— How did KAYAK start and how has it changed since then?
— The team that launched the service already had experience in creating successful online projects in the tourism sector. Ticket sales were actively developing on the Internet in the early 2000s in the USA. Both agencies and the airlines themselves were involved. As the number of offers grew faster, it became harder to compare them. As a result, the idea to create a resource which gathered together information on all offers into one place emerged.
It was important to get away from any association with ticket sales, so they came up with a name for the service that wasn’t directly connected with traveling or flying. The name had to be easy to remember and no bigger than six characters long. The word “kayak” was picked out of several thousand variants.
Today, KAYAK is one of the world’s largest services for searching travel offers. Each month we process more than 150 million searches, helping travelers quickly plan the best trip to anywhere in the world.
— Why are package tours now giving way to independent travel?
— So KAYAK decided to enter the Russian market?
— How did you begin attracting the first Russian users?
Promotion of the service is handled by the actual staff in other countries. Why in Russia did KAYAK decide to work with an advertising agency?
— How have you arranged ad placement in Yandex.Direct?
— What technologies or features of Yandex.Direct turned out to be particularly useful to your business?
— Templates for instance are very helpful in creating a number of similar ads. They can be easily configured to create similar advertising campaigns for different sites and regions.
Using the keyword selection tool, we can follow the change in frequency of queries in different seasons, which is important in the tourism business. In addition we use the Direct Commander application. It’s great for working with a large volume of advertising campaigns.