How Kayak.com Uses Web Scraping
and Data Aggregation to Make Money
What is Kayak?
If you’ve booked a flight anytime in the last few years, you almost definitely know Kayak.
Just so we’re all on the same page, though, here’s a quick overview. Kayak gives you the
ability to search flights that are available on specific dates and times, and shows you all the
ticketing options for those flights, across multiple airlines.
For the user, the deal is pretty sweet. Instead of having to go to multiple airline websites,
searching for the possible tickets, then having to compare all the flight options for price and
convenience (can you imagine how long that would take?), it’s all there in one place.
That’s the real key to Kayak’s success: the site solves a problem you may not have even
known you had.
How Kayak works
Instead of visiting any number of sites to manually search for flight information, Kayak lets
you find everything you need in one place. Kayak scrapes that flight data from multiple sites
and aggregates it, presenting it in a clean, user-friendly search interface. From a
technological standpoint, some of the airlines might have APIs that Kayak plugs into; for
other airlines different scraping techniques might be used.
The bottom line: Kayak figured out a way to automate the things people were doing
manually. They made consumers’ lives easier by streamlining the task, making it easier and
also allowing them to save money.
How Kayak makes money
As a business, Kayak has multiple revenue streams. They’d generate a commission on each
ticket sold through their site. They also sell advertising to airlines, for greater visibility to the
target audience: people buying flights. It’s highly likely that Kayak also sells some data back
to the airlines – aggregate data generated through the searches performed through their site.
You can, too
There are endless sources of data online. That means there are limitless opportunities to
make money by scraping and aggregating that data, making it easier to access and more
valuable to the people who need it.
Check out my full video rundown on Kayak here, and while you’re there, don’t forget to like
and subscribe so you don’t miss more videos like this one.
Learn more about Cobalt Intelligence here.