After integrating its flight price-tracking with TripIt a couple of months ago, Yapta continues its coming out party by entering into a hoped-for mutually beneficial arrangement with metasearch leader Kayak.
Under the deal, Kayak was set today to begin powering flight search on Yapta.com, a move that Yapta believes will increase conversions and media revenue.
Barring last-minute glitches, it is slated to look like this.
Then, within a few months, Kayak will integrate Yapta's price-tracking and flight refund services into Kayak's SideStep.com and later into Kayak.com itself.
Yapta's integration into SideStep may look something like this.
And, unless it's tweaked beyond recognition, Yapta's mashup into Kayak could appear thusly.
Here's what changes for Yapta: It currently has direct connects to some 35 airlines and it has a relationship with an unnamed GDS to track price drops on flights.
With Kayak powering search for Yapta on Kayak's servers, Yapta will get access to additional airlines and "with the flip of a switch can track price drops because of our GDS relationship," says Yapta founder and CEO Tom Romary.
In addition to providing more airlines, Kayak provides Yapta with multicarrier flights, Romary says. For example, this might entail an American Airlines outgoing flight and a United Airlines flight on the return.
Romary explains that Yapta didn't want to invest more monies in search and decided to team with Kayak, which he termed the best and largest metasearch player.
In turn, in several weeks SideStep will get Yapta's "track price drops feature" and will conduct studies to assess user behavior to fine-tune implementation. Some time after that, Kayak.com is slated to get the price-drops feature, as well.
A Yapta spokesman characterized the two companies as taking a "crawl, walk, run" approach to the rollout.
Romary declined to discuss the terms of their agreement, which covers flights, but not Yapta's hotel service, which is powered by Orbitz.
Yapta's strategy is to go out to major industry players and strike such co-marketing and distribution relationships as it has done with TripIt and now Kayak.
Romary claims that combining search and price tracking increases conversions 20-25% and that price tracking brings increased user engagement, which helps the advertising and media business.
In the partnership, Kayak likely will increase its traffic from Yapta's 750,000 registered users, and adds pricing tracking and refunds, another nifty reason to visit SideStep and Kayak.
While Kayak won't have Bing Travel's price predictions, Kayak will have Yapta and its GDS partner in the fold to monitor flight-price fluctations.