Connecticut startup Kayak has raised $223 million in venture capital and employs 58 people to build and grow its travel search site. Its chief competitor, San Francisco based Mobissimo, has raised $1 million and has just 15 employees. Mobissimo also became profitable last year, and the company doesn’t have to raise more money unless it’s to fuel faster growth or acquisitions.
It’s also clear even from a cursory comparison of the two sites that Mobissimo is trying harder than Kayak to help you find exactly the flight and hotel you are looking for. Kayak is largely similar to other travel search sites - enter where you want to go and get back results from a number of providers, sort by price, etc.
But Mobissimo has implemented a number of just plain smart features that provide the kind of travel options that you usually need a human operator or travel agent to get to. In addition to normal search results, for example, users also see options for the lowest priced non-stop fares, the lowest priced alternative dates, and the lowest priced business class fares (without doing new searches). And if there’s a train between the two destinations, Mobissimo will show those results along with the flights - you may get there faster and cheaper that way, and you’d never think to search for train schedules separately.
And even better, the service will look for related destinations and show you the lowest fares there, too. For example, a search for flights to Poland may show other Eastern European destinations if the prices are a lot lower. Or if you are looking for flights to an airport near a beach, Mobissimo will show you other flights to other beach destinations, perhaps thousands of miles away (and skiing, and wine regions, etc.). It’s very hard to find these kinds of travel options with online searches. If you are flying to Warsaw, you just don’t think to do a search to Prague, too, to see if it’s vastly cheaper.
And if all you want to do is find a quick getaway to gamble, play golf, drink wine, go to a beach or just about anything else, you can search primarily by activity, too. Mobissimo also has widgets on the site that pull in third party information about the destination. Weather, Flickr photos and (soon) travel guides are included in the left sidebar.
All of this isn’t to say that Mobissimo has more traffic or sales than Kayak - see the Comscore chart here for their relative sizes. But Mobissimo is a solid, profitable startup with a great user experience. And they’ve done it with next to no financial resources.
The company was founded by Beatrice Tarka in October 2003.
Tried Mobissimo last year when they had a booth at the TechCrunch party. It wasn’t very dazzling, especially not when they just left some old indian engineer try to explain what the site does.
Obviously they’ve since done a massive retooling of the service. Whereas before it was just offshored amateur hour, now it just looks like a Kayak clone. Oh here’s a nifty flickr widget on the side! Data seems pulled from the same sources (Orbitz), Mobissimo’s ticket providers are a crap shoot. It showed a cheaper ticket price (by $4 bucks) for a Vegas trip than Kayak but Cheapoair.com shows it as being $0.00 in pricing.
It’s marginally better than Kayak. So this begs the question: when you have 1/223 the capital and momentum of a bigger and better competitor is a cloned website with widgets going to cut it?
I personally like the Mobissimo guys and have respect for less-well-funded startups in general. However, let’s be honest, I don’t give a crap about Flickr photos or the weather today in a city I’m going to in a month. These widgets are really quite useless and DETRACT from the user experience.
Web 2.0 is all about feeds and pulling data from here and there. Great. It doesn’t do what I want it to do so I’m going back to Kayak/Sidestep.
Great features, mobissimo team seems to have done a great job with limited resources. Only other website i know that offer a calendar based interface is farecompare.com - Not sure why there is so few off them
Why does this post feel like your trying to make it up to Beatrice Tarka for wrecking her interview with Loren?
Seems like Kayak has just become an affiliate site for Orbitz lately. All my searches lately just return Orbitz. But the bigger question is who is hotter, Kayak CEO Steve Hafner or Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka?
tried mobissimo for international sites, they do have a ton of int sites and are way better in international searches, some obscure websites they search but they pull good international fares. at #5 the big lebowski, dunno, but krista pappas at farecast is dy-no-mite for sure.
I just messed around and wasn’t very happy with the site. It didn’t let me see the flight connections before sending me to another site, which is time consuming. The activity section is horrid. It asks for dates but then just sends you to the cheapest date it finds for the corresponding activity/area. ? Why bother asking for my dates of travel if you are just going to foce me to go in November? I think the design is nice, but this test run failed.
I know the Mobissimo team and want to give them their due for competing efficiently. The site and service are first-rate, and it shows that you don’t need millions (or hundreds of millions of dollars) to build a company effectively. In fact, haven’t we seen a lot of these super-funded companies spend their way straight to the dead-pool? Companies get big bucks and start spending and growing without focus, while their lean competitors continue to execute, bloat-free. Glad to see Mobissimo getting some props for delivering.
Mobissimo’s service is brillant. What makes a great startup isn’t money it’s PRODUCT.
223 million ?? what the hell can ask so much money ?! do they plan to buy Airbus A380 ?? !! ah ah ah
Long life to Mobissimo
mobissimo - classic example of well designed well executed site that does one thing well - and reak well. I love it.
kayak - overfunded, no focus, overpaid execs - that cannot execute. It’s what makes all of sick who actually create products that just work.
I use Mobissimo for my international travels. They’re just more connected, local airlines, more destinations. Just got a ticket from SFO to Provence (MRS) for $1412 or $110 cheaper than any other fare on all other sites then went to the “activity” section and selected “Europe” from MRS and got a flight from MRS to Madrid for $28 on Ryanair. That’s why I’ve been using Mobissimo for 2 years; they come back for innovations that help me for my international travels.
I live in Europe. Based on my own experience Mobissimo does the trick and outdoes Kayak all the way in airfare searches.
I had not even heard of kayak till I saw your tweet about this post. I love Mobissimo and used them to book travel for two upcoming events.
I’ve used Mobissimo many times for international travel, it’s excellent. I happen to know some team as well and they’re a good crew. Congrats Beatrice and team.
Ya that’s great, 1/223rd, but they have 17x the traffic and 5x growth multiple.
This is very interesting. I hadn’t realized they were better.
But, I know the Mobissimo team well. Beatrice is a very, very smart person. Her team with people like Peter Chin are great too. They definitely try hard and work hard and I can imagine that they build a better product. I better start trying them for my travel
I’ve used Mobissimo a number of times and I’m a big fan. They have a nice design, UI and bonus points for delivering useful information you didn’t even query for.
The two most important things for me in a travel site are quality of results and usability. Quality of results is obvious but usability is essential too. I often find myself changing dates, routes, options multiple times during a fare search and a site that makes this hard is painful to use. Mobissimo excels on both counts which is why I use it. Simple as that.
I can say that Mobissimo has excellent features, there is no better and faster website. ..
Without me blathering on about it, check it out for yourself at http://www.mobissimo.com
For international trips there’s no better than Mobissimo - particularly if the trip is a little more complex. Try SFO to Yemen via Auckland and Sydney … super fast results and a great fare!
They “borrowed” their “We search. You travel” slogan from “We point - You Travel.” at http://www.point-travel.com a site two years senior to them.
Just so you’ll know.
August 2003 archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/200.....ravel.com/
I’ve been using Mobissimo since their recent redesign, and they’re great! They definitely have the best prices and selection for trips overseas - I compared them against kayak, orbitz, travelocity, and expedia for my trip to Menorca earlier this month, and they found the best prices and selection.
Congrats Mobissimo for executing well!
No other service can hold a candle to Mobissimo for international travel. The other guys (Kayak etc) are duking it out in the extremely overcrowded and slow-growing US market. Mobissimo is tops for the real growth areas: trips to China or India for example.
Well, i have been using mobissimo for quite a while, and i do believe their service is great, and at the end of the day only service counts. It is easy to raise 223 million dollars from VCs, spend 196 million to acquire sidestep and to use the VC money to buy traffic. Any body can do that if the objective is not profitability. It is another thing to build up traffic on the quality of service and customer satisfaction and to reach profitability!
Kayak has bought their way to profitability when buying sidestep. The article is misleading, because their $233M of capital is mostly burnt and spent already, so it says nothing as far as financial robustness. It does says something about management and their unability to reach profitability on their own thought. They still have to integrate the two companies culture, which is going to be distracting, and down the road decide what to do in regards to their online properties. At the end of the day people want choice and alternative (one of the founding principles of these sites), and when the merger of sidestep and kayak into a single entity is consumed/well understood, then Mobissimo might very well be the real winner as the only standing second opinion for aggregated travel search. As far as feature set is concerned, I tend to agree with the author althought that I would loose the Flikr photos if I were them.
Roy #16, thanks for the support for me and Mobi, a small typo in your post, should be ‘Her team with people like Peter SHIN are great too. They definitely try hard and work hard and I can imagine that they build a better product.’ Thanks again. -Peter
wow that’s how I like to search & travel. This I will definitely use, can’t wait!
Mobissimo does NOT out-execute Kayak. Try looking for a hotel on there - there is no comparison to which one is better. Mobissimo is harder to navigate, find a hotel in a specific area you want, and there are a lot of other small things (like how you enter in your trip dates) that just make it inferior. There’s no map either. When you look for a flight, Mobissimo inserts ads right in the middle of the search results - haven’t they learned anything from that one company? I think its called Google or something like that…
It isn’t that far behind, but there is no way that it’s better than Kayak.
I’ll be more impressed with any of these travel sites when accessibility is searchable and accurate.
Nice article. Beatrice Tarka and her team remind entrepreneurs that the goal of a company is to create a useful product and be profitable, not just raising money! Congratulations!
I tried Mobissimo last year and I was hooked because the interface is simple and it saves me money, week after week. I like the recent features too: comparing Mobissimo and Kayak and the other search engines, it looks like Mobissimo is always two steps ahead. I wonder why? Maybe they care more about the travelers, or simply they are travelers themselves…
Mobissimo is pretty but it just doesn’t find the lowest fares or best schedules. I try to use it but I always feel like I have to double check the results on other sites and (so far) I have always been right to double check because there are better options out there that Mobissimo misses.
I will keep trying it but they have some serious work to do.
Hi Michael thanks for the post about Mobissimo and capturing various aspects of our company and the service we have built.
To all TechCrunch Readers ( and Mobissimo users) thanks for your support. We also appreciate the feedback we got here on what we are misisng and how we can improve our service. Stay tuned we will deliver!
As a team we are excited- Mobissimo has its own game-plan and product and strategy vision to get us to the next step.
We have robust proprietary technology and experience as travelers so keep an eye on Mobissimo for more product releases and improvements this and the next year.
As for competition- we like our competition and its is great we are all working on better ways to search- each new product release, at the end benefits us- the travelers.
As Italians say though the Games just began
Forza Mobissimo and MobiTeam- kudos to all my colleagues - they have embarked with me on this adventurous startup trip and continuously deliver!
Boudica #31- please email us with what sites would you like us to search- we keep adding new ones every week.
Jon #28 - we have concentrated on Air Search Improvement. In the hotel section we search more hotels than Kayak so far. The next step is releasing UI which addresses all the issues you’ve mentioned and deliver even more. We have collected feedback from users and we are eager to show what we can do.
Alaska Miller# 1 : Mobissimo launched before Kayak.
Your question at the end: Time will tell…..
I don’t get it. I am trying Mobissimo for a simple cross country trip between the Bay Area and North Carolina and the options that come back are not very good. Even though there are literally dozens of of flights that get in on the day I specify, the top results show flights that arrive the next day. The UI doesn’t make this explicit at all and I control the time the trip is over but not the day??? Or duration? I don’t see alternative airports (I’m trying SFO to RDU but I happen know there are non-stops to CLT whereas there are none to RDU). And I can’t tell where things connect without going 1-by-1 to the destination sites.
Explain to me how this is better, or even as good, as Kayak? As a user, I don’t really care that they developed it on the cheap.
BTW: In case anybody is listening out there (and I get the feeling that they are since IMHO the raves can only be coming from employees/friends/family of mobissimo) - what I really want is a good way to see and control where my connections are. If I can’t get a non-stop, show me flights that connect through city X rather than city Y. I’d much rather connect through, say, Las Vegas, than Chicago (at least I think so — would be useful to also see statistics about on-time etc….)
Follow up… now trying the same thing on Kayak. Looks like they’ve recently added the feature I asked for in previous post (not perfect… when I select certain layover airports I get no results… why are they in the list for my search?… but really a big step forward!)
As it turns out, Kayak also recommends flights that arrive next day - but at least they show the duration - and I can filter these out easily enough using the time/date of arrival filter which is much better designed than the one on mobissimo.
No interstitials while I wait for results (Kayak shows results as they get them… much more pleasing effect) and no promises of $220 alt date fares that turn out not to exist.
Seriously… again… how are these sites comparable?
Tried mobissimo - for standard domestic travel in the US it’s not even a comparison. Mobissimo fails to deliver some basic functionality that is absolutely critical to a frequent traveller. Mobissimo gives no obvious option to filter by airport (try flying into DC - BWI flights take the first 3 pages). As a frequent northeast corridor traveler I was hoping the train integration would be more seamless as well, but so far I see nothing that makes me want to switch from kayak.
Somehow, I just don’t think this number is accurate. Mobissimo has been around a WHILE now, I cannot see how only 1$M is ALL that they have taken in or used. I think I was looking at them at LEAST three years ago, and a quick archive search shows data from as far back as 2002. 1M$ for six+ years? Not a chance.
I prefer all luxury travel sites like http://www.perfectescapes.com as it shows me only those hotels i would consider staying in when traveling. the technology of sites like kayak and mobissimo are impressive but i value sites that have experts do most of the filtering for me.
Never. Ever. Underestimate Terry Jones. Kayak has staying power, particularly now Sidestep is inside… Kudos to Ms. Tarka. It will make her exit that much sweeter having achieved so much with so little.
Just a note: Mobissimo was co-founded by Beatrice Tarka, Svetlozar Nestorov, and Lucia Carniglia:
http://www.mobissimo.com/company/founders.html
I am willing to wager kayak wasted alot of their resources and man hours trying to use the JSP platform. It is a pain. Mobissimo made the right choice developing in PHP.
I use Mobissimo all the time because I’m sure it will find the best fares. kudos to Techcrunch for profiling it.
A good execution, but whether or not Kayak has been sufficiently out executed is another story. If at this point, it’s Kayak’s move so to speak, then Mobissimo has not placed itself in a position where they cannot be out-manuevered by the very predecessor whose style they’ve managed to bite so well. I hope the two of them go at it though, it can only mean good things for the little people.
I find Mobissimo’s search technology innovative and most importantly designed to capture the international audience. While kayak.com is struggling with beta translations, your friends and family around the world can easily shop at mobissimo.com for hotels and flights in the comfort zone of their language. It is a smarter approach than hoping to reach over 728 million Europeans with a single English message.
With time, the number of “bookers” not “lookers” will determine who can sustain the competition and oil prices. I look forward to seeing Mobissimo grow exponentially across the globe. Fine job of work, Mobissimo team!
Mobissimo and Kayak mainly seem as affiliates to Orbiz and they both seem to beleive that web2.0 is all about attitude - trying eagerly to be forefront in web2 slang - doesn’t work.
The true aggregators that are strong in the international market seem to be http://www.momondo.com and http://www.skyscanner.net. They both search all the low cost carriers not included in old-school portals like orbitz, expedia and travelocity.
We should be realistic that Mobissimo and Kayak are following two distinct paths.
Kayak tries mostly to maximise revenue while not making a top priority having the entire inventory in hand. This explains the exclusivity which Kayak has with Orbitz on certain routes. This approach actually works well for the US market where inventory is all the same anyway. For international travel Mobissimo has more comprehensive inventory and cheaper prices. With its marketing power Kayak has cornered distribution very well especially after the Sidestep purchase.
Mobissimo on its end is trying to make sure the entire inventory is available to the customer thus leaving the decision what is relevant and what not to the customer. From my perspective this is a more Web 2.0 approach as it empowers the customer.
As far as Momondo and Skyscanner are concerned - First of all it is not true that Momondo does not work with travel agencies.Actually both they and Skyscanner do especially, on routes not covered by low cost airlines.
admit it. you just have a crush on beatrice. get in line bro…
purchase Mobissimo ? diffcultly
it’s great to see mobissimo able to gather all its users in one place.