In October, Kayak launched a hotel Recommendations filter that allowed users to narrow results by expert recommendations, and pulled in reviews from Frommer's and Budget Travel. Users will also be able to filter search results by TripAdvisor as well, ticking off a box will filter out any non-TA reviewed properties.
When you filter hotels by Trip Advisor ranking, you'll see how many stars each hotel received on Trip Advisor, where the hotel rated overall (excellent, very good, average, poor etc.) and what the hotel's rank is on TripAdvisor in the destination. The feature will be launching in the US and the UK today will be rolling out globally and mobile apps soon.
Considering TripAdvisor's place as the leader in user-generated reviews in the travel space, this is a big content win for Kayak. After a search for what hotels are available for a given trip on Kayak, I tend to go to TripAdvisor afterwards to checkout which hotels had the best reviews in my price range. And Kayak says that most of its users exhibit similar behavior as well. Clearly, by incorporating these reviews in search results, Kayak is saving users time.
For TripAdvisor, the Kayak integration will certainly help spread the reach of the site's reviews into other travel portals. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. TripAdvisor also has similar deals in place. For example, Expedia already integrates travel reviews from TripAdvisor.
With the IPO on hold , Kayak has been heads down on product development over the past few months. In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company's website most recently got a big UI upgrade , creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps. Kayak cleaning up and innovating as the companybattles with Google in the travel search space.
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