KAYAK Trends Alert: Thanksgiving Recap and Winter Break Trends

Norwalk, CT (PRWEB) -- KAYAK (kayak.com (www.kayak.com)), the world’s leading travel search engine released an analysis of travel search data for this past Thanksgiving holiday and trends for the upcoming 2010 winter break.

A review of KAYAK travel search data showed that most people searched for their Thanksgiving flights well in advance. 77% of people on KAYAK sites searched for flights at least 30 days before Thanksgiving, and less than 3% of people waited until the last week before the holiday.

“While we received a number of inquiries before Thanksgiving regarding last minute travel, only a small percentage of people waited until the last minute,” said Giorgos Zacharia, KAYAK’s Chief Scientist. “Since most people seem to book far in advance, we began looking at trends for travel this winter, and there seem to be some good deals.”

The following are highlights of KAYAK trends data comparing February airfare and hotels prices for popular destinations, based on the average prices selected by people searching in September and October of the previous year.

February travel prices % Change 2010 vs. 2009, Average Selected Price

Searches Conducted On KAYAK Sites in September and October 2009 vs. 2010

Popular beach destinations

•    Hawaii: airfare -2%, hotel rate -19%

•    Cancun: airfare -31%, hotel rate -13%

•    Trinidad and Tobago: airfare -17%, hotel rate -36%

Ski destinations

•    Denver: airfare -8%, hotel rates -24%

•    Aspen: airfare -21%, hotel rates -35%

•    Reno: airfare -19%, hotel rates +2%

•    Calgary: airfare +2%, hotel rates -14%

European destinations

•    London: airfare +3%, hotel rates -28%

•    Paris: airfare +1%, hotel rates -26%

•    Barcelona: airfare -16%, hotel rates -17%

KAYAK provides open access to its travel search data at kayak.com/trends (http://www.kayak.com/trends) for nearly any commercial airport in the world and for hotels in hundreds of the most searched destinations. KAYAK Trends data is based on flight and hotel searches made on KAYAK's network of sites (kayak.com, sidestep.com, travelpost.com, kayak.co.uk, other local market KAYAK-branded sites and KAYAK-affiliate sites) over the past 12 months.

KAYAK Overview

The company’s mission is to help people find the best travel choices easily by enabling them to compare hundreds of travel sites at once. KAYAK (kayak.com) provides powerful flight, hotel, car rental and vacation search, as well as travel search applications for mobile devices. The company has local sites in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, India, Spain, and several other countries, and also operates travel search site SideStep.com and hotel reviews and information site TravelPost.com. Visit kayak.com (http://www.kayak.com/), kayak.com/trends (http://www.kayak.com/trends) and kayak.com/mobile (http://www.kayak.com/mobile) to learn more.

For more information, contact:

Robert Birge,

Chief Marketing Officer

203-899-3100

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