Tnooz: The blurring lines between transactional and non-transactional sites

My latest post for Tnooz has is live. Title of the post is "Non-transactional travel sites are chasing the online agents on unique product hunting – but can it work?". I write about how content sites are starting to negotiate directly with suppliers for unique product offerings, trying to directly challenge the major online travel agents. Mentioned in the post are Kayak Private Sale, TripAdvisor Business Listings, Voyageprive, Jetsetter, Dealbase and Totaltravel.

You can read the full post here.

Want to know how consumers search for Travel - well NY times has a few tips

Interesting piece here from the New York Times' "Frugal Traveler" called "Research: The Travller's Best Friend". Is an article where the Frugal Traveler gives their tips and tricks to NY Times readers on which sites to use to research, book and manage a trip. There will be no surprises for you the experienced online travel user/abuser but it does provider some useful insight into the advice the the mainstream media is giving the online consumer on where to look and book.

No blogs were mentioned. Sites getting a mention include:

• Google;
• Luxe Series of guide books;
• Kayak
• SeatGuru;
• Dealbase;
• TripAdvisor (but not in a good way);
• Craigslist;
• TripIt;
• Facebook;
• Couchsurfing;
• Oanda; and
• Flight 001 travel store

Also some old school recommendations to check out books.

Thanks for Madame BOOT for sending through the link.

Thanks to Kristina B for the fantastic image

DealBase raises $1million in Series A funding

The deal hunting and publicising websites are appearing everywhere and launching in new markets constantly. In Australia alone we have had TravelZoo and Cheapflights rushing into this crowded and relatively small market.

News today that hotel deal/offer aggregation site Dealbase has raised $1 million in Series A funding from Russ Siegelman, an Affiliated Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Bob Zipp, Managing Director of Amicus Capital and Josh Hannah, General Partner at Matrix Partners and former CEO of eHow.com.

Dealbase.com was one of the BOOT pick's for the final six at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. I chose it because it is has spent time and energy on the display layer. This has resulted in a great browsing and filtering experience generated by the common layout in terms of description, savings etc for each offer and deal. Makes it much easier for the customer to make the necessary comparisons. I am also very impressed by the self loading approach for hotels and inventory providers - at no cost. Is very different to the paid offer approaches of TravelZoo, Cheapflights and others. As with all these things distribution will be the key - especially if they get caught in an arbitrage traffic position where they try to buy traffic from Google at a price cheaper than they sell it to hoteliers. Are currently claiming a 100,000 visitors in March (puts into perspective my 3 years to get 100,000 visitors).

As a reminder here is the Dealbase.com pitch by CEO Sam Shank at the PhoCusWright summit.

PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit - my pick for the top six

32 companies spent today presenting at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. Six get to move onto the Centre Stage sessions. The six will be announced tomorrow at lunch time based on anonymous voting during today's session. Here is my pick of the six (note have to pick two each from New, Emerging and Established Companies). In no particular order

Pick 1 - Uptake.com: I have spoken about Uptake before. They have built a meta-search business for travel reviews and built a search methodology that goes well beyond the tradditional capabilities of Google, Yahoo and MSN. [Emerging]

Pick 2 - Triporati: I have long been a fan of last.fm and Pandora. Both are music companies that have approached (respectively) a compunity and a genomic approach to helping people to discover new music (rather than search for known music). Triporati is doing the same for travel. Focusing on discovery rather than search through breaking down travel into 62 "DNA" elements and matching those against 1,200 destinations. [New]

Pick 3 - Dealbase.com: The test of innovation is an idea that no-one else thought of that has been executed well. The idea for deal base is a qualified lead generation business for OTAs and hotels. This is a new idea for the travel industry and the execution looks good. [New]

Pick 4 - Rezgo: A supplier and vendor matching system combined with long tail distribution management system. No other product in the 32 like it. [Emerging]

Pick 5 - Worldmate: The best of the mobile solutions I saw (but just). Very close competition with TripChill (see this post for more on mobile). Have given my vote to Worldmate (after a close debate with myself) due to its distribution deal with Nokia. Distribution is the hardest part for a mobile app. [Established]

Pick 6 - Fogglight: Home & Away have built a component based trip planning site builder. Enables travel companies such as hotels and tour operators to set up a whitelable sales operation of complementary product providers (ie a hotel building a web and packaging site using Expedia's white label solution). With acceess to content, a contact management system and more. [Established]

I will let you know what the vote is tomorrow.