My wife and I have a very specific travel style.  We like to go to foreign lands with only what we can cary on our backs.  We refuse to get professional travel agents to coordinate our travel, and we avoid America both in fashion and food.  No suprisingly, the planning process is requires a lot of attention.  I think that’s why I like it.

The last trip we scheduled was to Ecuador.  It included Christmas in Quito, a week of white water rafting with some Amazonian natives, New Year’s Eve back in Quite, and finally a week on an eco cruise through the Galapagos Islands.  It was a great trip.

On paper.

The night I mailed in my final deposit check for the cruise - the biggest chunk of change for that trip - I decided to get run over by a car.  My last words before going under the knife was “Anne, cancel that check.  Whatever you do tonight, cancel that check.”

The Ecuadorians were pissed, but what are you going to do?  I spent the next two months in a wheel chair followed by rehab followed by an unexpected pregnancy.  Not me.  My wife.

Needless to say, I haven’t had time to do much travel save a few trips to see family on both American coasts.  That’s why something as cool as Kayak has been exploding in popularity right under my nose.

Kayak is what the techies call a “Meta Search Engine”.  Before today, I was somewhat familiar with the term but under the assumption Meta Search only applied to the aggregation of traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo!  If I were to use Meta Search for my queries, I could expect a greater depth of search results and hopefully no redundancies. 

However, this form of Meta Search has never really exploded onto the scene.  They’ve been around for quite some time - in Internet time - but most people are content with just traditional search engines.  The logic goes that if you can’t find it on Google you can’t find it.

Enter Kayak.  Their mission was to apply the Meta Search Engine philosophy to a specific sector of the economy: travel (which is a $10 billion dollar industry online).  Their business model aggregates the availability and pricing of flights, hotels, car rentals and cruises from different online travel agents ranging from Orbitz to Travelocity to smaller, more obscure ones like cruisesonly.com. 

They have competition like SideStep and Yahoo! Farechase, but Kayak is breaking away from the pack.  Their growth has been 300% in the past year; 2.5 million unique visitors went to their site last year alone.  It is perhaps due to their great user interface complete with numerous filters and a great Google Mashup that shows you where the listings are located in town.  Click on a thumbnail for a full review with photographs and TripAdvisor star ratings:

According to Compete, Inc., a travel research company, Meta Search Engines are poised to reinvent the online travel category.  Already this summer the number of unique visitors using Meta Search for their travel needs has eclipsed 10 million.  This category growth is at the expense of more traditional online travel agents like Orbitz and Travelocity (OTA’s have seen a 5% drop from Q1 ‘05 to Q2 ‘06.  This could mean a major shift in how many of us book travel in the future.  It could also mean further brand devaluation for many of the major travel providers.

Here are the takeaways I’m getting from this trend:

• Meta Search will take over other industries where customers filter on price and attributes.  Think car insurance.  Think stereo equipment. 
• TripAdvisor, the king of user-generated travel content, will build out a Meta Search component to compete against Kayak.
• Kayak will add in user-generated content to their fantabulous map system.  In doing so, they will go head to head with TripAdvisor, Cruise Critic, and the like.
• Google will buy Kayak.  They probably already have.
• My long-postponed, customized trip to Ecuador will be a helluva lot easier to coordinate.