Kayak says bon voyage to paper-based processes

Kayak single-handedly revolutionized the travel industry when it launched in 2004. The company successfully built a metasearch engine for travel purchases before any other travel site. Now, the company crawls hundreds of airline, hotel and rental sites at once, seeking the best deals and packages for customers who are ready to embark on their next adventure. 

Kayak’s business model relies on selling advertising—lots of it. But every ad sale entails an intricate advertising contract process. And, before DocuSign, it was a complex, paper-based interaction filled with errors for both Kayak and its customers. 

Though Kayak modernized its advertiser contract management by adopting Salesforce in 2009, the manual, paper-based process Kayak used to obtain signatures remained. Sales representatives had to first create contracts in Salesforce in PDF form to send via email to clients. Clients then printed, signed, scanned, and emailed documents back to Kayak where sales teams had to obtain required internal signatures using the same manual methods. The process culminated in a final round of scanning and emailing documents back to clients. 

“It was very painful,” said Tony Leung, Director of System Administration for Kayak. The process took up to two weeks and was very error-prone. Contracts were getting stuck in people’s inboxes, misfiled, incomplete, or just plain lost. When internal auditors checked how many of Kayak’s advertising campaigns were backed by a signed contract, they found that it was only 30%. “We just had to do something,” Leung said.

A trusted global leader for advertising contracts

Leung and his team began evaluating e-signature solutions and made their choice after attending a Salesforce conference. “It seemed like every time the subject of e-signatures came up, DocuSign was the standard,” he explained. “We looked into the product and found that it completely covered our needs.” 

Kayak chose DocuSign not only for its ease of use, but also for its support across multiple languages, which is critical to a business with customers across 30 countries. “We wanted the global market leader and that’s what we got with DocuSign eSignature. It’s recognized and trusted around the world,” he said.

Kayak streamlines a complex signing process

Kayak began with DocuSign eSignature for Salesforce and customized it to support the company’s complex internal signing process. These tasks are now simple and straightforward due to DocuSign’s support for advanced workflows. 

“Everybody loved DocuSign immediately,” Leung said. “In fact, when word started getting around about our change, advertisers started asking if they could DocuSign their contracts. We use it 100% of the time.” 

Automatically filing signed contracts into Salesforce has reduced billing errors and eased concerns about potential legal issues. Instead of having to contend with the cumbersome paper trail of the past, Kayak employees can expedite and streamline agreements, and continuously track the exact status of every contract. 

“Introducing DocuSign helped every aspect of our business—efficiency, compliance, measuring, tracking—everything,” Leung concluded. “We definitely have gotten and continue to get our ROI from DocuSign every day.”