In anticipation of the upcoming summer travel season, Kayak.com, the world’s largest travel search website, makes it even easier for people to find the right trip at the best price by introducing a new Buzz homepage.  Consumers who haven’t settled on a specific destination or travel dates can use the revamped Buzz to easily browse popular airfare deals worldwide.  New features include a weekend getaway filter, airfare history charting, and customized fare alerts and deal tracking.  

“Kayak.com’s enhanced Buzz homepage offers a quick snapshot of popular destinations, airfares, and pricing history across potential travel dates,” said Drew Patterson, VP of Marketing.  “Plus, Buzz is personalized so New Yorkers see deals from New York airports while San Franciscans see airfare deals from their city.  With these tools, there’s no reason to stay home this summer.”  

Users can access the new Buzz page by clicking the “Buzz” tab on Kayak.com.  Features include:

-The Fare Buzz search box lets people instantly find great travel deals.  Users can specify regions, travel month, number of stops, and price constraints. 

-Late Breaking Fares feature is a continuous scroll of up-to-the-minute prices from real time searches on Kayak.com.

-The Trip Ideas section offers vacation recommendations from fellow travelers and travel professionals.  The most popular Trip Ideas are listed on the homepage, and under “More Trip Ideas”, users can browse by category, popularity and keyword. 

-Creating and managing alerts are even easier.  Register a new alert by clicking “Create New Alert” and input departure airport, region or destination airport, preferred travel month or upcoming weekends, maximum price, number of stops, and frequency of notification. To modify or delete alerts, click on the “edit” button and check/uncheck new preferences. Fare alerts can also be received through email and RSS feeds.  More than 400,000 people are already receiving customized Kayak Buzz Alerts by email.   

Kayak Buzz was the first airfare history tool when launched in November 2005.  Several enhancements later, Kayak Buzz displays the lowest fares to the 25 most popular destinations from a traveler’s hometown, as found by Kayak users.  Consumers can further specify the fare buzz for a region: World cities, US, Europe, Caribbean, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia/Oceania. The Buzz product was further enhanced last summer with the launch of Best Fare History, an option to view up to 100 fare/itinerary combinations for a specific city pair found by other Kayak users over the past 36 hours and Best Fare Trend Graph which charts pricing for city/date pairs found by Kayak.com users over the past 90 days. 

Kayak.com traffic doubles in four months

Due to innovative features like the Buzz, Kayak.com’s popularity is rapidly growing among savvy travelers.  More than 17.5 million visitors performed over 20 million searches on Kayak.com and Kayak.co.uk in March, double the volume from December 2006.    New local language versions of Kayak.com will debut in France and Germany in early May, and the rest of Europe and India will launch by yearend.