With a such large number of corporate business travelers on the BlackBerry you would expect that they type of application that would drive on the platform would be the travel companion.
This, however, is not the case for KAYAK, a popular travel comparison service, who recently announced that they will no longer support the KAYAK mobile app on the BlackBerry platform.
When we started KAYAK in 2004, we issued BlackBerries to the entire engineering team so we could communicate instantly 24/7. Today we’ve all switched, and it seems our users are doing the same. Our audience of BlackBerry users has been declining precipitously, and we can’t justify the cost any longer.
KAYAK will continue to support the usual suspects like Android and iOS, but, it would appear that decision to drop BlackBerry support was not based on market share alone as KAYAK plans to continue to support Windows Phone which has significantly less share than RIM, and, at the moment, slower growth.
BlackBerry 10, the next version of the BlackBerry operating system, will support Android apps, so one has to wonder if KAYAK will submit their Android App to BlackBerry App World.
There is no real need for KAYAK with BlackBerry Travel. I find that BB Travel does quite well.
Have you ever tried Kayak, it is excellent. I don’t think BB Travel offers anything similar to Kayak. It was really a great tool to find ticket prices and plan quickly, same on RIM for not pushing to keep the support, if the manufacturer doesn’t care about their users, you think software developer will? I feel totally ignored.
A lot of people keep saying that they really don’t need KAYAK because they have BlackBerry Travel, but, the apps don’t overlap all that much. KAYAK is much more of a travel planning and comparison tool than is BlackBerry Travel which is a lot more like Trip-It or WorldMate.