The BOOT at Asia Pacific Aviation Outlook Summit 27-30 July - Sydney

I will be speaking this week at the Australia Pacific Aviation Outlook Summit 2010 at the Four Seasons hotel in Sydney. The conference runs July 27-30. Day three of the conference (July 29) is the "Travel Technology & Distribution day".

Also speaking on the Tech and Distribution day are:

• Richard Noon (CEO Webjet);
• Claire Hatton (Head of Travel, Government and Local for Google);
• Steve Sherlock (MD Oodles);
• Shashank Nigam (SimplyFlying) and
  
• Martin Symes (CEO Wego)

I am in two sessions

Solo at 235 pm on

The role of airlines and distributors in the “inspiration funnel”

* What are the four phases of online travel?
* How consumers get from an idea to going away and making a booking
* The role of airlines, tourism authorities and OTAs in the inspiration funnel

and on a panel at 440 on

Leveraging social media to create customer interaction and brand awareness

* Making better use of existing channels vs investing resources in newer distribution avenues
* How well do suppliers understand the value proposition of social media?
* Brand management through social media
* Integrating User Generated Content into the booking path

Hat tip in advance to Martin Collings of the Shearwater blog who first introduced me to the role of airlines in the bow tie/inspiration funnel.

Tnooz: 7 companies from the "old guard"

My latest post on Tnooz is live. Title "Online travel reboots – Seven companies from bosses coming back for more glory".

I go through seven new companies formed by the online travel old guard including Triporati, NewTravelCo, Tripit, Hotelscombined, Wego, Getaroom and Voyij

Rumour True! Google trialling meta-search in maps for hotels

Who knew that a BOOT rumour (admittedly one from a trusted source) could prove to be true. I wrote last week that I had a good but unsubstantiated story that Google was planning a launch of travel meta-search. Now we have confirmation that they are putting prices into the display of hotel results with priced links to booking engines. Not all users are seeing this functionality (in classic Google multi-variant testing) preventing me from giving you a screenshot of my own, but over at "eWeek Google Watch" you can see some screenshots of a "hotels in new york" search with prices and meta-search style functionality.

Kayak, Wego, Hotelscombined, Sprice and more - hold on to your algorithms this is going to be a bumpy ride!

More analysis over at Tnooz

PS - WOW I scored a TechCrunch link out of this

Interview with Wego CEO Martin Symes and Product Boss Ross Veitch on Content, Advertising, ADR, Meta-search and (naturally) Twitter

It has been a frustrating conference season for me this year. I had to leave TRAVELtech early this year to rush to the side of a sick relative. Then I missed WebInTravel altogether because of a back injury. As well a missing out of a lot of schmoozing and boozing, I missed a chance to catch up with Martin Symes and others from the Singapore based meta-search company Wego (aka Bezurk). Martin is an online travel veteran with stints at Zuji/Travelocity, BA and American Airlines. He is also an entertaining presenter and dinner companion. Through Wego he is at the forefront of meta-search in Asia so an interesting person to hear from. Last week I had a chance to catch up with Martin and Wego Product Boss Ross Veitch by phone to hear the latest on Wego, meta-search and the Asian travel market.

Here is some of our exchange. [nb- I was not smart enough or well trained enough to include in my notes which of Ross or Martin answered my questions so in the below I have blurred them into one respondent]

BOOT: How’s business?

Wego: Great – steady growth in all the metrics we look at. Traffic is up 200% year on year and revenue about the same. The recession has been good for us as it has brought to us looking for distribution and has added to the price sensitivity of consumers. Move from Bezurk to Wego brand and new platform has also helped, especially with SEO traffic. [SEO] Now makes up 50% of our traffic so acquisition costs are low.

BOOT: I noticed you have a new feature of ranking hotels by popularity in the sort order. Does a meta-search company have to choose between being a price based search engine or being a a mechanism for recommending hotels to consumers?

Wego: See them as complementary. We have adopted the same philosophy toward UGC aggregation as we have to price aggregation. Have not tried to do it ourselves. For content it is critical to get a mass of reviews so have crawled hundreds of different review sites and then broken down the content, created indexes and built a snapshot of what people are saying. The volume of hotel reviews for larger properties is overwhelming. We can help customers cut through the reviews and the price.

BOOT: The theory was that the recession/GFC would drive down CPM rates and drive up CPC rates as advertisers shifted their marketing budgets from display advertising to direct response. Is this true? What have you seen?

Wego: Hard to say as our display business is coming off such a low base. June on June we have had a 600% growth in display revenue – again a low base. Also for most of our customers we are selling integrated packages for display and direct response [clicks - BOOT]. An example is Hotel Spotlight [three hotels at top of search– BOOT] which is generating a dramatic increase in click through rates to not only the spotlight itself but organic listing further down the sort. Now trialling the hotel inserting their twitter feed messages into the Hotel Spotlight. Giving hotel a chance to put fresh content into the promo spot [now available in Singapore and coming elsewhere soon – BOOT]

BOOT: What about other plans for Asia? There is some tight competition with Qunar in China and Ixigo in India.

Wego: Some days India is our biggest source market for traffic. Though the click through rates are lower than other markets. Even so we think that it has more potential as a market than Chian. Very hard to monetise traffic from China. Our Chinese language sites are launched we have a few more languages planned

BOOT: ADR declines are hurting everyone. You are able to see prices from so many different angles. Where do you think ADR is going next year?

Wego: Agree, we saw big declines in ADR this year. Can’t see too much continued downside next year without another recessionary event. We hope to see rates stabilise and then we can get into targeting of deals. We are having discussions with suppliers about targeting to different user groups. This is the exciting next step for us and OTAs.

BOOT (to Martin): Final question about conferences and presentations. Twitter and instant blogging are now an unstoppable feature of presentations at conferences. How has it changed the way you present and prepare?

Wego/Martin: With presenting you now have to be aware that things will be taken out of context, re-twitted and sent around in seconds.

PS – Apologies again to Ross and Martin for (other than the last question) losing track of who was answering which question. Chances are that the answers I have above are a merger of comments from both of them

PS 2 – disclosure: Back in 2007 I did some consulting work for Wego

"The AsiaRooms of 2009 is not the AsiaRooms of 2005": Interview with John Fearon, AsiaRooms Head of Marketing

AsiaRooms is one of the region's largest online hotel retailers. With 81, 908 hotels and counting (according to the site today) and a parent company that is the largest travel company in Europe (TUI), AsiaRooms is clearly a player that the BOOT should be paying attention to. Historically the company has made this hard as it has been very secretive with its numbers and plans and (to be frank) was not a company we wanted to pay attention to. Prior to TUI buying the company, AsiaRooms built up an unwanted reputation on online customer care forums for complaints and among the trade for scoffing at rate parity and associated price guarantees. Rumours of wholesale group rates being market up $5 and sold online became the standard trade fair post-session beer story when AsiaRooms came up in the conversation. The brand buzz was all bad. In fact the customer and industry complaint forums became the only source for profile information on the secretive company.

John Fearon the (relatively) new Head of Marketing for the Pattaya based AsiaRooms is determined to change all that. Determined to build on the TUI brand and infrastructure support to change the market perception of AsiaRooms and to bring the company out from behind the secrecy curtain. As John told me “we are not the AsiaRooms of 2005”. I had a chance this week to (virtually) sit down with Fearon and hear his plans for changing the reputation of AsiaRooms, overhauling their marketing plans, ditching meta-search and taking on all comers in a press to be number one in Asia.

In marketing, John's first target is to change the approach to paid search marketing. SEM and SEO is the frontier that John believes will sort out the winners from the losers in Asia (I agree). Is also the place he was happy to share numbers and metrics with me. After only three months of work Fearon is claiming to have doubled the amount of business coming form the search engines on the same level of spend. Not much of a metric to share but an indication of his marketing plans. He had a lot less praise for and desire to continue to invest in meta-search. Has pulled AsiaRooms out of Kayak and has no plans to go with hotelscombined. For the moment is sticking with Wego but as general rule does not believe that meta-search builds a brand or helps the business. Claims it forces you into “killing yourself” on pricing at the expense of the consumer experience. This is an interesting point. I am working on a separate post on my thoughts on the meta-search model but from what I am seeing the arbitrage gap (difference between price meta-search players buy traffic from Google and sell it to suppliers) is narrowing.

In supply the plan is to continue to gain access to cheap inventory - but with less (he did not say none) of the rate rule breaking.

Asia is a tough place to play but Fearon is not worried. AsiaRooms claims that profitability and support from the rest of the TUI nline Destination Services (ODS) group will prove another important factor. [FYI the TUI ODA group includes the UK based LateRooms and Spanish Hotelopia].

They will need more than good paid search plans and mothership support to make it in this market. Fearon says he is aware of this, especially with the Global F’n Crisis hitting Asia hard. He predicts the GFC will bring down a number of smaller brands (we off the record speculated which ones). But for Fearon this is the opportunity to bring AsiaRooms out and take competitors head-on. He has not been impressed by any of the marketing activities of competitors from the big four (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline). "There is nothing they have done that made me say Wow".

Was interesting to finally hear a (confident) voice from AsiaRooms and one not afraid to admit to the reputation. He acknowledged that AsiaRooms broke a lot of the pricing rules in the past (and maybe that they still do) but is now looking to invest in brand and customer satisfaction (heck they even have a facebook fan page now!).

So what do you think? The consumer forums still don’t paint a pretty picture for AsiaRooms but the company is claiming a lot of changes since 2005. Either way the Asian online travel market war has moved to a different level.

WebInTravel. Next week. See you there.

WebInTravel Only days away. Oct 21-22 at ITB in Singapore.

On day one I am joining a session with Phillip Wolf and Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright. We will be talking the industrying apart and putting it back together.

Later in the day conference boss Siew Hoon Yeoh and I will be running the WIT Challenge - firing questions and issues at top exes from Abacus, Wego, Yahoo!, T2 Impact and PhoCusWright.

On day two I am moderating a panel with the top reps for for Agoda, Wotif, Zuji and Expedia. The big guns from the biggest online companies in the region.

Great event. See you there.

Ever wanted to ask questions of PhoCusWright, Abacus, Wotif, Wego, T2 Impact, Expedia and Yahoo!?

Well now you can! I am co-moderating a panel on day one at the Web In Travel conference in Singapore (Oct 21-22) along with conference boss and industry commentator Siew Hoon Yeoh. The session is called "the WIT Challenge" (full programme here). Siew Hoon and I will be firing questions at a fantastic panel including the following:

• Ram Badrinathan, Senior Director, Research, PhoCusWright Inc;
• Brett Henry, Vice President, Agency Marketing, Abacus International;
• Robbie Cooke, CEO, Wotif;
• Martin Symes, CEO, Wego;
• Timothy O'Neil-Dunne, Managing Partner, T2 Impact; and
  
• Ken Mandel, Vice President & Managing Director, Yahoo! SEA.

Also expecting a representative from Expedia to be confirmed very soon.

Do you have any questions you would like to ask this great collection of industry insiders. Feel free to put your questions in the comment section of this post. I will take the best of the best with me to the conference. Include your name/company and I will mention you (if)when I read out the qustion.

Webjet vs Wego: sometimes an OTA is better than meta-search

Steve Sherlock of Oodles sent me me a email pointing out a very interesting quirk that can give OTAs a functionality advantage over meta-search. Typically I would have thought that top notch meta-search are going to be better at delivering customers to the top fare combinations versus OTAs. The OTAs would have the advantage in packaging, customer rewards, content and community and other retail elements but that meta-search would have the lead in the search and user friendliness.

But in the Australian domestic market the airlines have structured their fares in such a way that they are very user unfriendly for meta-search. The results list is full of all the fares you would want to see on a typical Australian domestic city pair (say Sydney/Melbourne) but you have to book the outbound and return separately. There are two click offs prompted by the metasearch. Here is a shot from Wego to show you what I mean



Clearly this is something on the airline side, not within Wego. Meta-search results are dependent on their source material. Since the vast majority of domestic in AU is sold as one way segments then a meta company needs two searches and two separate results to produce a fare. The bulk of long haul is still defaulted to return so they have different value. I suspect this may even be a deliberate limitation that the airlines are using to drive customers back to the direct sites of Qantas, Virgin-Blue, Jetstar and Rex.

Webjet are the largest Australian OTA (by gross bookings). They have found away around this problem through the design of their underlying technology (called the TSA or Travel Services Aggregator). They are able to capture all of the segments from multiple carriers. The customer's card is collected once and then sent to all of the points of charge. For a multi-carrier fare this may mean that the card is charged three times (once by the first carrier, once by the second and a third time by Webjet for the fees) but the consumer has only had to enter the details once. In the battle between Online Agents and Meta-search, when it comes to domestic Australian flights it seems to be advantage OTAs.

Anyone out their from Wego or Webjet care to comment - would love to do a follow up post with your views? Anyone else know of similar consequences in other domestic markets?

Update - please read the response in the comments from Ross Veitch, Chief Product Officer at Wego.com

Disclosure - in the past I provided some consulting services to Wego. The work is finished but I remain a long term fan.

Winner of ticket to Eyefortravel Asia Pacific

I have been running a competition for one free two day (bronze) delegate pass (normally A$1,395) for a lucky BOOT reader to the eyefortravel Sales & Marketing in Travel Asia Pacific conference at the Shangri La Sydney on 29 and 30 July.

The competition was for the best question in the comments for a conference speaker.

Prize Winner

Jonathan's question for Martin Symes of Wego (see below)

First Reserve

Gath's question for Andy Conroy of Lonely Planet (see below)

Second Reserve

Adam Vance's question for Richard Noon of Webjet (see below)

What Next??

Can Jonathan and Gath please send me their contact details to timsboot [at] gmail [dot] com? If I hear from Jonathan by noon Sydney time Wednesday then he wins the prize. If not it goes to Gath. If I have not heard from Gath, then it goes to Adam (Adam I have your details).

I need your Name, Job Title, Company, Email and Phone numbers.

Here are the questions.

For Martin Symes of Wego With price parity increasing in popularity, do they perceive the decreased volatility in accommodation pricing as a threat to their business model, and if so then how do they plan to react/adapt

For Andy Conroy of Lonely Planet As free downloadable city guides take off (eg for iPods, iPhone, Amazon kindle etc) how is LP planning to keep up production on their guides as revenue from book sales diminish.

For Richard Noon of Webjet Due to the current economic climate in the US, we are seeing a number of major online travel agents rolling back the plethora of fees they charge in a bid to attract travellers away from the main airline websites. Given that comments in the past have indicated that up to 60% of your revenue comes from these types of fees/charges - what impact would this have on your business model and how could you mitigate this potential risk moving forward as the economic climate cools in Australia and consumers become more aware of how to "beat the system"? Would you agree that it's not a matter of "if" but "when"?

Wego becomes Bezurk - but dodges the Trip name bullet

With the ink barely dry on my recent post to my recent post "Kango becomse UpTake, Vailoma becomes TripSay - seems it is easier to buid a product that get a good URL these days" comes news that Asian based meta-search company and News Ltd investee Bezurk is now called Wego. Here is the press release. New name comes with some additional features around trip planning and some very SEO friendly looking destination and flight routing looking links.

I exchanged a an email with founder and Chief Marketing Office - Craig Hewett to understand more. Here is an edited version of our exchange.

BOOT: Does this mean that the name Bezurk will fade away or will you keep the two in parallel?

Hewett: We will slowly transition Bezurk.com users to Wego.com over the next few months, so until then both sites will run in parallel but the intention is to eventually redirect bezurk.com to Wego.com

BOOT: How hard was it to pick a new name and get a new URL. Can you share some names you rejected?

Hewett: Coming up with brand names which we liked was the easy part the hard part was finding ones which were available as a dot .com as well as the key country domain extensions.

In the early part of the process we kept up coming up with made up names which incorporated: trip, search, flight and they all sounded too similar to other exiting travel site names.

We lived on http://instantdomainsearch.com/ which tells you instantly as you type whether a domain is registered – speeding up the search process. We ended up combining different words together and searching close to 2000 names and landed up discovering wego by pure luck.

Fortunately for us Wego was owned by a company in the US who had acquired the domain when they acquired another company a few years back and had no real use for it and happened to put it up for sale a few days before we came up with the name. So we snapped it up straight away.

ed - Craig also mentioned that some of the names researched and rejected by the Wego team included tripsearchr, triptasia, tripseekr, tripkiv, tripsecretary, trippa , tripblender, tripdecision and trippursuit. But as Guillaume over at Hotel-Blogs points out the last thing the industry needs is another "trip" based name.

BOOT: Still focused on Asia or pushing out to other parts of the world?

Hewett: ...primary focus will be on Asia Pac consumers. We are fortunate that Wego.com as a brand name lends itself globally should we have global aspirations

Pithy ending - I like the new name (but was also a fan of the Bezurk name). Am glad that Craig and Martin dodged the "Trip" name bullet. New name and News funding = busy 2008. Their only worry now is that people confuse them with the World Evangelical Gospel Outreach (yes it exists).

Disclosure - in the past I have consulted to Bezurk/Wego