Farecast - airfare predictions

Farecast the first airfare prediction site that helps people "know when to buy" airline tickets opened up Private Beta last week. Send me an email at mfridgen [at] gmail [dot] com for access to the site.

The company received great blog coverage, including John Cook's blog, TechCrunch, Stuart MacDonald's blog, Techdirt, and, as of 10am this morning, 530 people dugg it on Digg.

(Disclosure: I run marketing and product development for Farecast.)

Kayak expanding into Europe

Kayak raises $11.5M from Accel to launch a nationwide advertising campaign and expand into Europe. Pretty bold statement from the Kayak CTO in the press release "[We are} eager to reshape the European online travel market." There are several existing travel search engines in Europe and I'm not sure how $11.5M spread accross the U.S. and Europe gets that done. They are a talented group at Kayak, so should be interesting nonetheless. The full press release at FareCompare Blog. Here is a excerpt:

NORWALK, Conn., May 22 /PRNewswire/ — Kayak.com, the world’s largest travel search engine, today announced the completion of a $11.5 million Series C financing round led by Accel Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm with offices in London and Silicon Valley. Kayak.com will use this investment to fund extensive offline and online marketing campaigns launching this June and for European expansion scheduled for the fall.

“Kayak.com is eager to reshape the European online travel market in the same way we have improved how Americans search and book travel,” said Paul English, Kayak.com CTO and co-founder.

Accel Partners joins existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital and America Online. Kayak.com has raised a total of $30 million since the company launched in January 2004.

Group travel awareness wars

Group travel is really up for grabs. TripHub got a nice bump from yesterday's lifehacker posting. Hearing more about the tripmania guys. Groople is still out there, albeit a different model.

Google Trends, Kayak growth

Check out kayak.com, sidestep.com Google Trends graph. (Image would not upload correctly.)

OK, I admit it, I just love these graphs. New tool to help watch the Kayak vs. SideStep saga unfold. Curious how companies will feel about this information being so readily available to their competitors. Interesting to see how each site does from different cities... guessing Qwest skews Denver numbers.