Monday, November 06, 2006

Europe marketing driving Travelocity (hard!)

Great results for Sabre/Travelocity this quarter - with strong gains in the European online business. All the news outlets carried the quote "best quarter ever". European business was up a third with EBITDA up to US$31mm (+66%). Travelocity had a terrible start in Europe. Arrived there late behind Expedia and the local Lastminute and eBookers then tied itself up in knots with a complicated relationship in Germany. I remember a disatrous TV campaign from 2000/2001 (can't find a link anywhere online) based around a guy needing a break. Bleak scenes of him stuck on the tube, in the office and at home. Nothing about it made people want to identify with him or the company. Not that identification is critical but the ad carried none of the humour of the current commerical.



The question for Europe is whether or not Lastminute acquisition (or the new ad!) was the sole cause of the turnaround or whether there were also integration and management decisions that played a role. We may need to watch a few more quarters before we know the answer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

maybe zai are Trying Fo Ze Gay market NO ?

Anonymous said...

Here's a predicament for you in the Travel space and RSS feeds:

A content provider distributes his or her content through the use of an RSS feed. This feed is open to any who would subscribe. The first question is: Is there an implied consent to repurpose that material by republishing it (with proper credit) on a blog or Website? The act of syndicating (distributing) content may imply that permission.

The second question is: How are splogs (spam blogs) that are set up as aggregators of content to attract keyword-driven traffic, that publish only the headline and snippet of text, that link out to the original source, and that make money from AdSense different from Google and other search engines? Doesn't Google do, essentially, the same thing?