Kayak, TripAdvisor Join Forces to Meld Travel Search and Hotel Reviews

If you like to search for hotels on Kayak and then switch over to TripAdvisor to read reviews from other travelers, you're in luck. On Thursday, the sites unveiled a new arrangement in which the results from Kayak searches will now include TripAdvisor reviews.

When you search for a hotel on Kayak, all of the over 60 million TripAdvisor reviews will be included in the Kayak search results.

When travelers are looking for a hotel, they tend to comb over a ton of different sites, information, and reviews, as that hotel stay will be their temporary home - a very personal thing, Robert Birge, chief marketing officer for Kayak, said. Kayak searches hundreds of travel sites at once to get our users the best rates, so by incorporating the best review content, Kayak users now can get the best hotel search results and read the best reviews in one place.

In October, Kayak launched a hotel recommendations filter that allowed users to sift through results by expert recommendations and drew reviews from Budget Travel and Frommer's. Kayak also offers hotel reviews from Kayak visitors as well as from sources like Travelocity, IgoUgo, Citysearch, MyTravelGuide, and Epinions.

Users can now filter search results by TripAdvisor by ticking off a box that will filter out any non-TripAdvisor reviewed properties.

The agreement is the first partnership between Newton-based TripAdvisor and Kayak, based in Norwalk, Conn. The service launched Thursday in the United States and United Kingdom and will roll out globally and on mobile platforms in the coming weeks.

Kayak is not the first Web site to incorporate TripAdvisor ratings. Splitting off from Expedia in December, TripAdvisor reviews appear on the Web sites of over 250 companies, including online travel agencies, airlines, and hotels.

Kayak and TripAdvisor joining forces is a sign that online travel sites are nervous about the emergence of Google, which recently set its sights on online travel with a series of acquisitions including ITA Software and Zagat. In the last year, Google released both Google Flights and Google Hotel Finder.

Google is also incorporating reviews into its Hotel Finder, albeit on a much smaller scale. The site only includes reviews from users with Google accounts.

As the fight over the online travel pie heats up, expect to see many more companies joining together to stay in the game.