Kayak Tries Side Hustle in Corporate Travel for Large Enterprises Like PwC

12.09.2023 - 13:07 / skift.com / Steve Hafner / Sean Oneill

Kayak, the travel price-comparison service, on Tuesday debuted a corporate travel service for large companies.

Kayak’s move does not reflect a major strategy shift. Yet the relative ease at which the consumer business created a corporate travel offering suggests that long-hyped concepts like blockchain may be leveling the playing field in a sector dominated by a handful of large players.

The product originated when PwC came to Kayak looking for help managing its corporate travel program.

Kayak provided its user interface and its supply — with more than 2,000 supplier connections. It teamed with Blockskye, a startup that provides distributed ledger technology for back-end services, especially connecting data for booking, payment, expense, authorization, and settlement.

PwC employees have now, for a few months, been booking some business trips using Kayak. When searching, they only see results from PwC-approved hotels and airlines and fare types, such as economy class. If a flight is canceled, a road warrior can contact Kayak for customer service (through a white-labeled travel management company partner) to help to rebook it, and all records will be updated accordingly — avoiding a need for error-prone reconciliation among different systems later.

“Users don’t have to file expense reports, and they don’t need a credit card to make their bookings, which is pretty awesome,” said Kayak CEO Steve Hafner. “Regardless of where the booking is made, direct from a supplier or indirect from an agency, they get all their loyalty points.”

This isn’t Kayak’s first move in business travel. In 2020, Kayak launched a travel booking solution for small and mid-size businesses. This free service offered basic travel management, such as letting companies set policies about what kind of travel is approved.

It now claims 30,000 customers.

One critique Skift noted in 2021 about the service was its lack of customer service support.

Kayak said it would soon address that issue by offering a $20-a-month version that includes customer service support.

Metasearch isn’t an obvious player in corporate travel. As Skift has noted before: “Ask a company travel manager for their biggest gripe, and they’ll likely say it’s employees who waste time trying to find a cheaper ticket, or room night, rather than go with the price showing up on the company’s online booking tool.”

But Hafner believes a compelling user interface that overcomes key friction points will coax road warriors into complying with their company policies. A lack of compliance is a major problem at some corporations — though blaming the employees sometimes like an all-purpose excuse for poorly designed travel management programs.

What about costs? Kayak says enterprise