Online Travel Agency Kayak Opening Hotel In Miami Beach

Airbnb has dipped its toes in the biz as well, no?

If I'm a hotel in Miami and have signed a contract with Kayak to be featured on their site, why would I not be worried about a conflict of interest here? Isn't this what Amazon is in trouble for - duplicating products and featuring them at the top of their search pages?

Ahhh, they want to turn hotel check-in into airport kiosk check-in, among other things.

Slightly unrelated, but Steve Hafner (CEO of Kayak) has one of the best LinkedIn profiles I've ever read.

"Specialties: Luck. Brevity. But mostly, staying out of the way of the talented people who work with me."

Regarding his current role at Kayak: "Blame me for things we're doing wrong. I'll try to fix them. In the meantime, we'll keep innovating on travel."

On his time at BCG: "One of the best powerpoint monkeys on their staff. I quickly realized that producing one good slide a day kept me on the payroll."

And a consulting role prior to that: "My bosses happily overcharged their clients for my work. Gosh, was I inexperienced."

i love Kayak, its the best flight search app/website there is. they know what theyre doing, and this hotel will hopefully make it even better. i wish them much success-cant wait for ur review ben!

Interesting approach because Booking Holdings owns both Kayak and Opentable, and this sounds like Opentable for hotels. But Opentable didn't open its own restaurants so...

As for your thought that someone at the front desk has to monitor the app traffic, Disney has off-site call centers field front desk calls. Disney's hotels are generally not that good at front desk response but for a smaller property, a Kayak linked call center with good back-end software could be a competitive advantage over paying multiple people to work the overnight shifts.