodate the estimated 12 million users who have downloaded Kayak's mobile application. Those who use it to search for flights and hotels are often redirected to a supplier site that may not be mobile-enhanced.
"It's a dissatisfaction on the website that we don't offer that choice, but on mobile, going to a third-party site can be a challenge," Birge said.
Follow Johanna Jainchill on Twitter @jjainchilltw.