Yahoo FareChase

» see farechase.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

flight meta-search did not reach me as a category for a long time. through farechase's whole independent life i was a teenager in turkey, and through farechase's whole yahoo life i was at engineering school and my flights ran through a turkish travel agency or through thy.com directly. the comparison-shopping habit americans had for domestic flights was carrying a different shape in turkey, where intercity travel was mostly an overnight bus and an airline ticket was an event.

lior delgo and ofer shaked founded farechase in israel in 1999. the company built web automation that crawled airline and online travel agency sites in real time to compose a single fare comparison page. by 2004 farechase was indexing about 39 separate e-travel sources. yahoo announced the acquisition in early july 2004 with an estimated price above 20 million dollars and folded the 25-person staff into yahoo travel.

on 25 march 2009 yahoo closed the product. carol bartz had taken over as ceo in january 2009 from jerry yang and the first cleanup round cut underperforming product lines. yahoo's official statement said the closure would let the company focus on yahoo travel guides and trip planner. travelocity, which had refused to participate in farechase results all along, celebrated quietly.

~ the case file ~

~ what farechase did ~

the technical pitch was real-time crawling instead of pre-cached fare feeds. itasoftware sold a sabre-style pricing engine to the airlines and to a few search products. kayak licensed from itasoftware and bolted on the brand. farechase wrote its own scrapers and ran them against airline websites on every query. the answer was supposed to be fresher than anything itasoftware-derived and cheaper to operate than a full pricing engine.

the legal exposure was real. american airlines sued farechase as early as 2003 for accessing aa.com without a partnership agreement. southwest and a few others followed. the litigation set boundaries for the kind of scraping a meta-search product could do. kayak ended up licensing its way around the same problem.

~ the kayak problem ~

kayak launched in 2004, the same year yahoo bought farechase. within two years kayak had the brand recognition that farechase never got and the product-design team that yahoo did not staff up around its acquisition. by 2008 kayak was running about 60 million queries a month and farechase was a tab inside yahoo travel that some users found and most users did not.

the travelocity holdout was the part that hurt. one of the four major us online travel agencies refused to participate in any meta-search index, which meant farechase results were missing a chunk of inventory by definition. the user side of meta-search collapses fast when a known fare source is absent from the comparison.

~ the actual end ~

bartz arrived 13 january 2009 with a mandate to cut costs. the techcrunch and bloomberg coverage of the bartz era used the phrase "wields the knife" in headlines almost weekly through the first quarter. farechase landed in the 25 march round along with several other yahoo properties. the closure was clean, the staff was absorbed or laid off, and yahoo travel kept running on partner-feed inventory without the meta-search layer.

kayak ran on through to a 1.8 billion dollar priceline acquisition in 2012. itasoftware sold to google in 2010. the meta-search category that farechase pioneered became one of the larger categories in consumer travel software. yahoo's exit from the segment was final.

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