A Kevin May @travolution tweet pointed me to a Travolution story "Expedia mulls launch of meta search engine". Contains a quote from Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi considering a move into the meta-search model. I found this a little odd as back in July last year Expedia subsidiary TripAdvisor (yes...Expedia owns TripAdvisor:)) bought meta-search company OneTime (my post on the story here). Couple of possibilities here. Maybe the OneTime engine is not good enough and Expedia needs to start again. Or maybe Khosrowshahi has signed off on so many acquisitions for TripAdvisor that he forgot about one. Most likely it is just a sign that of the long list of TripAdvisor subsidiaries one of them (OneTime) is going to be getting a lot more attention than the others.Update - getting lots of feedback in comments, twitter and email saying the OneTime should not be considered a meta-search company. More a deal finder. Looks like Option 1 above is the right one (OneTime engine is not good enough).
5 comments:
hadn't heard of OneTime, but seems hardly meta search.
Just like bookingbuddy i.e. meta search without the search.
OneTime is a knock-off of TravelZoo's SuperSearch et al. It sends users off to various sites (in multiple windows) to search in the same way that TripAdvisor does. It does not integrate the results a la Kayak or Fly.com which are true metas.
bookingbuddy is also part of Expedia through the Smarter travel route
So they already have two 'kind of' meta search sites (they send you off to other meta search sites as well in their multiple pop ups besides the OTA sites) but want to start another one?
why don't they just buy Wego.com or another smaller meta search company and save themselves the hassle of building one from scratch.
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