Kayak and Skyscanner CEOs: Metasearch Isn’t Dead — It’s Evolving

Photo Credit: Kayak CEO Peer Bueller with Seth Borko, Skift's head of research. Skift Kayak has stopped looking for what replaces metasearch. Skyscanner isn’t replacing it either — but it’s evolving with packages, multimodal travel, and potentially agents. Kayak CEO Peer Bueller said the distribution that built metasearch has been disrupted. Bueller, who was appointed in February after a decade as CFO, acknowledged that Google's Gemini interfaces and carousels have pushed results down the page. What used to arrive organically can now require paid acquisition and, at the same time, one has to appear inside LLMs. He said building comparison is hard and not a commodity. The data requires complex integrations with suppliers, direct database access, and commercial agreements on how it can be used — it’s not just scraping. Kayak has spent a quarter-century trying to get side-by-side comparison right and he thinks it gets harder as airlines unbundle fares into different attributes and as airports marketed as the