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Kayak IPO parked on tarmac

November 17, 2011 | Online Travel

Technology companies ranging from Groupon to Angie's List have launched IPOs lately. Then, there's Kayak Software Corp. A year ago this week, the travel website filed documents for an initial public offering. But Kayak has sat on the IPO tarmac, writes The Wall Street Journal.

As Kayak's IPO sits on the shelf, deep-pocketed competitors are pushing into online-travel services.

ITA Software Inc., which Google acquired this spring, provides most of the data Kayak uses for its airfare searches. As regulators weighed the Google-ITA deal, Kayak was among travel-site operators that warned Google could advance its own travel offerings by limiting rivals' use of ITA flight data.

People familiar with the online-travel industry credit Kayak with drawing increasing numbers of users despite stiff competition, including from Google, which recently started experimenting with its own flight- and hotel-search tools. In the first six months of this year, consumers did 443 million travel searches on Kayak, or 49% more than a year earlier, according to the company's IPO documents, which it has continued to update.

Some of Kayak's other benchmarks have weakened, however. In the first half of the year, Kayak's revenue rose 36% from a year earlier to $109.4 million, slowing from a 2010 growth rate of 51%, and it sustained a loss from operations as it shut down one of the websites it acquired, according to Kayak's most-recent financial information.

Get the full story at The Wall Street Journal (free content)

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