Kayak World's 5th Largest Travel Site

Big announcement last Thursday afternoon, Mike Arrington broke the news, that Kayak has raised $196 million, from multiple sources including Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, and acquired SideStep.

The companies reported that the combined traffic and revenue will create the "world's fifth largest travel site." The combined entity have reported gross bookings/sales of $3.5 billion and revenues of $85 million. More at search engine land.

Kayak has reported that the "merger will bump the number of searches on its sites to 33 million in January, more than double the 16 million in January 2007." In a redherring story, Paul English says "Kayak is taking aim at Expedia, the No. 1 web site based on travel searches per month... At the same time, Kayak partners with Expedia by referring searchers to that site, which serves as a ticket-selling agency... [similar to] shopping search engine like shopping.com and a retailer like BestBuy."

Greg Saks of Compete pulled together an excellent analysis of the Kayak/SideStep merger. Definitely worth reading. Thought it would be interesting to look at Farecast and Mobissimo, the number two and number three travel search player, relative to Kayak. (Granted that with the acquisition of SideStep, this gap increase substantially.)

John Cook at Seattle PI weighed in on how this deal impacts Farecast.

GigaOm testing Mobissimo and Farecast against the rest and scored them both higher.

This is a big deal and sets us up for another exciting year for online travel in 2008.

(Disclosure: I work for Farecast.)