A long time ago (okay, three years ago), Kayak co-founder and CEO Steve Hafner (in)famously labelled metasearch newbie Hipmunk as "road kill".
Attendees at the 2012 Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, laughed and gasped as Hafner played word association game during an on-stage, one-on-one interview.
It was a typical Hafer moment - publicly pour scorn on your potential rivals and raise a few chuckles in the process - and happened despite being bought for $1.8 billion by the Priceline Group just a few days before (and having a new, extremely sensible and always diplomatic boss in the shape of then-CEO Jeff Boyd).
Hipmunk has not usurped Kayak since then, as most predicted it wouldn't, but back in the heady days of 2011 and 2012 (when metasearch started to gain some significant traction as a important channel for hotel and airline distribution) the fledgling site was credited with introducing a few features that had never really be seen in the market before.
One in particular was the so-called "ecstasy" rating (following on from its original "agony index" for flights), where searching for hotels on the site could be carried out by seeing the location of properties on a map with an accompanying heat map overlaid to show their proximity to shopping, nightlife and attractions.
HRS also produced a similar tool for its Facebook page in November 2012, so users could search for hotels based on where their friends had stayed previously.
Despite Hipmunk's apparent likeness to dead animals on the highway, perhaps the idea did resonate deep down with Hafner as, four years on, Kayak has introduced its own version of the heat-mapping functionality.
The website will push the feature live next week, as part of its hotel search channel, using data and technology from Avixu.
Users will be able to search for a hotel based on its location on a map and discover if it is close to areas renowned for their restaurants, shopping, nightlife and sightseeing attractions.
For example, New York (sightseeing):
London (shopping):
The heat maps are determined by Avuxi by mining 54 different data sources to generate a ranking based on the most popular outdoor activities and most visited places in a destination.
Ecstasy for Kayak users, agony for Hafner after seemingly mirroring a feature from the "road kill" of the industry.