In Qantas Transit and guess what - the VOD system is not working

Long term readers are almost certainly bored by my rants at how the new Qantas entertainment Video on Demand system (VOD) never seems to be working. Well let me rant once again but this time with a new twist. In previous rants the system failed Airline wide. My disappointment was turned to anger when the airline dismissed the problem and showed no concern. BA then showed up Qantas by offering me hard cash compensation (ok vouchers) when one movie failed once at the end of the movie.

The new twist on this flight was that every seat on the plane had VOD working but mine and the guy next to me. That's right the number one supplier rant I have is the failed Qantas VOD. So much so that I am the number one hit on Google for Qantas VOD....and it is my seat that fails. Brilliant. Sometimes Qantas cannot win a trick.

The BOOT is on the road - back Mar 3

I am on the road next week for work in London and other parts of Europe. Will have a direct chance to compare Qantas and BA business class one after each other. Will let you know. Wont have much chance to post until I get back. Of course last time I said that deals came from everywhere.

Developing Rumour - some/all/part of Reed Business Information's business or titles are up for sale

Rumour came in this morning that Reed Business Information (RBI) is looking to sell something (limited confirmation coming out of the Guardian). Exactly what (titles or the whole) business is not sure. What is strong in the Rumour is that Flight and Travel Weekly are almost certainly going to be put up for sale in the UK. No word on what this means for the other travel publications such as the sterling Travolution. If this is true then two possibilities:

• the seemingly unstoppable travel boom means that the ad sales teams at these titles can't take the orders fast enough ensuring cash flow that would be attractive to buyers; OR
• industry execs have just stopped reading magazines instead getting all the news they need online.

Mark Sweeny in the Guardian thinks it will be the whole business and that it will capture a price tage of GBP1-1.3 billion.

What do you think - is the industry magazine business a dying one or vibrant and worth billions?

UPDATE - PaidContent is also covering the story. Looks like full sale is most likely. Are saying that 30% of revenue is from online.

What role did the Karavel sale play in Opodo's recent profit announcement?

At the beginning of Feb we heard the good news that Opodo was in the black for the first time with Euro 6.6mm in net profits on the back of Euro 1.3 billion in gross bookings.

Just today I spotted that Travolution are carrying a brief interview with Opodo CEO Ignacio Martos. It was published just after the announcement and Ignacio was talking about the results. He admitted that the sale of Karavel to Barclays "contributed to the net profit number". Does not say how much it contributed.

The leak that hit the internet was that the Karavel sale would net Amadeus (who control Opodo) Euro 40mm. So what does this mean. One reading is that maybe taking away the costs of operating Karavel helped contribute to the Opodo bottom line, dropping costs and contributing to profiability. Another (more dangerous reading) is that it was the profits from the sale that pushed Opodo into the black, not general trading activity. No way of telling which until we see broken out numbers but is very interesting to speculate about. If this is true (and I am not saying it is) then would mean that Opodo is still losing money at an operational level. hmmm....

Kevin or anyone out there from Travolution world know any more?

UPDATE - a source has told me that people inside Amadeus were surprised to hear that Opodo was profitable. That as far as they (these people inside Amadeus) knew Opodo was losing money in 2007. Could add credence to the notion that it was non-operational matters (ie once off) that generated the profit. I repeat myself - this is all innuendo and conjecture at this point.

Hotelsbycity acquisition rumour (started by Google)

I learnt a long time ago to trust Google search traffic as a source of acquisition rumours. Search traffic to the BOOT hinted at both the Worldspan acquisition by Galileo/Travelport and the Asiarooms acquisition by TUI.

Now my traffic logs are picking up search traffic under the headings "hotelsbycity acquisition" and "hotelsbycity priceline". This is hardly definitive but is certainly enough to start a rumour that Hotelbycity is about to be acquired.

Hotelsbycity is a content/review site (with booking functionality) where consumers post real photos of hotels. Hotelsbycity combine all these photos into an almost room by room map of the hotel. I reviewed them back in January last year. My main comment was that the content was great (especially the jumping on bed PR campaign) but that booking did not work very well. The booking path has improved with support (in my search of San Francisco) of wctravel.com (ie Travelocity).

Anyone out there heard anything about a possible deal? Anyone from Hotelsbycity want to comment?

UPDATE - I cannot find an announcement by Priceline that this deal happened or a reference on the Hotelsbycity website that they are owned by Priceline. But Thompson Financial M&A are claiming that the deal happened in Jan 2008 for a price of CAD$4mm. In July 2008 Gavin O'Malle at Online Media Daily refers to the deal in an article about Travel Ad Network. PIrclien do have Hotelsbycity listed as a partner on their Priceline Parnter Network site but that is about it. Anyone out there know the real story???

Death of an acronymn: Virgin Blue launches Premium Economy

Already Virgin-Blue has stopped calling themselves a low cost carrier, preferring the term New World Carrier. Now we see the last nail in the coffin of their status as an LCC - the launch of premium economy on domestic routes. You can now add this to other hallmarks of a traditional carrier - business lounges, a frequent flier program (Velocity), fully flexible fares, online check-in and more.

Not announced but surely coming soon are tiers of frequent fliers, a wine club and leather embossed passport holders. Why would DJ do this you ask? Well profits for the six months to Dec 07 are down 10% on the previous year and the stock is down 37% (SMH article). DJ has reached saturation almost it efforts to capture low spending domestic travellers. The growth area they need to hit is the corporates - who do not want to face hours of domestic travel (ie Sydney to Perth) in cramped seats.

The other big product question for them is where Virgin Blue will target the front of the plane product for "V Australia". This the airline to be launched for Pacific route (AU to West Coast US). Will they do a premium economy style seat for a full near flat business class to try and take on Qantas. My guess - given that they have only asked for 10 flights per week - is that they will chicken out and leave the near flat to QF (see my earlier rant on the Open Skies agreement).

Here are the specs on the new product.

UPDATE - 22 Feb DJ CEO Brett Godfrey is quoted (in Travel Daily) as saying that Virgin Blues fastest growing segment is corporate travel and that he can see premium economy becoming a flagship product. Further confirmation that with 31% domestic market share DJ cannot see any more growth in the market from an aggressive Ryanair style low cost approach. I presume this makes Tiger Air a little happier (now thirteen destinations in Australia).

Budget and Gotcha Capitalism

This is an update to my story on Gotcha Capitalism in the travel industry.

I consider myself a well experienced travel buyer and despite all of my efforts in my car rental with Budget (see above in the story) I have found it unavoidable to be hit with A$90 in charges on my card after returning the car (25% of the rental cost). This is despite prepaid, despite filling up the tank, despite denying the top up insurance premiums and despite reading all of the terms and conditions.

I spoke with Budget customer service and they immediately sent me on the local office.

I spoke with the local office and they simply say "that is the way we do it here, it is the computer, if you have a problem call your travel agent. It is to cover airport taxes, child charges and more".

In response to being told by me "this is a terrible customer experience. Why do you constantly do this - charge customers money for pre-paid booking after they have consumed the service and after they have left the country", the Budget agent in Nelson said "I have to go now and service another customer". In other words, "Gotcha!". Shame on Budget and the whole car hire industry.

Thinking inside the box (yes I said inside)

Very interesting Harvard Business Review IdeaCast (podcast) late last year called "Thinking Inside the Box". Is an interview with Kevin Coyne, coauthor of the Harvard Business Review article "Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box.".

We spend a lot of time thinking about innovation, change, re-engineering. As Coyne points out sometimes change does not require revolution - just asking the right questions.

You can download the podcast here. Is only 10mins and worth a listen.

501 not out

Time has passed and the posts keep flowing. Time for my "not out series" - a regular summary of the last 100 posts that I first started with 101 not out and continued with 201 , 301
and 401.

Just like the 401 update it has been deals, deals, deals that has dominated the last 100 BOOT rants:

• Wotif evenutally managed to by Travel.com.au/Lastminute.com.au despite a fight from Webjet and a cunning move from AOT. Followed up almost immediately buying Asia Web Direct;
• TripAdvisor launched a new version and continued its targeted site buying spree with HolidayWatchdog;
• TravelCLICK was sold to Genstar and the BOOT called it first;
• The Asian acquisition bonanza continued as Priceline returned to the market though an acquisition of Agoda, ;
• Sidestep disappeared in a flood of newly raised Kayak cash; and
  
• Venere bought Worldby.
  

Cash flowed into online travel:

• Fastbooking took Euro35mm;
  
• Worktopia grabbed $5mm;
  
• Bezurk got "an undisclosed sum" from News;
  

I spent some interesting times on the phone doing start up interviews with:

• Yen Lee of Kango;
  
• Gregg Brockway of TripIt;
  
• Martin Symes of Bezurk; and
• Kellie Pelletier of Kayak.

In the weird world of quirky news:

• bags fell from the sky;
  
• The president of Sri Lanka got bumped and was not happy about it;
  
• Man fired dog and bragged about it; and
  
• nobody, I repeat nobody is doing anything naughty naughty in the new Singapore Airlines double bed suites.

Oh and Qantas turned from being the flying Kangaroo to the thieving Rat.

But I saved my most angriest post for number 400 - the last in this seasons. When the new Australian government said they were doing me a favour by continuing to allow Qantas to over charge me on flights to America.

If you're still reading then I'm still writing.

Open Skies between the US and Australia: There is no one I don't hate right now

There is a great line in that brilliant show the West Wing where the ever cranky Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff) turns and says "there's no one I don't hate right now". This is exactly how I feel after hearing about the the new Open Skies agreement between the US and Australia. In theory I should be cheering this agreement. I have complained again and again about the gouging that goes on in the pricing of the Pacific Route (Australia to the west cost US). Up until the open skies agreement only two airlines could fly this route - Qantas and United. Qantas sat on almost seventy percent of the capacity giving them an almost monopoly. They priced accordingly, earning more than 40% in revenue per passenger kilometre than on the Kangaroo route (Australia to the UK). The last time I tried to book a US flight Qantas wanted to charge me more than A$15,o00 for business class. Sure I was booking with just over 2 weeks notice but that is the out and out definition of monopolistic price gouging.

I should be cheering because Open Skies is supposed mean more airlines, more competition and therefore lower prices. But this Open Skies agreement is nothing but window dressing and will do almost nothing to change competition - especially in Business class. The deal is limited to Australian and US carriers. On the Australian side this means the only carriers that can be added are V Australia (Virgin Blue's not yet launched low cost long haul off shoot) and maybe Jetstar (Qantas' own low cost carrier). On the US side it might bring American back to the route but really who cares. As the Sydney Morning Herald points out in its analysis, V Australia are only looking at 10 services a week. Qantas already fly 51 while United only do 14. Therefore only 15% more capacity is being added and effectively all of it in leisure classes. No downward pressure at all on Business Class prices.

The only way to bring true competition to the route and bring down prices is to allow Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Canadian to have access to the route. This would provide a meaningful increase in capacity in all classes of product. The previous conservative/centre right Australian Government and Transport Minister Warren Truss exposed himself as a complete idiot and the only centre right government minister in history to argue that increased competition in a duopoly/monopoly would not be a benefit to consumers when he said

"The economic modelling work [on the Pacific Route] that we have done suggests that the benefits of an airline such as Singapore entering that route would be very, very small to the Australian tourism industry,"

The new centre left Australian Government has gone one better in the stupidity stakes. New transport minister Anthony Albanese is quoted in the SMH article as saying the following

"... he had "no intention" of allowing the two new carriers on the route [Singapore and Canadian], making V Australia the only new carrier expected to enter. "We're serious about liberalising trade, but we're also serious about protecting Australian jobs," he said." (my emphasis)

I had to read this paragraph twice to make sure that I wasn't seeing things. Somehow it is now critical to the overheated Australian employment market for Qantas to be able to gouge its customers and charge 40% more that it should or needs to. Australia is in its sixteenth year of growth and has less that 4% unemployment. Everyone everywhere in the travel industry is struggling to find anybody to meet the huge demand for talent and people. Australian regional carrier Rex has had cut routes because it cannot find enough pilots to actually fly the routes it wants to support. Yet somehow the whole boom would fall apart if Qantas was forced to charge normal prices and face standard and reasonable competition. Baloney.

So Open Skies are here, Qantas is happy, Virgin Blue is happy and the government gets to shout "see how brilliant we are" but somehow I still have to pay exactly the same rip off fares to go the US.

There is no one that I don't hate right now.

UPDATE - you will love this. In Travel Today there is a lead article with commentary from Singapore Airlines heavily criticising the Open Skies deal. Right below it is a story from QantasLink (Qantas' regional airline) complaining that they are going to follow Rex's lead in cutting services due to a "higher than normal pilot attrition rate" (ie NO STAFF). This (presumably unintentionally) completely undermines the comments by the Transport Minister Albanese that there is any job threat at all.

Travolution brings The Boot and Musings together

Travolution Magazine has posted a combination of my four quick rules for a successful travel content/community company and Alex Bainbridge' eleven more rules follow up. Here is the full article "Top tips - how to be a successful start-up"

Not to be outdone by TUI - Thomas Cook drops too much do buy hotels4U

Seemingly in permanent catch up with TUI, Thomas Cook has shouted "look at me, I now get it online" in announcing that it has bought bed bank hotels4u.com for GBP21.8mm (Telegraph story here) - and there are more to come they insist (according to e-tid).

Very limited stats and info behind the deal:

• management to be retained. Haim Perry will stay on as MD (retaining 25% of the company as part of an earn out); and
  
• Hotels4U has 500,000 customers a year and "access to" 30,000 hotels.

Thomas Cook's website was the biggest travel site in the UK (in terms of traffic) from 1998-2002 (or thereabouts). This was despite a dismal site, lack of inventory and a general disregard from the management. At this time, Thomas Cook had the opportunity to look at Amex's missed chance in ruling the US online market and solidify its online lead in the UK. Instead it followed the well trodden offline dinosaurs strategy of being trapped in the headlights of the incoming online meteor shower. Another great BOOT mixed metaphor meaning that Thomas Cook stuffed up at the turn of the century in ignoring all of the advice and opportunity to establish UK online dominance. Now they have to play catch up by overpaying for a small provider.

Gotcha Capitalism and the Travel Industry (Updated)

I recommend you take the time to listen to Terry Gross interview on NPR last month with Bob Sullivan the author of Gotcha Capitlism. Interview is here. Sullivan's book is about the proliferation of hidden charges that hit consumers every day and undermine advertised prices. These include areas such as ATM withdrawal fees, credit card usage charges, airline fuel surcharges etc. All the stuff you don't know about from the advertised price.

He says the main cause - unfortunately - is the hyper price competitiveness and sensitivity of consumers brought on by transparency of the Internet. Consumers can now see the price from an almost limitless number of retailers all at once, driving down prices which is forcing retailers and suppliers to find new revenues streams. Unfortunately many have responded by applying new and small charges here, there and everywhere in the hope that consumers wont notice or wont complain.

There travel industry is not as bad as the banks and telecoms providers but is still a guilty party in this new form of revenue generation. There is the annoying but nonetheless sneaky approach of sticking taxes, fees, surcharges, levies etc at the back of the purchase path. This is something that intermediaries are guilty of and have been forced to do to follow the actions of the major suppliers. For consumers this is frustrating and a bad experience but at least the consumer has a moment before clicking "buy" to see the full cost.

The real Gotcha Capitalism that hits travel consumers is the emergence of post booking fees and charges. Fees and charges not disclosed at the time of booking. Hotels that now charge for room to room calls and mini bars that charge you for touching or moving an item are low level examples. The worst examples are those fees that are nowhere to be seen at the time of booking and almost unavoidable for the standard, innocent consumer such as resort fees, hire care company excess waiver insurance premiums and gas/petrol surcharges.

Resort fees (for those that dont know) are where a hotel charges an extra per person daily charge to use the pool, gym etc. This can be around US$15 per person or $30-$60 per day for a leisure couple/family. The Gotcha is they they are charged regardless of whether or not you use the pool/facilities. Outrageous that a compulsory charge would not form part of the room rate.

Rental car excess waiver insurance is basically a tax on consumer ignorance. On my recent hire car experience in New Zealand, Budget offered me $22 per day insurance to drop the excess on my car hire from a whopping $2200 to only $200. That is $144 per week on a $500 rental or an increase of almost 30%. This is pure profit for Budget. The consumer ignorance part of course is that my $78 a week travel insurance policy covers this already as does the limited travel insurance being offered by my credit card. Budget is trying to gouge me on something I already have (twice).

But it is in hire car gas charges where Gotcha Capitalism is most alive and gouging in the travel industry. There is so much hard work you have to do as a consumer to calculate whether or not to buy a tank upfront at the time of rental and if you don't to find the closest petrol/gas station to drop off, overfill the tank and do all you can to avoid paying the huge penalties involved. In the case of Dollar Rent a Car, no matter how hard you try you are still going to get slugged with a $2 "top off fee" (thanks as always to the Consumerist).

Cheating your consumer is nowhere to be found in my copy of "Customer Retention For Dummies".

Do you know of any other egregious examples in the travel industry?

UPDATE 2 - I consider myself a well experienced travel buyer and despite all of my efforts in my car rental with Budget (see above in the story) I have found it unavoidable to be hit with A$90 in charges on my card after returning the car (25% of the rental cost). This is despite prepaid, despite filling up the tank, despite denying the top up insurance premiums and despite reading all of the terms and conditions. I spoke with Budget customer service and they immediately sent me on the local office. I spoke with the local office and they simply say "that is the way we do it here, it is the computer, if you have a problem call your travel agent". In response to being told by me "this is a terrible customer experience. Why do you constantly do this - charge customers money for pre-paid booking after they have consumed the service and after they have left the country", the Budget agent in Nelson said "I have to go now and service another customer". In other words, "Gotcha!"

UPDATE - Consumerist has posted about Fodor's list of 14 hidden hotel fees (Consumerist here, Fodors here). They are (some of my comments in brackets):

# Groundskeeping
# Towels (other than room—e.g., pool or fitness center)
# Business center, fitness room
# Safe
# Housekeeping, bellman gratuity fees
# Water and newspapers (hate this one)
# Energy surcharge (should be included in taxes but never is)
# Early check in or out/extended cancellation
# Shuttle service
# Baggage-holding
# Bartenders (not heard of this before)
# Room block fees (not heard of this either)
# Mini-Bar
# Random incorrect charges (hmm not sure about how helpful this is)

Sorry

I promise this will be the only time I use the BOOT for a political message but today (finally) the Australian Government has apologised to the indigenous people of Australia for the heinous act of taking indigenous children from their parents in the 1950s and 60s (known as the "stolen generation"). I want to add my personal apology as an embarrassed and shamed non-indigenous Australian. This act of contrition and acknowledgement by the Australian Government of the immeasurable pain and suffering caused is long overdue. It does not undo the damage but I hope it can help with the healing.

If you would like to listen to the Australian Prime Minister's speech you can find it here care of the Sydney Morning Herald.

TripAdvisor buys HolidayWatchdog.com - one step closer to being a full on ad network

More deals to report. Thanks to Kevin and Travolution for breaking that Expedia's TripAdvisor has continued its targeted content acquisition plans and bought HolidayWatchdog for an undisclosed sum. This adds TripAdvisors collection of targeted sites including smartertravel.com and bookingbuddy.com; TravelPod.com; Travel-Library.com; SeatGuru.com; and Cruisecritic.com.

So while the TripAdvisor site begins to look more and more like an OTA site than a content site they see more and more expansion opportunity from outside the TripAdvisor brand. This means that behind the scenes the revenue generators at TripAdvisor (ad sales guys and girls) begin to look more and more like members or a advertising network than product owners. That is not necessarily a bad thing but if taken too far goes away from the core of success - tight relationship with customers - and closer to the usually disinterested eyeball pushing that you associate with an ad network.

Oh.. and the for sake of my continued access to search engine traffic and to help all those who missed the memo let me once again confirm that since March 2004 Expedia Owns TripAdvisor...

UPDATE - Travolution are reporting the purchase price is rumoured at GBP9-10mm

Venere buys Worldby.com: beware the vanishing SEO traffic

Seems like you go on holidays and everyone else goes round buying all the SEO players they can find. While the BOOT was in New Zealand counting sheep Wotif.com bought Asian SEO accom player Asia Web Direct and Euro accommodation giant Venere has announced the acquisition of European destination SEO specialist Worldby.com (thanks Hotelmarketing). This is Venere's first acquisition (that we know about)

Details of this deal are:

• adds 2.5mm registered uses;
• adds 6,000 properties (adding to Venere's existing 20,000 but there are sure to be overlap);
• 2008 targeted gross bookings for the group is EUR500mm;

Nothing on the dollars involved. Worldby corporate site says the following about the business:

• more than 7 million page views a month
• 100,000 unique reservations a year
• more than 5,000 Hotels & Resorts All on direct contracts (presumably out of date)
  
• Average of 34 large size photos and 10 webpages of descriptions per Hotel (180,000 photographs online, Sept. 2006 figures)
  

It is the photos, content and resulting SEO traffic that must be the main attraction for Venere as the volume add is not huge and the brand is not anywhere near the strength of Venere. I presume the acquisition model focused on the cost synergies plus improved inventory brought by Venere on top of the "free" SEO traffic of Worldby making the deal cheaper than actually marketing. Makes some sense. But buying a company that is dependent on SEO traffic is a very dangerous activity. The behind the scenes magic that keeps the traffic appearing can disappear unexpectedly, especially once the chief SEO magicians (founders) leave the stage.

WTF and Phuket: Wotif.com buys Asia Web Direct

With the ink still wet on the "we finally did it" press release from Wotif announcing that the acquisition of Travel.com.au is complete, Wotif CEO Robbie Cooke has kept the stock announcements flowing with news of the acquisition of Asia Web Direct. Details from the announcement are:

• $A34.2mm - A$17.1mm in cash plus same again in WTF shares (3.6mm shares - 80% subject to 6 month escrow);
• 2007 AWB did 450,000 room nights through 4,000 hotels. In FY07 Wotif did 180,000 room nights in Asia;
• 150 staff; and
• 2007 AWB EBITDA ~ A$2.25mm

AWB gives Wotif volume into Asia and an SEO network through Phuket.com and Bangkok.com. That is a good thing. But it does not give deep foreign language assets or international brand. That is not such a good think. The price is steep at 17x earnings but at Wotif's multiple they can afford it. Is there a good joke to be made about WTF and Phuket.com coming together - no...there are only bad jokes there...

The BOOT Holidays in New Zealand - back Feb 11

Your BOOT correspondent along with Madame BOOT and the BOOTlets are off to New Zealand on holidays. Will be back on the Blog on Feb 11 after having enjoyed the delights of the Marlborough wine region and Air New Zealand economy class.







Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.

WHOOT: deal done, Wotif to do flights, David Clarke of Webjet is relieved

FINAL WHOOT series update - WHoever Owns Outright Travel.com.au

Travel.com.au, Lastminute.com.au and Lastminute.co.nz are now officially owned by Wotif.com. Deal closed today. Interesting tid-bits of news around the closing of this deal

• In TravelWeekly Wotif.com CEO Robbie Cooke announced that Wotif.com would have air functionality within six months. I am still trying to figure out what it means for Wotif as a brand to try to shift to air. It is well known that efforts by Expedia's Hotels.com to sell air have been a complete failure. Wotif itself tried to sell land packages back in 2004/5 but found that did not work. I am not able to think of another example of a land product online travel brand successfully adding transport (let me know if you can);
  
• From the same article - planned integration savings will be $1.5mm. I don't think that is enough to indicate a shut down of the Travel.com.au Sydney office (Wotif is Brisbane based) butit is big enough to presumably make a few people in that office a little nervous; and
• In the Australian Webjet MD David Clarke sad he was relieved to have missed out on buying Travel.com.au. Of course one would say that if one was the failed bidder but he is right when he says that the integration efforts that confront Wotif are going to be challenging and by no means guaranteed to work.

Opodo looks good in black - banks Euro 6.6mm in profits

The owners and staff at pan Euro OTA Opodo must be walking around with big fat smiles on their faces (or sitting slumped in their chairs with a look of absolute relief) after having recorded and announced their very first profit. Reports are of a EURO 6.6mm net profit in 2007 off the back of Euro 1.3bb in TTV (well they say sales but presume that is gross bookings). Other stats from the story are 3 mm customers and "double digit growth" 07 over 06.

Results came despite or because of (you choose):

• abandoning their in-house hotel program and returning to the use of helpers such as Hotel.de.;
• a huge shift in management after the departure of almost all of the central senior executive team a year ago; and
• shedding offline business Karavel to Barclay's.

From Travelmole via HotelMarketing.com

UPDATE - Travolution are carrying a brief interview with Opodo CEO Ignacio Martos where admitted that the sale of Karavel to Barclays contributed to the net profit number. Does not say how much it contributed. The leak that hit the internet was that the Karavel sale would net Amadeus (who control Opodo) Euro 40mm. So what does this mean. One reading is that maybe taking away the costs of operating Karavel help contribute to the Opodo bottom line. Another (more dangerous reading) is that it was the profits from the sale that pushed Opodo into the black, not general trading activity. No way of telling which until we see broken out numbers but is very interesting to speculate about.