Kayak kicked off American Airlines, sheds no tears

Okay, we warned you the other week: American Airlines and kayak.com were feuding and Kayak could be booted off of American. Or more literally, American fares could be taken off of kayak.com, a meta-crawler that searches and compares website fares. It was using Orbitz.com as a tool to get to the American data, and American objected. American was angry that kayak.com, along with its sister site, sidestep.com, showed results from various sites such as cheaptickets.com as well as from AA.com, the airline's own site. AA.com has a lowest-fare guarantee and in fact was one of the first airline websites to offer one.

This has not deterred Steve Hafner, the Kayak founder, who says he has big plans. He gave an interview to an on-line travel forum in which he outlines them. Here is Steve, again, just because kayak.com has a much better image of its boss than a camera does. Hafner ('CEO Steve," as the kayak.com site calls him) was a founder of Orbitz, by the way.