14 DAY TRIAL // The recent acquisition that Kayak made of Sidestep, valued at 200 million dollars, forced Yahoo! Travel to step up its game and stop lingering about. The first move they made was to drag the FareChase tab from the shelving and put it front and center on their page. It shows the default search engine for pricing flights, hotels, cars and vacations.
The deal I've mentioned earlier was very dangerous for Yahoo, because the combined traffic to the Kayak and Sidestep networks in December, in the United States, was 6.3 million individuals, according to comScore.com, bringing then within striking distance of Yahoo Travel's 7.3 million.
Yan Lee, the former manager of Y!T noticed the change and offered his analysis on his 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."
It's a bold move, Yahoo just gave up on the short-term profits to the more important maintaining and capturing market share. Actually, despite it not looking like much, the Farechase has actually been built a business around it by the dev team, in order to replace the old Travelocity deal.
As a funny fact, Kayak, now its the biggest competitor, was designed to be a copy of the application Farechase originally built. The Yahoo! Travel service is easy to use and quick, but the interface looks old and to that extent Kayak might win. Nevertheless, it is a market based on functionality and not good looks, so Farechase's searching more travel sites might be a winner.