Quite an admission from Kayak CEO Steve Hafner: Qunar is not going to be beaten in China.
At least, Hafner concedes that Kayak is not going to be the metasearch brand which manages to unseat the Chinese giant any time soon.
Speaking during a session at the PhoCusWright conference in Los Angeles this week, Hafner was commenting generally about how the Kayak business is attempting to scale outside of its stronghold of the US.
Despite the mammoth $1.8 billion acquisition by the Priceline Group in 2012, a move which was touted at the time as being helpful to Kayak for its international ambitions, Hafner admits "we have a long way to go worldwide".
Kayak is "doing well" and expanding into many new countries, Hafner says, but the big question mark looms over if it can replicate such successes in China.
"We are not going to beat Qunar," he says firmly.
Elsewhere around the world it will be the likes of Kayak, Skyscanner and Trivago that will be able to leverage their size in order to get some impact with a launch or expansion in new countries.
"It's a scale game" and the big boys of metasearch will make it work, Hafner says.
Kayak has been operating in Asia-Pacific for around a year, but clearly China is a different beast.
But, presumably, perhaps it is the size of the Chinese opportunity, where even just a fraction of the market still outweighs those of existing countries that a company operates in, means that the CEO of a business can seemingly wave the white flag so early.
NB:White flag image via Shutterstock.