Qantas Entertainment - a Very Obvious Defect (VOD)

I have already bored/amused you with my stories on how bad the roll out and performance of the new Qantas VOD/entertainment system has been (they are calling it simply "Q"). As a quick reminder, Qantas launched a new VOD system about a year ago claiming that it was a revolution in airline entertainment. Never mind that the system as described was at best on par with that offered by Cathay Pacific and Singapore but realistically still behind the great offerings from those airlines, the real issue was that the system never worked. It crashed on every flight I was on within an hour of launch. My experience was by no means isolated as similar stories were retold by other flyers in Qantas Clubs around the globe.

I am used to Qantas management being immune to the complaints and comments of its customers. Now however there is news from the Qantas cabin crew that they are suffering significant abuse from customers due the constant failures of the system. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that this is resulting in stress related issues and physical illness. As a result on Jan 19 the cabin crew association wrote to management to alert them of the constant abuse and failures. Here is the response in the article from the manager in charge David Cox (E-GM of Engineering)

"As with any complex system there have been some technical issues,...The problems usually involve a small number of seats and the passenger can be moved to a different seat in these cases. We are dedicating considerable resources to address these reliability issues, including through the supplier Rockwell Collins."

In other words - this is not a big problem, if you don't like it move seats and it is the suppliers mistake not ours. Shame on you Mr Cox and shame on you Qantas. Your customers are telling you the system is busted, your staff are telling you the system is busted and the best solution you can come up with is moving seats. This is completely useless advice for two reasons. Firstly the flights I have been on the VOD system has been broken in whole sections, if not the whole plane. Secondly, I mainly fly Qantas to the US and UK. These are very busy (or monopoly routes) and I cannot remember the last time I was on a plane with spare seat. In fact I spend half my time on wait-lists in effect begging to get on a flight. My suggestion to Qantas is to can the useless, head in the sand advice and over-haul the system.

My second piece of advice is that if Qantas does not believe me that this is an issue for their customers then here is a quick test that David Cox and his team can try - dress in business casual, grab an on cabin bag and head for the nearest Qantas lounge. In the lounge blend in by grabbing a drink, sit next to the nearest bunch of flyers and start a conversation about in-air entertainment. My bet is that this will be the first time Qantas has solicited the feedback of its top flyers and I am confident the results will be along these lines "the system is crap, it never works, the Cathay and Singapore systems are better but I have to fly Qantas anyway because they dominate the routes I need to fly".

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2007 - the year of the Travelport break up

As I have been anticipating for some time, 2007 is gearing up to be the year that the three Traveport divisions - GTA, Galileo and Orbitz - are spun off. First rumour (care of e-tid) is that UBS has been appointed to float Orbitz in London at a valuation of US$2.5-$3bil. Why London? Best reason I can think of is to avoid Sarbanes-Oxley regulation. London is liquid enough a market to provide the same capital value as New York or Nasdaq while removing the onerous/costly burden of SOX compliance.

UPDATE - in related Travelport news here is an interview with Graham Nichols (Worldspan vice president and general manager EMEA) on the merger between Worldspan and Galileo. The questions I most want to ask is "What is the future of the Worldspan brand?". Here is Graham's answer (or non-answer as the case may be)

Should the merger proceed as expected, Worldspan will become a Travelport company and will operate under its own brand, similar to how Galileo currently operates. Until we are merged we will operate as two separate companies.

Expedia "Strikes a Deal with Tripadvisor"

Did not mean for the last few days to be so Expedia focused but the deals and stories are coming thick and fast. The latest announcement care of Australian TravelWeekly is that

Expedia Australia has struck a deal with travel community website Trip Advisor [sic] in a move to step up its user generated content and to improve conversion rates.

The natural inclination as an online travel blogger is to poke fun at TravelWeekly for not knowing, realising or checking to find out that Expedia owns TripAdvisor. Following this train I would make particular fun of this sentence in the report

No commercial terms for the deal have yet been finalised.

However there is actually a very serious side to the internal negotiations between the TripAdvisor site owners and each of the Expedia point of sale operators within the EXPE mothership. Kevin May at Travolution broke the European part of this story in October. There is probably a lot of internal ego and P&L ownership behind this. My guess is that this is driven by that fact TripAdvisor staff are measured with a stand alone P&L and want compensation/target reduction for any activity that potentially helps an Expedia Point of Sale (POS) owner obtain traffic that would normally go to TripAdvisor.

There is a bigger picture also for Expedia. Part of the power of user generated content is the natural search/SEO benefits that the unique content provides. TripAdvisor's strength in this area ensures that it is the top ten natural results for now very expensive key words like "Hotels in New York" or "...London" or "...Sydney". This ranking is maintained by the unique and "independent" nature of the content on TripAdvisor (white hat SEO marketing) and contrasts to the activities of other travel content/affiliate providers that build a seemingly unrelated series of websites based on the same content that link to each other to book rankings (black hat SEO marketing). Black hat SEO marketing can be very lucrative as it short cuts the need to build a huge library of content, links and relevance. However it is also very dangerous. When Google finds sites involved in black hat techniques it typically responds quickly and mercilessly by cutting off the sites involved. Therefore if an Expedia POS was simply to cut and paste TripAdvisor content it runs the risk of (in the best case) hurting the rankings of TripAdvisor or (in the worst case) causing both TripAdvisor and the POS from being banned from Google's natural results. I am sure Expedia is aware of this and that is why they are treading very softly (with just Australia and Canada announcing full deals) are promoting the illusion that it is an arms length commercial deal. Expedia needs to do this as the integration of UGC and booking functionality is the number one characteristic of Travel2.0. Expect Expedia Inc to continue to push this strategy but to do so very carefully.

UPDATE - Sydney Morning Herald has also picked up the story in a good PR piece for Arthur and team. However they too have not mentioned the common ownership of Expedia AU and TripAdvisor.

And finally to TravelWeekly, here is a link to all of the brands owned by Expedia Inc so that you can avoid a mistake like this one.

UPDATE 2 - This is a word for word quote from the print addition of Australian business publication BRW in their "Australia Online" addition dated Feb22 - April 4 (cant find an online version so you'll have to trust me).

"In January, Expedia signed a deal with Tripadvisor...The Expedia tie-in with Tripadvisor is another parthership in a sector that seems ripe for consolidation" (my emphasis)

This is the number 1 or number 2 business publication in Australia (depending on how you measure it against the Bulletin) and yet they fell hook, line and sinker for the notion that Expedia and Tripadvisor are separate companies. You'd be surprised how often I see in my search logs "who owns tripadvisor". I should be ranting about how badly this reflects on BRW, but instead, I am impressed by the great sell job Expedia is doing keeping these brands separate in the minds of the general public and "educated" media.

Keep up with Cameron Jones

Nice interview here from eyefortravel with Expedia's Cameron Jones. Not surprisingly he is saying on message selling to hoteliers on the benefits of dynamic packaging and the relatively recent launch of Expedia in Australia and brand spanking new launch in Japan.

HRS enters the UK

Will avoid any war like analogies in commenting on HRS's announcement that they are entering the UK market. HRS are the dominant player in the German (and I think also Austrian) markets. In the Travelmole article they claim 54% of the online German market.

This is a smart strategy for them - maybe a year or two earlier than would have been perfect but a good move. The market is crowded and they will have to work hard take on the cocky and growing Pricleine (through Activehotels and Bookings.org - hey speaking of which I have not yet seen the implementation of the proposed name change) the entrenched and all powerful Expedia and Lastminute.com and the perpetual successful sleeper site combo of HotelClub and RatesToGo. They have the right content mix to fight with these player but will need to work on traffic and marketing from the UK (obviously) but may also have to abandon their long held belief in keeping the display unbiased. In a cut throat market like the UK you need to use revenue management tools to make the most of out each piece of traffic you get your hands on including sort order biasing and display management.

EXPE vs AA - No wonder AA are cocky

I was wondering after having written my post earlier in the week over the commission battle between Expedia and American Airlines - why is American suddenly being so cocky and determined? Don't they need all the help they can get? Now we have the $231mm answer - AA is profitable again. For the first time since 2006 according to e-tid. Everything was up - revenue, passenger numbers and costs. No wonder they feel like a fight. Game on.

Blog Name Change - BOMST - the Business of Meta-Search Travel

Latest news in the non-stop world of meta-search is that Cheapflights have made an investment (dont know how much) in flight options meta-search company dohop.com. Dohop's claims to fame are that (1) they are based in Iceland and (2) come at the search results from all of the routing options first then price. Most meta-search players (and online agents for that matter) look to searching availability (and that means fares). The prices it finds on complicated routings are very high but that is ok and to be expected. It is great to have a service that can help me get over missing GDS access as I can explore and examine route options and will. Good move for Cheapflights as it should help them deliver more and better options on each search.

I have been talking almost non-stop about meta-search since returning from my break - come to think of it leading up to the break as well. The activity in this sector is running at break neck speed. The BOMST acronym is nowhere near as catchy as "the BOOT" so will resist the urge to change but that will require either the meta-search boom to slow down or me to find other deals to write about.

I owe few responses in comments, particularly to Hotelsbycity on their engine and AsiaTravelMarket. Am working on those for next week.

AsiaTravelMarket - Even in comparative shopping brand is important

Announcement today in Travelmole of the site AsiaTravelMarket coming out of stealth mode. They provide inbound to Asia comparative shopping services ex-UK. I don't like the front page as it provides too many options. Travel sites work best with a booking engine/widget on the home page as this provides an obvious first action for a customer, minimizing confusion and lost traffic. However I had a play with a search for Heathrow to Bangkok - the engine was fast and the results looked good.

They will need two things to compete with with more established comparative shopping players (Sidestep, Kayak and to a lesser extent Bezurk in Asia).

First they need some more content deals. The search I conducted did not have results from either Travelocity (or lastminute) or Expedia. Online shoppers that are experienced enough to use a comparative shopping engine will know to check one of both of those players. If you do not have them in an ex-UK devoted comparative shopping play then customers are less likely to trust the results.

Secondly they need a new name. AsiaTravelMarket sounds like a good idea as it is a clean description of what they do. But there already exists an Asiatravel.com and an AsiaTravelMart.com. Each has their problems and issues but each has been around since the beginning (ie the first boom). Additionally AsiaTravelTips have been around for a long time providing industry information (well press release delivery at least) and hotel booking capability. Even though comparative shopping engines feed off the content and to an extent brand of other players they need to build their own brand as well. AsiaTravelMarket will struggle to secure brand recognition when a Google search for "asiatravel" is guaranteed to favour these older players. I know it is a tough recommendation to receive when you have just come out of stealth but maybe this is also the best time. Reminds me - I must secure the domain names AsiaTravelMarketStore.com, AsiaTravelMarketStoreShopper.com and AsiaTravelMarketStoreShopperSite.com before anyone else does....

Headaches at Opodo but is a sale really in the offering

Was preparing a post to discuss the huge list of departures at Opodo with rumours of more redundancies on the way when I say the Travolution blog post. Kevin has all that you need to know about this part of the Opodo story here.

The next part of the story is whether or not Opodo is up for sale. Independent is reporting that Opodo have

"the first steps towards a sale that could value it at well over £100m"

The over a hundred million part I get. Even though Opodo is losing a fortune, it has a turnover of Euro140mm plus and is growing despite the big marketing spends of Expedia and Travelocity / Lastminute in Europe. Heck if eBookers was worth £200mm plus then Opodo is easily in the hundred million range. (OK - we all know that eBookers was never worth £200mm but it has to be part of the story somehow).

The tone of "we have said goodbye to all of the top management, now are ready to sell" I dont get. Not sure how you can sell as either an ongoing concern or as a strategic investment a company that has lost its CFO, Country Manager for largest market, Head of Product and Commercial, Head of Tours and is just breaking in a new CEO (no matter how talented/experienced Ignacio Martos may be). Amadeus is clearly rethinking its online strategy globally (as evidenced by its exit from Travel.com.au mid last year) but they are unlikely to obtain the best price for Opodo until after they have rebuilt the management team.

EXPE vs AA - who will be the strongest warrior

Expedia and American Airlines are having a bit of a fight according to Reuters. The news wire article says that AA international an non-coach domestic fares will no longer be available through Expedia.com. I presume the battle is over attempts by American to follow the trend limit /eliminate commission payments to Expedia but do not have positive information to confirm. If that it the reason then Expedia must be adopting different tactics in the US to the other locations. In the UK, Expedia continues to sell BA flights and their Australian operation is selling Qantas and Virgin Blue domestic. Traditionally in battles between suppliers and large intermediaries you have a period where on switches off the other while the battle continues in the background until one party "blinks" or a compromise is reached. However in the airline commission battle, so far none of the first mover airlines (BA, Singapore Airlines and Qantas) have blinked. Could be that the US is different as there are more airlines for Expedia to shift share to but there will be some routes where this will hurt. Looking forward to watching round 2 of this fight.

UPDATE - m-travel.com are quoting an AA source as saying that AA and Expedia could not

“come to economic terms”

should be clear confirmation that AA wanted to lower commission and Expedia refused to accept. For their part Expedia says that the reason was

“...the result of Expedia’s choice to cease processing AA bookings using the Worldspan GDS at this time...[and]...independent of any negotiation issues with AA”

Another Lonely Planet Play

I have been previously critical of the poor online execution by travel publishing power-house Lonely Planet. They are still well short of building scale in their travel classifieds product. The front page link that I can see here has only 200 or so listings.

I am late to report their newest efforts - the launch of an invitation only online accommodation site, the HayStack. There theory behind the site (according to eyefortravel) is to limit the available properties to those reviewed by Lonely Planet reviewers. From the press release this means

"Haystack launches with over 390 properties from 20 countries and will develop rapidly from launch."

This sounds like a good idea - a way for customers to book reviewed hotels online. But I think it is too little too late. Lonely planet was founded in 1984. Online travel took off in 1995. Online travel became a serious business in 2000 (with Travelocity's acquisition of Preview Travel). Launching a booking product in Dec 2006 is at least 6 years too late for Lonely Planet.

I want Lonely Planet to "win" online as I have so many fantastic travel memories from by backpacking youth that involved a Lonely Planet book by my side. I should also give them some credit for launching new products on a regular basis. But the next generation of backpackers all own mobile phone and will all have accounts with the large scale community and review sites (the Tripadvisors and WAYNs of the world) connected to their phones and local internet cafe, reducing the relevance and need for a Lonely Planet book tucked in the back pocket.

UPDATE - have just read the interesting post on the Compete blog analysing the (limited) traffic flows from the Lonely Planet main site to the Haystack booking engine. Makes for interesting reading

The BOOT on Hotel-Blogs

Many thanks to Guillaume of Hotel Blogs for profiling the BOOT in his entertaining "20 Blogs about Travel" series (here is the profile of the BOOT).

Jumping good, Booking bad

You don't need me to tell you about the Flickr phenomenon, just to point to the travel players trying to take advantage of the traffic and community that comes from photo sharing. A not-so-new player that I came across while reading the New York times online is HotelsByCity.net.

On the fun side - I love the bed jumping competition photos section - huge collection of photos of people doing jump after jump after jump including wackos in their birthday suits, dressed in costume and risking life and limb.

On the features side - they have an outline map of a hotel showing the rooms/locations of photos submitted by users (here is an example from the Grand Hyatt in San Fran. Note - not all hotels have this feature.

On the business model front - there is strong consumer benefit in having access to photos not fluffed by the hotel. Further (assuming they have the scale they claim) this is great at driving repeat visitors and customer retention. Their business model seams simple - use photo driven content and community to drive traffic to the booking engine. That said, I made three searches in three cities and could not get a rate or booking option. Hotel results were posted with photos, maps and reviews but attempts to get to a confirmed rate and booking page failed every time. The main error message was that my check-out date did not come after check-in but (a) that was not true (I triple checked each time) and (b) there is no chance to confirm or correct on the error page, you have to use the back button. So - great content, great PR generator in the bed jumping but can end up a waste of time if people can't book anything.

Airlines spotting and nostalgia

Couple of sites came to my attention over the break that I want to share with you - one useful, one nostalgic:

1. Flight Aware - An airline will never be honest with you in first instance about how delayed their flights are. I remember one time I was running late for a Virgin-Express flight from Heathrow. I called the customer care line and asked if the flight was on time or running late. Was assured it was on time. I pressed - "are you sure, because if it is on time I will miss it". "OK" admits the agent "it is probably running about 15 minutes late". "That's not enough" I say "I will probably get there about 30 mins after scheduled departure.". "Well", the agent confesses, "that should be fine, as the flight looks to be delayed by about a hour and fifteen minutes". It took three attempts to have the airline tell me the correct information on the delay in the flight. On another occasion I was at the gate checking into a flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona when the staff apologised for the delay and announced that boarding would commence in fifteen minutes. I went up to the counter and double checked with the counter staff. "Excuse me - did you say that boarding would start in fifteen minutes." "Yes" she replied "apologies for the delay". "How can boarding start in fifteen minutes, when there is no airplane connected to the air bridge" I say pointing out the window to the obviously lack of anything on which we could board. She eventually admitted that the plane was fifteen minutes away, that it would take fifteen minutes to get the passengers off and at least another ten minutes to prep the plane for our boarding - so boarding would be forty minutes away. Flight Aware claim to provide flight tracking data and info free of the airline spin.
2. Departed Flights.com it is a crude and not very attractive site but here you will find old route maps for most major US airlines - including many of the defunct airlines such as Pan Am. Unfortunately is not interactive or searchable but provides a nice trip down memory lane. Other parts of the site have eclectic collections of old airline advertising campaigns including this oldie on how fantastic the 727 is/was.

Back on the blog

Hope you are as rested and ready for 2007 as I am.

Holiday Break and Wishes - Back Jan 8 (or so)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Seasons Greetings, Happy New Year etc. My best wishes to all for the break. Hope you have a chance to have some time off to rest, play and catch up with friends and family. I am going to take a little break from posting (unless I can't help myself). Am aiming to be back on the blog around January 8 (maybe 15). It is looking like a beautiful summer in Sydney so I plan to enjoy myself.

Thanks for being a reader over the last six months or so. Thanks to the comment posters for adding to the experience and keeping the volume of Travelport posts in check. And thanks to those other bloggers that have shared the link love this year including Travolution, Hotel-Blogs, dottourism, HotelReview, Social Media on the Fly, our Spanish friends Megustaelturismo, Go Man Go and even those crazy sploggers that somehow think they can make money out of stealing my posts and surrounding them with gibberish (here's an example).

All the best to you and yours and see you in 2007

Farewell Netus

I have been spending the last twelve months deep in the Internet venture capital world working for the News Ltd funded VC firm Netus. Has been a great year working under e-industrialist Daniel Petre and working on some of most exciting areas in new media. However I have realised over this time that my career goals no longer sit with corporate development and investment areas which dominated so much of my early career as a lawyer. Instead, I crave a return to the challenge and buzz of managing a large team of people with a P&L/revenue focus that was (up until recently) my main focus. Naturally I will stay in the Internet arena but on the operational side rather than investing.

It has been great to come to this realisation but once I did, sadly, I had to resign from Netus. I will take the next few months off to work on a few private projects and rest on the beach with my kids before announcing my new plans. You can stay in touch with me through my BOOT email address or my linkedin profile.

Planes, Trains and Accor-deals

Another inventory/supply deal for Bezurk has been announced. This one with Accor. I have talked in the past about how content deals should be the main focus of Bezurk - and all meta-search players - ahead of the more sexy/apparently appealing distribution deals. This is a particularly good inventory provider to have access to as Accor have been holding back inventory from a lot of the online companies. The margin is likely to be terrible (10% range) but it will give Bezurk a differentiation versus other players.

On the eve of the announcement of the deal I ran into Founder and CMO Craig Hewett on the train. He is looking confident and should be pleased with the state of the product.

Travelocity could get distracted looking out the Window

Hoping to cash in on the... Trying to generate traffic through improved SEO... Giving their editor-in-chief a place to... Improve customer loyalty through putting a face to the brand...

I don't know why but Travelocity have launched a blog called the Window Seat. I get the business model based on generating huge amounts of traffic and the great SEO boost from large amounts of user generated content and reviews as captured in Sidestep buying Travelpost, Expedia when it bought Tripadvisor and Travelport's (original plans) when it bought asia-hotels. I also believe you do a lot to improve your relationship with your customer's when they can see behind the scenes in of the business through a corporate or CEO blog such as Tripadvisor's fantastic blog on actual customer queries.

But I do not see the benefit to Travelocity in setting up a generalist, editorially driven travel blog. The general travel blog is one of the top three crowded blog spaces on the planet (next to porn and tech). Sure Travelocity have a good writer in Amy Ziff but there are well established players here such as Gridskipper and uber blogs like RealTravel that collect together the blogs and commentary of others so Travelocity is entering this space late.

It is not just second mover status that makes me question this strategy, it is that by definition Window Seat cannot speak to all or even a majority of the huge customer base of Travelocity. The chances of Amy or her team writing anything that more than 5% of the Travelocity customer base is interested in is near zero. That has nothing to do with Amy's writing ability it is because there are just so many Travelocity customers from so many different countries - each with different ideas, plans and needs around travel - that it is impossible. Travel itself is a big category, combine that with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different customers and you do not have a chance to target them in a single catch all blog. Travelocity would have to replicate the travel section of the local bookstore or newsagent to get close - with a blog for each of the major areas (backpacking, cruise, VFR, adventure, romantic, gay & lesbian etc...).

This is why UGC is so fantastic because each viewer/user/reader can find the other viewers/users/readers with the same interests without having to wait for the journalist to get round to it.

I like the look of the blog and I enjoyed this little piece on Venice but Travelocity should be spending its blogging time and energy helping IgoUgo catch up with Tripadvisor not musing on the fat content of pre-prepared food.

What is a frequent flyer worth?

If Qantas does go private - what will the new owners do with the frequent flyer program?

When frequent flyer programs became popular in the 80s in the US and 90s in Australia it was seen by airlines as a means for reducing price competition. The hope was that you would lock in a customer in such a way that it would take significant price differences for them to shift to another airline. The advantages were obvious. The disadvantage was that it also made customer acquisition a little harder. Pretty soon every airline had a program up and running, it made it easier for each Airline to retain it's customers but harder to steam customers from another airline. If Airline A wanted to steal customer from Airline B it had to drop its prices dramatically or carry over the tier status of the customer to convince the customer to abandon years of miles and free booze in the lounge. Frequent flyer programs in competitive markets began to lock in the market shares of the players - strangely enough reducing competition. You can read more about this fascinating phenomenon in the book Thinking Strategically.

In Australia Qantas does not have this problem as it killed off its main frequent flyer competitor - Ansett Airlines. Virgin-Blue has just recently abandoned the Low Cost Carrier "code of conduct" that prohibits frequent flyer programs and launched one (Velocity) in late 2005. However the gap between the death of Ansett and the launch of the Velocity program allowed Qantas to not only grow its program dramatically but establish the Qantas Frequent Flyer program as the dominant rewards program in Australia. All airlines have made money selling/sharing points with alliance partners and other travel providers (hotels, cars etc) but Qantas have turned it into an art form allowing partners as diverse as real-estate agents, financial services providers, retailers, wine clubs, telecoms companies and more to buy points/miles and provide them to customers. It became possible to rack up hundreds of thousands of miles needing to eat a single airline meal.

There is now enormous financial value in the buying and selling of miles for Qantas (and other airlines). Canadian airlines actually spun off its whole frequent flyer program in July 05, Aeroplan, a business that is valued at the time at CAD$2bil (now about $900mm) based on 4.8mm members.

With the plan to privatise Qantas, questions are being raised about whether or not the soon to be new owners will want to spin off parts of the company such as catering, cargo and the frequent flyer program. Qantas are assuring their frequent flyers that it is "business as usual" including sending out a dedicated email to that effect. But with a value range of AUD$400mm to $2 billion (Australian newspaper article) it is almost certainly at the top of the list for the consortium that will be sitting on a debt pile in the AU$10billion range.

So - should you rush off and book your frequent flyer seat? The answer is yes - but not because Qantas may spin off the program. The answer is yes because there are simply too many frequent flyer miles in the world - including Australia. It is inevitable that over time the value of a frequent flyer mile will decline. Qantas re-valued the program about a year ago making it more expensive to buy international flight. They re-wrote the program in 2000 converting from kilometres to miles (effective 38% devaluation). AND - it costs of hundreds of dollars per "free" ticket.

As the Economist stated more than a year ago - it is like the printing of a currency by a failing state - the more the print, the less the value. So the more miles that Qantas sells into the market the more regular will be the "updating" of the program to find ways to reduce the value of miles. There is no need to use up miles just because of the sale of Qantas but my standing order advice is have to use up your miles on a regular basis. The winner is the person who had the most holidays not the one that dies with the most miles in the bank.

Here is a great post from a finance blog about other frequent flyer valuation activity in the US

Can't ingore $11billion

Have been trying to ignore the actual deal around the $11billion buy-out of Qantas as I wanted to focus my thoughts/rant on the Australian Government's constant screwing up of competition on the Pacific Route.

The story behind the deal is a simple/traditional PE deal - large US group (Texas Pacific Group) joins forces with with the Australian Millionaires Factory (Macquarie) and another Australian group Allco to de-list the Red Rat. I would normally say that owning an airline is a dangerous aim to have. The airline business is subject to constant out of your control shocks (SARS, War, Terrorism, etc), huge capital outlays for airlines and the number one cost element (gas) is not only variable but wildly so. However the Texas Pacific Group are good at owning airlines - they are credited with the turn around of Continental Airlines. Oh - and they now own Sabre. We always used to joke at Galileo that one way to protect segment fee margins was to own and airline...

eMarketer compares the numbers

I am usually bored by more reports of big numbers for the online travel biz as we really know all that we need to know in this area - the sector is proven, the sector is big. However will make an exception for eMarketer's comparative chart above as it gives a nice little summary of what each of the major research houses think about the US market. There is actually a lot of agreement between them. Estimating may become harder in the future if (as a result of both being/going private) Orbitz and Travelocity cease to break out their online sales.

50 of the best

Luggage on line have nice list of "50 of the best travel sites you probably never heard of". My favourite on the list has always been the Airline Meals site. I love this site - it is like a cross between food porn and trainspotting. Thousands of photographs and reviews of airline meals from the best in the world like SQ first class to the What The Hell Is That of Borat's favourite Air Kazakhstan.

The fantastic underground site not mentioned is SeatGuru - do not fly without looking here first. Shows you the layout of each of the major configurations of each of the major airlines - which seats to look for and which to avoid. Green for good, yellow for something to note and red for reach for the sleeping tablets. Even SeatGuru can't help you if you are flying Qantas to the US code sharing with American as you will end up on a MD S-80 aircraft, which as you can see here has nothing in Business Class that is recommended. Not a seat.


Thanks to Mark Fridgen's blog where I first saw the link to the 50 best.

Too busy looking at Travelport to see the money chasing Sabre

We were all so busy tracking the Travelport and Worldspan rumours that the hints around the possible privatisation missed me until today. Forbes (and many others) say that there are two PE groups bidding for the business in the $4billion dollar range. The stock price has reacted accordingly - up more than 10% at the time I type this. Lots of good assets inside Sabre - of course there is Travelocity and Lastminute - but also the small but successful Holiday Autos and the booming in the US Site59.

Not that it will likely weigh much in the mind of the PE bidders - their weakness is in the Asian online market. Zuji talks a good game with localised sites in many countries - Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Korea- but in each of those (except I think Taiwan) they are well behind the leaders despite years in the market and millions in marketing money. Mainly this is due to the product - both functionality and inventory - always being a step behind the competition. The single ownerships structure (as opposed to their early life under a dozen or more airlines) should help fix this however that will depend on them having the right management and almost flawless execution.

UPDATE - here is RedHerring's take on the announced deal. Thanks to Anon in the comments below for being the first to let me know of confirmation of the deal.

Qantas might go private but the Australian government lied ot the public

Australia has joined the private equity boom (especially in media) with the two largest TV network media groups, 7 Media and Channel 9 owning PBL, having combined with KKR and CVC Asia Pacific respectively. I am a bit late with the story on this blog, but the newest Australian candidate for going private is the Red Rat - Qantas. I am not known for my kind words about Qantas (for screwing up online, for charging a fortune for free travel here and for having no idea about customer service) but my largest and loudest rants related to Qantas have been the Australian government's outrageous defence of the pacific route duopoly.

You may recall my quote of then Federal Transport Minister Warren Truss when to defend excluding Singapore Airlines from this lucrative rout 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,"

Now comes something even more stupid out of the mouths of Australian parliamentarians and an admission that Truss was making it up. Here is a quote from a Melbourne newspaper

...several Liberal MPs [government parliamentarians] have told The Age they believe the Prime Minister is more likely to embrace an open-skies policy if Macquarie and its national private equity partners succeed in their $11 billion takeover.

That is - that despite all claims of making decisions based on economic realities, the government would abandon its protection of Qantas on the pacific route if it ceased to be a public company because, well just because. If this proves true then it will go down as one of the greatest acts of business hypocrisy by any centre right/conservative government in living memory. If this becomes policy then Truss will be proven to have lied to the public earlier this year.

I am mad not just for the principle of the thing but because I/my company has to pay almost twice the per km cost to go the US than the UK while being forced to use an inferior product to market leaders Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Cathay Pacific etc. Just as before there is no justification in the pacific route duopoly and even less justification in believing a government that says that there is.

"Worldspan+Travelport=Gal-World" - how a search term became a company

First it was a strange rumour. Then it was a search term here and there. Finally it became a mountain (well a small hill) of traffic to travel blogs such as yours truly, Travolution and Travel.Beat. Now it is reality - Travelport (Galileo) has acquired Worldspan.

Interesting points from the deal:

• Cendant bought Orbitz in part because of the huge revenues that Galileo would gain from migrating Orbitz from Worlspan to Gal. Presumably part of the reason behind Galileo buying Worldspan is eliminating the litigation risk and migration cost that arose from that strategy - how serendipitous;
  
• Worldspan itself has been in some financial trouble. This deal will not simply be a case of cutting costs. The Worldspan and Gal products will both have to be kept alive for some time. Reviving Worldspan will be a enormous integration task for Gal; and
• There are lots of financial machinations behind the deal - an immediate recapitalisation of Worldspan and a $125mm loan to Worldspan. The item to keep a close eye on is the comment that
  

  The initial integration focus will be on consolidating technology and administrative operations resulting in near-term cost savings of approximately $50 million

  That is - a lot more head count to go.

But my favourite part of the deal is that it confirms that Google knows everything. There is no secrecy in M&A activity any more because the answers are all in Google's logs. If I can sit he with my tiny free tracking service and see that people with Worldspan and Travelport IP addresses are furiously typing in every combination of Worldspan and Travelport you can think of, can you imagine what could be gleamed from Google, Yahoo, MSN search logs by looking for combinations of company names.

Now comes the fun part - need to pick a new name for the combined company. "Worldport", "Travelspan", "Portspan", "Worldtravel"...all too corporate and boring. We need something fresh that speaks to generation Y - which is why I propose "Gal-World"....OK, maybe not...it probably wouldn't work too well typed in a search engine.

Thanks to Ed Silver who was first to forward the PR news to me.

UPDATE - e-tid are reporting that (registration required)

Worldspan will assume the Galileo name

Farewell Barney, Welcome Henrik

The unpublished rumours were true - Barney Harford is now the former President of Asia Pac for Expedia. After what must be close to 9 years with Expedia Barney will step down to be replaced by former head of lodging for Europe, Asia and everywhere not American, Henrik Kjellberg. Barney will retain his links to the firm through Chairmanship of eLong. Henrik inherits the few months old Expedia AU (including offline marketing plans), few days old Expedia JP and Australian, Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong versions of Hotels.com. With Henrik moving to Hong Kong ,will be the first time since 2002 that Expedia has had a VP or above level exec in the region. Congrats to both Barney and look forward to seeing you in Sydney Henrik.

Clock ticking on Priceline.com.hk/sg/tw

Enough of rumours - fact of the day is that Asian mega-company Hutchison Whampoa have sold the last of their Priceline shares. Hutch is the majority shareholder in the Priceline Asia operation (Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan).

The Reuters article says

"Priceline.com said it continued to do business with Hutchison Whampoa through a joint venture, Hutchison-Priceline in Asia"

but almost certainly this means that joint venture is on life support - soon to be put out of its misery. As I discussed earlier Priceline Asia has unfortunately been in trouble from the start, never living up to its promise in Asia. Priceline has not had much luck in Asia. In addition to the troubles of Priceline Asia, it's efforts in Australia went through a lot of money - mainly largest teleco Telstra's - under a different name (www.myprice.com.au - domain name now belongs to a car company) before shutting down moments after launch in a barrage of expensive post/early bubble bust redundancy payments.

Priceline should take this chance to close down its Asia JV and relaunch efforts under Bookings.com brand (I would have liked to have said the Activehotels brand but no more).

Record Traffic Day - thank you Worldspan and Travelport

The day is only half over and already I have had a record day for traffic to the blog. Nothing that is going to blow out the stats engines of Nielsen Netrating or Hitwise but enough to make me turn to my referral logs and try to figure out what is going on. There have been some links from fellow bloggers such as Guilliaume at HotelBlogs and Kevin at Travolution (thanks to both). However the area is which traffic is going bananas is search engine traffic around the following terms:

• worldspan + travelport
• worldspan travelport announcement
• travelport acquires worldspan
• galileo rumour
• worlspan rumour
• and so on....

Search traffic is hardly a definitive indicator of M&A activity but it sure is a useful buzz measure. I first 'felt' this traffic spike building last Thursday but today is exponentially higher.

Expedia in downtown Sydney

Expedia marketing in Australia has started to go offline. Picture below with charming scenes of female marketeers dressed in yellow, spruiking their hearts out to the lunch time crowds in Sydney's Pitt St Mall. Perfect opportunity for a caption competition. First prize is a year's free subscription to this blog.

Photo courtesy of Ted Szukalski, Digital Photo

Rumour of the week - Travelport is interested in Worldspan

ATW are reporting the underground rumour that Travelport may be interested in buying the struggling Worldspan.

Worldspan has long been the rumored target of acquisition by Amadeus, but the attention has now shifted to Travelport's Galileo.

I have no idea either way but the searches of "Worldspan" and "Travelport" in the same search entry are one of the leading drivers of traffic to my blog. Clearly someone/people are typing that a lot into Google.

Comedy break

Check out the Tripadvisor weird postings blog - here. Collections of wacko comment, typos and stuff you could not make up.

Sidestep content deals - a wider view

Quick follow on to posts on Sidesteps content acquisition frenzy including the Travelpost acquisition. Interest post here from fellow Travelport refugee Ed Silver on the paralells between that deal and the acquisition of Reddit by Conde Nast (Wired) and Google's buyout of Jotspot.

Expedia turns on Japan

Completely crushing my hopes of having an acquisition to talk about - Expedia have launched an organically developed Japanese site - Expedia.co.jp. Japan is arguably the hardest market in the world to sell air online as no-one has cracked a way to show a consolidated display from the two GDS's - Axcess and Infini. Expedia either haven't cracked it either or are still working on it so have launched with hotels only.

On the hotel side there have been two issues that have been hard for non-Japanese players to solve for a launch. Firstly that Rakuten Travel (Mytrip) charge hotels a low as 6.5% commission setting an expectation for the hotels on pricing for domestic demand and secondly how to load, sell and fulfil the traditional Ryokan inventory. Not sure if Expedia have solved these but congratulations are due in putting the site into double byte Kanji and in setting up a local fulfilment system.

Priceline to launch "Synergy.com"

Activehotels.com is no more - no it hasnt gone bust. It has shed its name in favour of Priceline stable mate Booking.com. Eyefortravel.com is reporting that they now have a common business model. It also says that the locations will remain separate and

"its websites will continue to be marketed with differentiated products".

The change is yet to make the front page of www.activehotels.com (at publications date).

I don't understand how Priceline plan to make this work. I have praised in the past their integration work and they have enjoyed the results with huge growth in online hotels sales in Europe. However it can only be a mistake to assume that you can market the same brand [Booking.com] to different customers with differentiated products. The only way to try and do this is that I can think of is to have different product or pricing depending on where a customer comes from (either by country or marketing channel). That never works online - as I have said before. Will have to wait for the site launch to see if Priceline can make this work - but I fear for them. Sounds like the word "synergy" and "costs savings" have been overly used across the board-rooms of Priceline Europe.

UPDATE - found an interview with Adrian Currie - Priceline CFO - from ITB in October. Talks about ActiveHotels and Bookings in Europe. Talks of successful integration but no mention of killing the Active Brand.

UPDATE 2 - in the Q4 2006 earnings call the CEO of Priceline Jeff Boyd talked more about the plans for the ActiveHotels brand in Europe. There is no intention of killing off the brand - rather the marketing focus will go behind the Bookings brand. I think that is a good balance. Would continue to caution against making the products inter-changeable to avoid the problems that best Expedia and Hotels.com when they first began to work on common inventory pools. But there does come a point when you have to balance the cost of marketing against the potential cannibalisation.

Webjet CEO cashes in

Webjet boss David Clarke has cashed in some of his shares to take advantage of the recent financial success and resulting stock price. SMH record of Australian Stock Exchange filing (registration required) says that David sold 1,938,226 shares worth AU$731,486. Congrats to David.

WAYN joins the boom

The Travel 2.0 boom is spreading to Europe. Where Are You Now (WAYN) has raised $11mm in a funding round that included VC groups but also Travel 1.0 entrepreneurs such as Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com and Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillipps, co-founders of Active Hotels (sold to Priceline).

Paidcontent are saying that WAYN are claiming 7 million subscribers across 220 countries.

This is the scale that new comers to content like Sidestep and Webjet's Plantit have to come up against in their plans to enter the social networking battle-ground.

.travel domain - I don't get it

Tralliance Corporation is the company pushing the roll-out of the ".travel" URL domain. Have scored a couple of coups in recruitment including hiring Daniela Wagner from OctopusTravel / Travelport. Daniela dragged GTA into the online era and grew Octopus to be the top hotel booking engine of airlines, so she knows a lot about online travel. She and Tralliance announced last month that they have 25,000 companies signed up to the .travel domain at $100 a pop (a cool $2.5mm in revenue).

That's a good start but I don't yet understand the compulsion for a travel company to have a .travel domain. Am sure most companies will buy the domain for their brand to stop somebody else (though a quick search shows that Webjet, Wotif and Expedia are yet to buy theirs - or at least switch on a referral). But aside from the defensive move it is not clear what the benefits area. Don't understand how having a .travel domain is better than having a .com, .co.uk, .com.au etc domain. You would never want to launch a business on the basis of having a .travel domain where someone had the same name under .com. The key for success then for Tralliance is to win support for their search product - search.travel. If this search engine gains traction then that could provide the positive reason for companies to support the .travel domain. Without it I see little benefit. Winning in search will also be hard work as Tralliance will be battling well established providers from Google at the top end through Sidestep, Kayak and Tripadvisor in the middle and Bezurk at the focused end.

Am not going to count out Daniela but am starting off very sceptical.

UPDATE - 16 July 2007 TravelWeekly are carrying the story that Ron Andruff the President of Tralliance and Cherian Mathai the COO will leave the company "pending finalization of certain agreements.". Which is later clarified to mean that their severance packages are still being formulated. The announcement has comments from Triallance parent company (theglobe.com) boss Michael Egan using very positive language about transition, growth plans and other improvements however as the annual report shows (and TravelWeekly quote).

According to theglobe.com's annual report, 25,200 domain names had been sold as of March. The company collects $100 a year for a dot-travel domain name.

That does not sound like a lot and fuels my continued scepticism in this business. To put this in perspective, Godaddy.com one of the world's largest domain name registrar services has more than 20 million URLs under management.

UPDATE 2 - here are HotelMarketing.com's comments.

I owe my traffic to elephants

I have recently installed a site meter. The part I love the most about it is I can see where my modest amount of traffic comes from, including the search terms in Google that result in a link to the blog. Today I received the greatest complement ever. If you go to Google.de (German version) and type in "price for an elephant" I am the top result. Clearly there is no better place on the planet other than the BOOT to advise Germans on how much to pay for an elephant. Brilliant!

Thank you Lonely Planet.

Webjet in living audio

Thanks to boardroom radio here is a link to an recent interview with David Clarke of Webjet. I have commented a lot on their hotel plans and expansion plans. In this case will let David comment

• Acquisitions - Talks about his acquisition thinking saying that they have "external advisors looking at possibilities". Quite rightly he is only looking in the online space and only at product ranges they don't have - ie not air. Says he has "no current target in mind".
• International - Also talked about thoughts on future of international bookings online. Believes that consumers will soon be able to booking multi-sector international fares with different airlines - like domestic.
  
• Hotels - Admits hotel business is very small but is confident of growth. "Will not be a material component of profit in the next six months".

Nothing on Planit.

Travelport still trying to shake a (now 2) billion dollar hang-over

Travelport's Q3 06 results are out. Net revenue is at $631mm - down from last quarter's $693mm. B2C net revenue was $193, well down on Q2 of $221mm - in fact on par with Q2 2005 results of $195. But that is not the story. The story is that there was a "Net loss of $1.2 billion which included a pretax non-cash impairment charge of approximately $1.2 billion".

Two big questions from this line.

Firstly - how are they still being laboured with the hang over of turning $7b into $4.3b? I thought it clear that his monkey was off the back last quarter?

Secondly - a non-cash impairment of $1.2 bil means that there is a net loss of $1.2bil means a zero EBITDA (actually -$1.3mm).

The answer in the first one is buried deep in the Q3 press release where they say

"the Company recorded a total impairment charge of $2.4 billion (which includes the estimate of $1.2 billion taken in the June quarter), representing the difference in the carrying value of goodwill of the Company’s B2C and B2B reporting units and the implied fair value of goodwill of those reporting units"

In other words - I called the "monkey off the back" too early. I went back to the Q2 results and listened to Q3 call to see if I missed it. I did not. In the Q2 results they estimated the impairment of $1bil but through the period of Q2 realised that it was double that. Ouch!

The second - appears to be legitimately put down to continued restructuring and business challenges. They say on the conference call that B2C (Oribit, HotelClub/RatesToGo, Cheaptickets and eBookers) are at break even. Presumably held back mainly by eBookers (see also the delay in role out of their new Orbitz backed platform).

Hopefully finally we can call Travelport free.

Travel video sharing sites - trying to fight off the porn like everyone else

Like the rest of the Internet world I have been tracking the phenomenon that is peer-to-peer video sharing and destination sites. From the gigantic (YouTube, MySpace) through the tussle in the middle (Metacafe, Break.com, ebaumsworld and Revver) to the targeted (Heavy). Only a matter of time before we saw the dedicated travel sites. First to come to my attention is Travelisitic. Founded by ex-MTV and ex-iFilm execs (MTV bought iFilm).

Site looks good - videos of white beaches, rolling hills, rushing waterfalls, ancient cities and (like every other video destination site), booze and soft porn.

You can tell from the monetisation efforts (lots of pre-roll video and good Google Adsense integration) and video quality that the founders know what they are doing. Will have a challenge in keeping out the porn and antics that are so popular on the other site while at the same time building scale but a great start.

On your marks, Jetset, go (well next year we will)

I have gone from feeling contempt for offline agents that have been slow to move online to almost pity. Clearly Flight Centre has made huge mistakes online (as we discussed here). Now we have a better one. Large Australian franchise network - Jetset Travel - have announced boldly a plan to "step up its online offering with the launch of a fully bookable website next year".

Unbelievable. Simply Unbelievable.

10 years after the launch of Expedia, 9 years after the float of Travel.com.au on the ASX, 7 years after the birth of comparative shopping engines with the launch of Sidestep and 6 years after the launch of Wotif, Jetset have announced that they will have a site up and running by mid next year. The CEO is competing with himself for understatements of the century when he says that Jetset is "late to market...and..to some extent playing catch up" and even better "The lack of a bookable online engine was my first priority".

That truly is like one dinosaur up to their nose in tar, with a tsunami, meteor and earthquake all on the way, turning to another and saying "next year I am going to grow an opposable thumb"

Here is the full article thanks to Travelweekly.

Another day another Sidestep content deal

First reviews, then blogs and now Frommer's for editorial content. If this continues, Sidestep could begin to rival Travelport for the most mentions in this blog.

Qantas speaks to me but manages to ignore me at the same time

I have just returned from an enjoyable lunch put on by FCM (Flight Centre's corporate travel arm). As you know I am a fan of good corporate agents - even with my strong history in online travel. They invited former Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh to speak. Very enjoyable lunch and talk from Steve. I even managed to win a copy of his autobiography.

Qantas was a sponsor of the event and a representative of their corporate sales department opened the event with a speech and general introduction. Now, keep in mind that this Qantas rep is speaking to a room of FCM clients. That is hard core road/air warrior travellers. Almost certainly everyone present is a top tier Qantas flyer. The Qantas rep spoke for 15 minutes on "what is happening about Qantas". He talked about the airlines they plan to buy, the battles they plan to fight with their unions and the costs they plan to cut. Also took a few minutes to complain about fuel prices and low cost carriers. I found this staggering. Here he is with a captive audience of some of the top individual customers of the business and not once did he say thank you. Not once did he talk about a commitment to the corporate travel, about quality of product and customer service...nothing about how he was going to make things better for us as top customers. It was like he was talking to a room of share holders, not customers.

To me this summarises all that is wrong with Qantas. They have become so bottom line focused that they have lost a sense of how to keep customer's happy. They have monopoly or near monopoly rights on key routes (especially the Pacific Route and the politician traffic out of Canberra) that they are not aware of the growing disquiet among their customers. If I was the Qantas rep at this luncheon I would have spent less time basking in the reflective glory of being at Steve Waugh's table and more time shaking the hand of every single customer in the audience thanking profusely and begging for feedback.

Fairfax adds Lonely Planet to hinted plans

A day of updates today with another titbit of information about Fairfax's plans. We already know that Zuji is the white-label engine (and that the engine needs work). Now the story is that Lonely Planet is providing the content. I presume that they will aim for the content to be more around good travel editorial and less on the size, cost and delivery processes for purchasing elephants.

Sidestep believes in RealTravel

Clearly the Travelpost.com deal we discussed early this week was only the beginning of Sidestep re-inventing itself. Today we have news that Sidestep will take a feed of blog and user generated content from RealTravel. These are both great moves by Sidestep. A comparative shopping engine cannot build loyalty the same way a full service provider can - by definition. Deep content not only helps counter this but should also increase traffic from SEM and SEO activity.

Ctrip pulls away from eLong, Ctrip investing in execs and staff

eLong.com, has announced some great numbers for Q3 with a 40 percent year-on-year growth in revenues to US$9.4 million. The bulk of this ($7.3mm) still coming from hotel commissions but air commissions are growing faster than hotels (47% vs 38%). Congrats to the company on a quarter of positive operating income ($215k) and I look forward to hearing what new chair Barney Harford and newish CEO Tom SooHoo plan to do with some $142mm in the bank.

eLong's good results came a day after a mixed by investment heavy announcement from CTRIP. Sales were up more than 50% year on year to a very healthy $26+ mm, increasing the gap on eLong. However net profit and EPS were dead flat. The blame falls on "compensation expenses". In their formal announcement there a series of comments like

• "Sales and marketing expenses...increased... due to hiring of new sales and marketing staffs"
• "General and administrative expenses... increased...primarily due to the hiring of additional staffs"; and
• "Product development expenses...increased...primarily due to hiring of additional product development staffs"

That is a lot of investment in a lot of staff.

The CTRIP and eLong battle is a look back in time at the battle between Travelocity and Expedia in 1999 and 2000 where Expedia took over Travelocity as the largest of the time. Though in the case it seems that CTRIP's lead is expanding and they are finding time to invest in people and product to go further. Am going to enjoy watching this battle.

Fairfax announces big play with few details

Travel weekly are running a story with big talk from Fairfax (huge Australian media company) on their plans for online travel. Fairfax made a very tentative step into travel when they acquired independent accom provider Stayz in December last year for AU$12mm. I always thought this a strange first move into travel. While I think the potential for the independent accom sector is great, Stayz did not have a particularly strong brand at the time and its technology is nothing special. There has been great interest in what Fairfax would do next. Now we know - well we have a bit more of an idea - well we have a little bit of a hint of a possibility.

According to Travelweekly, Fairfax will launch four sites in the next six months. The first is Hotelz. The quote from the article is that Fairfax and Zuji have entered into a "content deal". Unclear what that means but from the look of the hotelz beta site it involves a white-label booking engine. The site is in beta so can't be too critical yet but if they want to challenge Wotif, Lastminute, RatesToGo etc then it is going to need a better search functionality. Typing Sydney into the Hotelz search box and choosing Australia it still asks me for clarification - if I have chosen Sydney Australia, how could I possibly be thinking about Nova Scotia?

The engine url has regular references to travelpn.com - not heard of them before though judging by Alexa they provide white-label solutions for a number of airlines and Zuji. Could be an offshoot of Travelocity.

I like the Chutzpah and drive of Fairfax Digital travel boss James Cassidy claiming that "within 18 months it [Fairfax] will become a major force in online travel, even rivalling Wotif". However the basis for his claim does not stand up to scrutiny. He says “Wotif offers bookings within one month and only 30 per cent of the market book in that window,”. It will be a fatal error for Fairfax to chase the other 70% (assuming this number is true) as all of the money to date in online travel is in a booking window within one month. The sectors that are booking beyond that date are the least likely to book online.

I also caution them on relying too much on white-labels. Controlling product and inventory is critical to success in online travel. Telstra' s Sensis jumped into online travel through GoStay - a white-label of AOT's needitnow - and it has gone nowhere. My earlier comments on that are here. Rumours are Travelport is also remembering that lesson and unwinding its efforts to combine offline and online hotel contracting.

Who you callin' ugly?

Was asked in an email what I meant when I described Travelpost.com as "not the prettiest of sites" and thought I would share my response with all. I am enjoying watching the battle for eyeballs from review and shopping comparison sites. Clearly Kayak and Sidestep are leading the comparative engine battle (with a little bit of Bezurk on the side in Asia) and Tripadvisor, Away, Gusto and Travelpost taking on each other in the review market. As anticipated the distinction between these two markets (if there ever was one) is disappearing.

The review sites have a lot in common - search box at the centre top, highlighted reviews at centre and either banner space or sectional draw outs in the right hand page groups. The problem with most - and this is my main criticism of Travelpost - is that the contents of the middle or main section are determined either by timeliness of the review, broad (automated) assumptions about me based on my profile or IP address or general site popularity. In other words the community has chosen the layout of this valuable real estate. I do not think this should be left to the community or a full technical solution. In review/community based travel travel a person/producer/marketer should own the home page and merchandise it with the same professionalism that the full service sites employ. This is why Tripadvisor continues to lead the bunch - it has matched the community strength of content with the Expedia strength of monetisation and production.

My recommendation to Travelpost then is to take a more hands on approach to management of the home page. Combine the science of the analysing consumer data with the emotion of a good production team to deliver a home page that at best speaks to me as an individual or at worst I could find interesting in general sense (ie the content is good in is own right even if not targeted). Compare that to the current home page where the top of the fold is just a list of hotel reviews by date showing hotels and destinations that I do not care about.

PS - Posted a review on Travelpost while looking into this blog post. Here is my sample review. Not sure why but the text doubled on itself. Could easily been my fault but can't find how to edit it.

Do not pass the mini-bar, do not collect your laundry

Cute story of the week - a developer in a small town in Switzerland has converted the local 135 year old jail into a boutique hotel but has kept the jail theme. The Jailhotel Löwengraben was a prison right up until the end of 1998. Would not call this luxury by the photos but looks comfortable - in a quirky (maybe even kinky) kind of way.

Credit where credit is due - came across this hotel while looking at the latest Zuji AU newsletter.

Meta Search plus UGC = more than Travel 2.0

Continuing the trend of social networking - including my coverage of Sheraton's, Amadeus and Webjet's efforts (here and here) - Sidestep is buying review and blog site Travelpost.com. Here is the travelmole and eyefortravel reports. The Travelpost site is not the prettiest of sites but if the claimed 500,000 reviews, photos and blogs is true this is a deep, useful collection of content that will help Sidestep with traffic (from search engines) and conversion (by improving customer site interaction). Kayak are probably taking this deal as confirmation that their development of the "Forums" and "Buzz" features was worth it. As per yesterday this on the one hand confirms the merit of the idea of Planit for Webjet but on the other hand raises the execution pressure on Webjet (starting with the URLs) - especially where they are spending one million of hard earned shareholder dollars.

More plans for Planit

More details from the SMH on Webjets plans for PlanIt. I first discussed it here. Launch target is April. Plans to invest $1mm.

More great moments in Security

A two year old boy was stopped trying to board a plane in Dubai bound for Turkey because his name was the same as that on an outstanding warrant. Reminiscent of the spate of US mistaken identity cases. The beauty with this one is not only did the boy's name match the warrant but SO DID HIS AGE! No-one in the Dubai security forces questioned an arrest warrant with a birth year starting with a 2. Brilliant.

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.

Webjet want in

Well known that Webjet have a lot of money in the bank from their cash flow positive activities but especially the option buy by s8. Now they tell us they want to spend it on buying somebody. They want in on more that just the organic growth market. Best idea for them - buy a hotel player. Webjet need to have in-house inventory and functionality for cross selling their flights volume. White-label deals with HotelClub will not be enough. Spending some of their cash on a good acquisition would also help sure up the balance sheet to fight off a raider.

No longer Lonely Elephants

Thanks to to Anonymous for letting me know that according to the SMH the elephants trying for months to make it from Thailand to the new Elephant enclosure at Sydney's Taronga Zoo have finally made it. Never found an answer for how much an elephone costs but the price for getting 4 (maybe 8) from Thailand to Sydney - a heavy $50mm.

Essential Business Travel tips

Normally a business travel tip invovles how to get cheap WiFi, good international call rates and fast dry cleaning turn around without breaking the expense account. Today I simply have a video of the new Singapore Airlines first class. I could tell that this would make me a more productive business traveller and add enormous value to my employer but even I am not that good a liar. This is just excessive. It is just outrageous. It is a pure and utter waste of money...but...with God as my witness and bathed deep in shame....I want it!!!