Global travel metasearch engine Kayak has officially announced its entry into the Indian market after having operating in the market since 2008.
Kayak, which has other travel portals such as Yatra, MakeMyTrip and Ibibo as partners on its platform, is a price and review comparison site and provides innovative travel tools to help people search, plan and manage their travel.
Imbert Fung, Director Southeast Asia and India at Kayak said that India is a rapidly growing travel market and has continued its impressive growth over the past several years. In addition, the Indian online travel market has immense potential, with increasing penetration and acceptance across domestic and international markets.
"We have exciting plans for 2017 and setting up operations here is a fantastic step towards making India one of our core markets. While we have had a presence here for a while and feel we understand the Indian user, we are now greatly enhancing our local presence by setting up country operations with Abhijit Mishra at the helm as the country manager for India," he added.
Kayak helps travellers get the information they need before they book and offers tools and features to assist them throughout their trip. The website and mobile app search hundreds of travel sites at once so that travellers have the information they need to make the best decisions.
According to a statement by the company, Kayak operates on a massive scale across the globe, with more than 40 international sites and in 20 languages, powering 1.5 billion queries annually for travel information and displaying results from hundreds of airlines, 900,000+ hotels, along with rental cars, holiday packages, activities and millions of verified reviews. The mobile app has already witnessed more than 55 million downloads.
Kayak is also launching algorithm based features for its users that allows them to get a forecast on how the prices are going to move in near future so that they can make their travel plans accordingly. Travellers can continually search and compare prices with ease and avail themselves of services like Price Alerts, Price Forecasts and free itinerary management with Trips, without having to go to multiple websites.