Kayak drinks MyPunchbowl’s Kool-Aid. Team up for Party Center
Online event planning sites work well to let people know what is going on when and who will be in attendance. However, these sites lack the ability to handle more advanced logistics, such as travel arraignments, until now.
One such event planning site, MyPunchbowl is teaming up with leading travel site Kayak to launch the MyPunchbowl Party Center. This new area will work exactly as you might expect. Just as on Kayak, you can search flights, cars and hotels. Simply input the dates and you’re presented with options — all without leaving MyPunchbowl’s site.
“In this difficult economic climate, many travelers may need to price a trip before replying to an online invitation and now these consumers simply and quickly use the Kayak.com search widget to research prices and availability without leaving MyPunchbowl.com,” said Paul English co-founder and CTO of Kayak.
This combination helps differentiate MyPunchbowl from competitors such as Yahoo’s Upcoming, Yelp’s Events area and even Evite.
Both MyPunchbowl and Kayak clearly want to launch this functionality now as the high school and college graduation season begins. With some six million students will graduating this year according to the U.S. Census, that will mean a lot of families and friends moving around to see the event.
One type of event the company doesn’t mention in its list of possible examples seems an odd omission — weddings. Of course, most people hire very expensive coordinators for those and putting that together through MyPunchbowl might not exactly scream elegance. Still, it seems like the Party Center would be useful for other guests to have a place to set up trips for such events.
We previously covered MyPunchbowl here and here. Find our coverage of Kayak here.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.
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Yan Pritzker