Kayak and Skyscanner CEOs: Metasearch Is Evolving

At a Skift summit appearance, top executives from leading travel comparison platforms Kayak and Skyscanner shared their insights on the future of metasearch amidst the rise of artificial intelligence, arguing that these platforms are not being replaced but are instead being rebuilt around AI, trust, and upper-funnel discovery.

Peer Bueller, who took over as Kayak's CEO in February after a decade as CFO, noted that Google's Gemini interfaces and carousels have pushed traditional metasearch results down the page. This shift turns traffic that once arrived organically into paid acquisition, while simultaneously requiring a presence inside large language models.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

Addressing the complexity of price comparison, Bueller stated that building comparison data is far from a basic commodity. It relies on complex supplier integrations, direct database access, and commercial usage agreements rather than simple web scraping, noting that Kayak could scale significantly with a traveler-centric and AI-centric model.

"The test is whether deep live pricing and trust engineering beat horizontal agents on convenience alone."

Peer Bueller

Meanwhile, Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista outlined a parallel expansion path into hotels, cars, packages, and planned multimodal itineraries combining flights with trains or buses. The platform has also seen growth across the U.S., Latin America, and APAC markets including India, Japan, and Korea, alongside a live ChatGPT plugin that delivers Skyscanner price comparisons directly inside the chatbot.