Techcrunch
Erick Schonfeld
January 10 2008
Last night, Yahoo signaled that it is serious about competing in the travel price-comparison search market in the wake of Kayak’s recent $200 million acquisition of Sidestep. Yahoo Travel put its FareChase property, formerly a tab, front and center on the travel homepage. FareChase is now the default search engine for pricing flights, hotels, cars, and vacations.
Yen Lee, the CEO of travel search startup Kango and a former general manager of Yahoo Travel, noticed the change and offered this analysis on Kango’s blog:
It seems like just yesterday that the travel sector crowned Kayak the undisputed heavyweight champion of price comparison search following their acquisition of SideStep. But wait! It looks like Yahoo has (finally!) unveiled FareChase, the price search engine they acquired back in 2004. On the Yahoo Travel homepage, the Travelocity booking engine is no longer the default search option, it has been re-labeled ‘classic search’ and FareChase is the default search.
. . . Presumably this brings a new competitive element that Kayak might not have expected (let’s be serious, four years after the acquisition, did ANYONE expect Yahoo to finally launch FareChase?).