UPDATE: Have Travelzoo and Kayak found a new BFF (Best Friend Forever) in each other?
Not only, as it turns out, is Travelzoo's Fly.com beta testing hotel and car rental feeds from Kayak, but Kayak has become a Travelzoo syndication partner.
Travelzoo air, hotel, car, cruise, vacation, entertainment and Local Deals are now integrated into Kayak.com's Deals section and newsletters, officials from Travelzoo and Kayak say.
Here's a screenshot of a Travelzoo-provided deal in the Kayak Deals section:
Diego Sanchez, general manager of the Travelzoo syndication network, says the two companies are testing a number of features and they will talk more about their new-found partnership in several weeks.
"I am very excited and think it will be a good relationship," Sanchez says, adding that the two companies "are testing some cool stuff."
Robert Birge, Kayak's chief marketing officer, in continuing the love fest, says Kayak decided to integrate the Travelzoo deals a couple of months ago because Travelzoo is a "premium provider of deals content and a great source of content."
Sanchez says Fly.com decided to go ahead with a soft launch of hotels and cars powered by Kayak because Fly.com is always looking to add content and functionality for users.
He declined to elaborate on Travelzoo's reasoning for reaching a white label partnership.
Sanchez also declined to comment about why the then-imminent launch of hotels and cars on Fly.com in Germany in 2010 never took place.
The original post follows:
A year-and-a-half after a Travelzoo official talked of an imminent launch, which never happened, of Fly.com hotel and car hire features in Germany, Fly.com is now beta testing hotels and cars in the US and Kayak is powering the hotel search.
In another development, coincidence or not, Glen Drury, who headed Travelzoo Local Deals in Europe, has left the company.
Do the two seemingly separate events symbolize some sort of Travelzoo reset in the works?
Consider that Fly.com hotels and cars metasearch was on the brink of being introduced in Germany in 2010, but then parent company Travelzoo went full-throttle into the Local Deals vouchers business, which was going gangbusters for awhile.
Then, earlier this month, Travelzoo reported that there was a "slowdown" in its Local Deals business in August 2011, a trend that the company attributed to seasonality.
There were plenty of skeptics about the seasonality factor being the driving force in the slowdown as there has been a bit of a shakeout in the voucher business sector-wide.
So, there is speculation that perhaps the beta of Fly.com hotels and cars in the US may symbolize a Travelzoo refocusing on metasearch and the newsletter business -- or at least hedging its bets in the event that Local Deals becomes an uphill battle.
Fly.com US's new hotel feature, which like cars is currently only viewable to a segment of users, is powered on a white label basis by Kayak.
The US apparently is the first region getting Fly.com hotels and car rentals. Until now, Fly.com has offered flights only.
Kayak.com's hotel search has a few more tweaks -- Google Maps, for example -- than Fly.com's Kayak-powered hotel search, but the participating sites, the user ratings and reviews appear identical.
Here's Fly.com's search results for a hotel stay in Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 14-21.
Here's the same search on Kayak.com:
In the case of the Hotel Barcelona Universal, for example, Fly.com displays the same sites (although the manner in which they are shown is different) and even offers Kayak's book on Kayak.com feature among the 12 site options.
Although it doesn't do so in the beta, the Fly.com hotels feature will give Travelzoo the opportunity to integrate or cross-promote hotel deals from its Top 20 newsletter into Fly.com.
Fly.com officials didn't immediately respond to inquires about its hotel and cars beta.
Travelzoo apparently decided that it would be easier to go the white-label route with Kayak for hotels than to build an in-house solution.
Fly.com sources its flight search from parties such as ITA Software in the US and Amadeus internationally.
It was unknown how Fly.com is obtaining its cars data in the beta.
The white label agreement with Fly.com is obviously a win for Kayak, which also powers Bing Travel's flight search.
One question that looms is whether the Fly.com brand becomes outdated, now that Fly.com is offering hotels and cars in addition to plane tickets.