There is good news for researchers and trend watchers from KAYAK (kayak.com), a major travel search engine. The company said that it has opened access to the site’s travel search data and launched a travel demand benchmark, providing an open source of travel statistics and information from hundreds of millions of travel searches.
“People have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on KAYAK in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends. We’re happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public,” Paul English, KAYAK CTO and co-founder said.
Trends data is available at kayak.com/trends for nearly any commercial airport in the world and for hotels in hundreds of the most searched destinations. The company also launched a proprietary travel demand benchmark, the KAYAK Travel Index. The statistical model provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites by modeling data for the average combined hotel and flight prices that people select.
KAYAK Chief Scientist, Giorgos Zacharia, an expert in predictive modeling, who developed the KAYAK Travel Index added, “The index essentially models how much an average traveler is willing to pay to visit a given destination by analyzing search behavior and selection patterns across all destinations searched on KAYAK sites.”
KAYAK’s mission is to help people find the best travel choices by searching the data from hundreds of travel sites with one search. KAYAK provides flight, hotel, car rental and vacation searchs, as well as travel search applications for mobile devices.
The company has local sites in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, India, Spain, and several other countries, and also operates travel search site SideStep and hotel reviews and information site TravelPost. Visit kayak.com, kayak.com/trends and kayak.com/
