Hafner, English and a search across travel sites.

Kayak was founded in January 2004 by Steve Hafner and Paul M. English, according to English Wikipedia. It did not start out under that name. The Independent, profiling Hafner in its IndyVenture series on 26 April 2017, reported that he founded the business in 2004 as Travel Search Company; Wikipedia, citing the company’s own annual report, says the name was changed to Kayak Software Corporation in August 2004. The brand is styled in capitals, as KAYAK.

Hafner had worked in online travel before. The Independent says he helped start Orbitz in 1999, a booking site backed by a group of US airlines, and he told the paper that even there he was dissatisfied, because the site could not show visitors every hotel or airline and pushed them to buy through it rather than from the travel companies directly. Of Kayak’s origins he said: “I was totally dissatisfied with all the trip planning options out there.” Visiting one travel site after another was time-consuming, he added: “I thought there had to be a better way but there wasn’t so we built one.” Wikipedia describes the result as a metasearch engine for flights, hotels, rental cars and holiday packages — a site that searches across many others and then sends the traveller on to book.

Paul English, the co-founder, served as chief technology officer. The Independent credits him with pushing the company toward phones early: Hafner recalled English suggesting a BlackBerry app and admitted he thought his partner “was crazy”, because he assumed people wanted to look at airline tickets on a big screen. English later left to found another travel company, Lola. Hafner, for his part, told the paper he wanted anyone planning a trip to “reflex link” to Kayak, an ambition he said he had held since starting the company. The public site followed in February 2005; Wikipedia dates the launch to that month, and Phocuswire later reproduced a screenshot of Kayak.com from February 2005, when it came out of beta, to show how far the design had moved on.

Acquisitions, a NASDAQ listing and Booking Holdings.

The company grew by buying rivals. Wikipedia records that in December 2007 Kayak raised a new round of financing from investors including Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst and used it to acquire SideStep, another travel search site. The Independent described the same moves, saying Kayak “swallowed” SideStep in the US, bought a travel site in Germany in 2010 and later another in Austria. Wikipedia names them as Swoodoo, acquired in May 2010, and Checkfelix, acquired in April 2011. SideStep itself was shut down in January 2011, Wikipedia says, with its traffic redirected to Kayak.com.

Kayak went public in July 2012. TechCrunch reported on 20 July 2012 that the company had debuted on the NASDAQ under the ticker KYAK, after filing to go public in late 2010. The same report said Kayak had started paying closer attention to its mobile products at the end of 2011, updating its interface across mobile and the web, and it named Google, which had bought the flight-search technology provider ITA, as a potential competitor. Hafner made the same point to The Independent five years later, calling Google Kayak’s main rival for engineering talent, machine learning and data.

Its time as an independent public company was short. Wikipedia says Priceline.com — the company now called Booking Holdings — acquired Kayak on 21 May 2013, and The Independent put it as the Priceline Group taking full control less than a year after the listing. Booking Holdings has owned Kayak since 2013, alongside Priceline and Booking.com.

Kayak has also gathered other search brands under its own roof. Wikipedia says it added momondo and Cheapflights to its portfolio in 2017, after Booking Holdings bought the Momondo Group, and took on leadership of HotelsCombined in 2018 when the parent company acquired it. Wikipedia gives the headquarters as Norwalk, Connecticut; The Independent described the company in 2017 as based in Stamford, Connecticut, and Phocuswire placed its technology offices in Concord, Massachusetts, in 2012.

Design and documentation.

Travel sites live on small screens as much as large ones, so their identities are tested at very different sizes. A wordmark that reads well across the top of a desktop search page has to survive as a home-screen app icon, a favicon in a browser tab and a tiny badge on a booking confirmation email. Many travel brands answer that problem with a compact symbol or a single letter that can stand alone when the full name will not fit, and keep the wordmark for larger placements.

Colour does a lot of work in this category. A consistent brand colour helps a user spot the right app among dozens on a phone and recognise the brand inside a crowded comparison results page. Mascots and characters play a similar role: an animal, a figure or a costumed spokesperson can carry a brand across television, social video and outdoor advertising without relying on the name alone.

Television spokespeople and recurring advertising characters have long been part of the travel-site playbook, giving a web service a face and a voice. When a company refreshes its identity, these elements are often redrawn, retired or brought back, so it is worth checking the date of any logo, icon or campaign before treating it as current.

A website redrawn to match its apps.

A detailed account of how Kayak approached its own look dates from January 2012. Phocuswire reported on 30 January 2012 that Kayak was unveiling a website redesign it described as iPad-influenced, intended to create one consistent experience across its many platforms. Paul English explained that a semi-independent iPhone team, supervised by Bill O’Donnell, chief architect and general manager of Kayak Mobile, had worked on a “parallel track” to the rest of the company, and that the iPhone and iPad apps had ended up offering a better experience than Kayak.com itself. The mobile team then set out to bring the website into line with them.

English set out the aims plainly. The redesign was meant to “introduce a universal color palette, simplify logos and typefaces, and incorporate more white space”. Phocuswire showed hotel photo pages where the picture dominated against a black backdrop, and hotel pages where the flights, hotels, cars and deals tabs moved from a left-hand column to the top. Chief scientist Giorgos Zacharia described a minimalist approach that hid little-used filters. Those choices were tested in a usability lab at the company’s offices in Concord, Massachusetts, where cameras followed how participants’ eyes moved across each page. Kayak also issued new specifications for display advertising on its site, so that the colours of other companies’ ads would sit with its own scheme, and replaced the hide link under each ad with a single link to hide them all. The redesign launched in the US only.

Television advertising has come from outside agencies. Adweek reported on 1 November 2010 that Barton F. Graf 9000, the New York agency Gerry Graf had launched that September, would take over lead creative duties for Kayak.com from Goodby, according to chief marketing officer Robert Birge. On 15 February 2012 Adweek’s Tim Nudd wrote about one of the agency’s spots, directed by Harold Einstein: a brain surgeon with no free time after work fits his search for flights and hotels into his operations, with help from an unconscious patient.

For a design guide, Kayak shows a search brand letting its apps set the standard for its website — one colour system, simpler marks and plenty of white space, with even paid advertising asked to fit the palette. Compare it with Priceline, its sister brand under Booking Holdings, and Google, the search company Kayak’s founder named as its main rival. For this guide we use search orange, ink and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kayak’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.