Kayak aims to land more fans in travel website war
TravelPost boosts search power to take on TripAdvisor
Kayak, which runs a popular flight and airfare comparison website, plans to relaunch its TravelPost.com hotel-review site this month to go head-to-head with rival TripAdvisor.com.
Kayak said TravelPost will be relaunched March 24 with a powerful search engine that will pull 1.4 million guest reviews from more than 200 websites and room rates from five to 10 websites. The upgraded site will also feature filters that let users pick which websites are searched and find reviews written by guests who share the same interests or demographic details. Now, TravelPost only displays 500,000 visitor reviews that have been posted directly on the website.
"You can actually cherry-pick which websites you want to get information from," Kayak spokeswoman Kellie Pelletier said about the revamped site.
TravelPost's makeover is the latest shot in an intensifying travel-website war between Norwalk, Conn.-based Kayak.com and Newton-based TripAdvisor LLC. Two weeks ago, TripAd visor unveiled its own search engine that pulls in flight and airfare data from multiple airlines and travel agencies in a bid - much like Kayak's - to become a more comprehensive travel-planning destination.
"They clearly feel a definite competitive threat when they look at each other," said Gregory Saks, general manager of travel for Compete Inc., a Boston Web analytics firm. "Each of them would not want to be the one that sits by idly as the other launches new products to encroach on their turf."
Kayak, which runs a 50-person engineering center in Concord, began running TravelPost as part of its December 2007 acquisition of SideStep.com. When Kayak took over the site, TravelPost was a Web 2.0 community that was cluttered with travelers' reviews of hotels.
Kayak has since integrated Google Maps, which shows realistic street-level panoramas outside each hotel, onto the TravelPost site. Kayak also gave the site a more streamlined design.
TripAdvisor, the number one online hotel and travel community website with more than 8 million US visitors each month, is "certainly happy to have more competition in the space," said chief executive and founder Stephen Kaufer. He thinks one of the reasons many consumers will stick with TripAdvisor is the site also includes reviews of restaurants and attractions.
At TravelPost, which attracts about 300,000 US visitors per month, reviews beyond places to sleep are "not on our radar right now," Pelletier said. But she said TravelPost has other advantages, such as unobtrusive ads tucked away on the Web page's right-hand rail and crisp, simple-looking content.
Saks, the Web analytics manager, said it will be interesting to see which type of travel website will hold the top slot down the road. "At TripAdvisor, it's the people and travelers and reviewers who are really showcased. It's a personal looking site. You really get a sense of the community when you visit TripAdvisor.com," he said. "You go to TravelPost.com and it does not look like a community website. It looks like a search engine. The question is: Will that work?"
Nicole C. Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com. 
