Travelgator profile

I had a great opportunity recently to chat for 45 minutes or so with Travelgator CEO Chris DeBrusk. Travelgator are trying to fill the new need I discussed this earlier post to help online travel consumers answer the question - "where do I go next, what do I do next". Site is just out of beta.

I like the functionality of Travelgator. It lets you save ideas, articles, deals and offers in the one place - called a Travelplan - without locking you into a purchase path. Future product plans hope to expand this feature with plug ins that would enable you to draw in content, deals etc from other sites. In effect adding a targetted tagging/del.icio.us style functionality. Of course there will be user generated content but also in-house content from a paid editor (claim more than 1,000 articles so far). All of this can be shared and have communities built up around it.

On product they want to stay out of the meta-search price comparison game. Mainly because they feel that Kayak and Sidestep are too far ahead in functionality to catch. But recognising the need for a engine have partnered with one of them (in this case Sidestep). The business model therefore comes back to good old fashioned targeted advertising campaigns. Claim to already have 30 click through deals in place.

As I say, I like what I see and Chris knows the market. I see two main challenges for him and his team to make the business work:

• Obtaining traffic - Search engines and word of mouth are the two main (possibly only) sources of traffic. Travelgator are going to be competing with three different types of businesses for eyeballs (to different degrees). Content behemoths like TripAdvisor, membership powerhouses like WAYN and USG/blogging post companies like Travelpost (now owned by Sidestep); and
• Focus - as per my previous post there comes a point in UGC, community based and targeted sites where too much choice is offered to consumers. They either become confused, frustrated and leave or you have targeted so tightly that the addressable audience is always too small.
  

To mitigate against these Travelgator has to find a delicate balance between picking their markets to be able to compete against the bigger (read better funded) competitors while ensuring that the focus is neither too tight nor the options too broad.

Sounds hard - well it is, not just for Travelgator but all of the new wave of online travel content and search players. Travelgator have made a very good start.

Funding to date is all private and angel. Clear to them that a travel provider is the only real exit. They need to build up the traffic and product to create a story around a critical and unique feature that a travel provider can only obtain through acquisition.

Silcon Valley & "in flight entertainment"

Seems that advanced "inflight entertainment" is available to more than just movie stars and Qantas crew. The word from Silicon Valley gossip and insider blog Valleywag is that one of the princes of Silicon Valley - a founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost - was seen with a companion enjoying the in-bathroom entertainment system on a Virgin Atlantic flight. Here is the Valleywag story.

Site59 goes to Area 51

Site59 is no more. The Travelocity owned US based last minute travel brand is changing its name to the best last minute travel brand in the Travelocity family - Lastminute.com. This makes sense. The basis behind the Site59 brand - booking at the last minute of the hour - is interesting and quirky but does not have the simplicity and catchy nature of its UK based partner. The only argument against the change for a US based company is that there could be some confusion with second tier player LastMinuteTravel.com owned by Travel Holdings Inc. While not as well known as Site59, LastMinuteTravel has been around since 1997 so have some claim to consumer recognition and association with the Lastminute* concept.

No change yet in the actual branding at the site at the time of writing and apologies for the shocking headline...

UPDATE - Rebrand has finished and 28 June announced relaunch in the US.. Note the little Travelocity stars are now combined with the pink logo of Lastminute.com (picture below). I have not seen that in any other market.

New look lastminute.com.au

Lastminute.com.au (Australian JV operation) have re-launched the site. I like the look - keeps the young, activity focused feel while at the same time (finally) devoting more crucial site real estate to travel rather than biscuit boxes, magazine subscriptions and other "lifestyle" (read low margin) products. Congrats to Adam and team.

Online Travel, Travel 2.0 and More - when it there too much choice for consumers?

I had a very interesting conversation a week or so ago with the CEO of 2.0 start up Travelgator - Chris DeBrusk. Travelgator is a two year old company, their site came out of beta in August 2006 with their major release hitting the cyberways early last month (Feb).

Like a lot of the new travel services companies Travelgator are looking to build a community around travel – around helping people find out what they want to do next in travel and help them draw on the experiences of other to decide. More on the company and how they are trying to differentiate themselves from the pack in a latter post - first, the prospect of speaking to Travelgator turned me to thinking about the market history that has led to this new wave of travel companies and what inherent needs they have for success.

In thinking through this I thought back on the phases of online travel - I decided there have been three broad overlapping phases.

Phase 1 (1995-2003) – I know where I want to go, find me the cheapest price.

Expedia, Travelocity and (the subsequently acquired) Preview started the market by turning the green screen around and giving early Internet uses access to travel agent booking processes. This made visible the dark art of booking travel. The low cost carriers followed quickly as did start ups on other locations such as Lastminute in the UK and (with much less success at the time) Travel.com.au in Australia;

Phase (2000-2006) – I want to find a deal on where to stay, can you help me with rates, availability and advice.

Expedia buys Travelscape (and eventually HRN) and the merchant model goes mainstream (by the way good Expedia history here). Soon everyone is contracting directly with hotels, a pace that accelerates as the hotel industry tries to recover from the horrors of 9/11, SARS and more. TripAdvisor (soon to also be part of Expedia) adds the next piece to the puzzle with the power of group based recommendation.

Phase 3 (2005 – now) – what do I do next, where should I go next.

A global audience that has travelled, enjoyed booming economies and is comfortable sharing everything and anything with a keyboard and mouse, has bought the wisdom of crowds mantra and wants to know what the world knows. Out of this comes social networking in TripAdvisor, investments in WAYN and start-ups like Travelgator.

I remember meeting in 1999 the founder and members of a company called TravelDonkey. Now little more than a traffic page – at the time the business model was to capture the experiences of travellers from the entire world and share them. People would be able to write in with their trip notes in real time. Search and matching algorithms would match like minded travellers and enable them to interact and build community. The CEO of the time (Sally Meecham – side note I had forgotten Sally’s last name but Googled “Sally Travel Donkey” and naturally found it) shopped this story throughout Europe – door-to-door and conference-by-conference. No-one bought it but looking back it was simply out of phase.

The big question for Phase 3 (and something I will discuss in the context of Travelgator in a later post) is - when does the provision of options, choice and possibilities confuse customers. In Phase 1 and 2 I sat through usability labs and customer surveys that showed that the more choice you gave a customer through buttons, links, options etc, the less they did. There are famous surveys in old school retail proving that a point is reached when you give a customer so much choice that they choose nothing. Each of the phase 3 business models therefore have an near impossible challenge – how do you provide choice, how do you meet the need from the consumer to find out “what to do next” without either providing too much choice or (to go to the other extreme) targeting in on a niche that is so small or focused that there is no money in it. Don’t know the answer but am looking forward to thinking on it more, watching others and finding out. What do you think?

Will target this thinking in tighter with comments on Travelgator soon.

The T-List - Travel & Tourism Blogs

Mathieu of the Radar blog has started an interesting idea to have travel and tourism bloggers generate a bit of buzz for each other through creating a T-List - a list of the favourite blogs of travel bloggers. A list that builds on the lists of others.

Here is current list (drawn from additions by Travolution) with my contribution:

Hotel Blogs
Radar
Social Media on the Fly
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel Blog
Travel Rants
Travel Weekly Blog
BootBlog (Bootsnall)
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
The Travel PR Blog
Travolution
Online Travel Review
MegustaleTurismo.es (Spanish)
InFlightHQ
HotelMarketing.com

If you are a blogger and would like add to the list then

• Write a post.
• Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
• Make sure the links are active and correct.

If your blog is on the list, remove it. This is not a self-promotion post. As Tim Fehlman (Z-List) said: “Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread.”

• Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it
• Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
• Publish the post.
• People will notice the T-List and continue it.

Flight Centre and Lastminute Australia updates

Two parallel but unrelated activities going on in public traded travel companies in Australia. The Flight Centre bid collapse and potential build up to a potential sale of the Lastminute.com.au joint venture. There is some great commentary on this from Tom Boreham in the Australian on both of these public companies and the public travel market in general. Interesting read.

Italy vs Australia - World Cup round 2 (Italian Government vs Qantas)

Had two very interesting and (I originally planned) to be unrelated travel experiences/plans today. First step was to go to the local office of the Italian consulate to register my new daughter for a passport and the second was to go to a Qantas office to have a minor change made to an airline ticket (for the same daughter). So two stops, with two famous pain in the arse bureaucracies. Good chance to see who is worse at customer service - the Italian government or the flying kangaroo. You can see where this is going. The visit to the Italians took 40 minutes including the initial queue up, time with the consul assistant to process a stack of documents, to pay the processing charge and for the admin assistant to add the name of my daughter to mine and my wife's passport. At Qantas it took 40 minutes for a person to put a very small sticker on a ticket. At the Italian embassy every staff member was perpetually talking to someone. There was a turnaround of people and constant flow of documents, issues and responses. At Qantas I counted 8 staff members, sitting at their customer service desks, doing nothing. Not on the phone, not typing on their computers, not doing anything- actually that is not quite true, two of them were talking to each other about clothes shopping. Meanwhile three customers and I sat patiently "waiting for Godot". There was no-one at the Qantas office looking at the situation of customers without service and service agents without customers and doing the obvious thing.

I was not and should not be surprised. As I discussed in this post, their is no customer service culture at Qantas any more. Instead they have a "process" culture. That is a culture based not on "how can I give you the best experience as a traveller" but instead "what is the process that needs to be followed to get these people from A-to-B in the fastest, cheapest, least impactful way."

So in the world cup final of bad bureaucracies Australia has beaten Italy, avenging the outrageous defeat of Australia by Italy in the real world cup. Forza Qantas...

UPDATE - nice/tragic post here on Travelmole from a travel journalist trying to book a "free" frequent flyer ticket with Qantas. My own experience is here

Market plunges - its all China's fault

Been a tough day/night on the markets. The mainstream news is blaming China.

[The main China stock exchange] fell nearly 9 percent on Tuesday, erasing about $140 billion of value in its biggest fall for a decade, on concerns that share valuations had become overextended and economic growth may slow

according to Reuters/Ninemsn. The Chinese government is trying to fight back announcing that they had no plans to add a 20% capital gains tax . Related to not the market bounced back - up 1.2% according to the SMH.

Thought I would take a look at what impact their was/wasn't on eLong and Ctrip. Over the last five days eLong is down almost 10% and about 7% from where it was a year ago. Ctrip is down a similar 7% over the last 5 days but is up almost 50% over the last twelve months. This reflects Ctrip's widening gap over eLong and a premium for being number one in the market with the biggest potential. That said, Ctrip is trading at an extraordinary P/E of more than 65 (compared to Expedia's 30 times, Priceline's 32 times and Wotif's almost 40 times). Clearly a lot of work for eLong to catch up but also a lot of work for Ctrip to prove that the enormous multiple is justified.

Flight Centre privatisation in trouble

Word on the street (ok - from Travelweekly) is that the privatisation of Flight Centre is in trouble. The billion dollar plus deal was announced in October but is seems that management and the board are not going to get to the magic 75% voting mark to make the deal happen. The article says that it is Lazard Asset Management (28% owner of the company) that is holding out. Chances are they are simply looking for an increase in the bid.

However I would caution anyone against calling the deal dead. The PE firm behind the deal - PEP - are not going to give up too easily and with $400 plus million resting on the deal, the management including Scroo Turner are certainly going to keep fighting. Chances are we will see a revised bid very soon.

That said - this is not a slam dunk must do deal for PEP. I have not done the financial analysis so cannot say for certain if the value is right or wrong. But I do know - and said before- that Flight Centre has not reacted properly to the rise of online travel, to reductions in airline commissions, to changing staff patterns, to the international challenges (especially in the US and UK) or to the need to have more depth and breadth in directly contracted land product. If the deal does go through, PEP will need to address all of those issues


UPDATE - Ouch - Flight Centre stock is down more than 10% as a result of all this.

Lastminute sale a real possibility

International readers will be confused by the headline for today's post as most will assume that the sale of Lastminute.com to Sabre/Travelocity was old news (2005). However in Australia the Lastminute "franchise" is operated under a joint venture with local player Travel.com.au being the majority shareholder. Travelweekly is reporting comments from Travel.com.au CEO Adam Johnson that he is considering selling the business back to Sabre/Travelocity by exercising a right under the joint venture triggered by Sabre's recent privatisation. The key part of the comments from Adam is that this is not a done deal but merely a right possessed by Travel.com.au. Am looking forward to watching this unfold.

Latest in travel spam

As you can appreciate, my timsboot email address attracts a lot of spam. I wanted to share one of the recent ones with you.

Hello Dear,

I have 3 clients who will be coming for a vacation in your area from the 10th June to 25th June 2007. Kindly get back to me if you have vacancy for the specified period, Get back to me with the total cost of the 3 Doubles rooms for 3 clients for 15 days stay.

Do confirm if you accept major credit card for your payment.

Note, Breakfast will be included to the total cost.

Do get back to me with the total cost of their stay in Dollars.

Kind Regards,

I am guessing that the commercial angle is for me to write back and say "I am not a hotel" which confirms my email as legitimate. Or - maybe there is a Nigerian like angle here were they start a dialogue with me on how to book accommodation leading to me giving up a "deposit" etc. Anyway - my favourite part is the very familiar "Hello Dear" at the beginning.

The world in an excel spreadsheet

Dottourism blog brought my attention to a link to the World Gazetteer that provides global population data by location - going as deep as city, town and metropolitan areas. Can be used to mash together with Google maps to add population data to map data. I haven't quite figured out exactly what I would do with all this data - but am eerily attracted to the notion of having an excel spreadsheet with the population numbers for each city.

How much did IgoUgo cost Sabre

In the comments section of a post on Webjet's Planit/Panitonearth plans a discussion started on the valuations of other UGC based businesses such as Expedia's TripAdvisor and Sabre's IgoUgo. Anon posited that IgoUgo was sold for $600mm - which is clearly too high a figure. Sabre never disclosed the amount paid for IgoUgo. Sam Daams of Travellerspoint just posted a comment on my earlier post that gives some good insight so I will re-post it here

I did a bit of research and here are two articles that I think definitely put the 600 million number to rest. More likely under 10....

From Sabre Holdings Q4 earnings report:
" As a reminder, we consolidated the IgoUgo business into Travelocity during the third quarter, which put a $4 million drag on Travelocity operating income for the year. "

From a google groups thread
" I know recently IAC acquired Tripadvisor and sometime last year Sabre Holdings acquired IgoUgo. I posted a couple of weeks ago asking about any details on the Tripadvisor deal and the answer was really fascinating. Any ideas about how IgoUgo was evaluated and how much it was acquired for?

First of all, make it a habit to research SEC filings whenever you have a question concerning finances of a publicly traded company. If it's anywhere, it's in the company's annual report (form 10-K).

In this case, however, this approach doesn't quite work; Sabre's 2005 10-K lists two acquisitions in 2005, SynXis ($41 million) and lastminute.com ($1.2 billion). This probably means that whatever Sabre paid for IgoUgo was immaterial (accounting word for "too small to mention"). Sabre's 2005 10-K also lists acquisitions made in 2004 and 2003; the smallest acquisition mentioned, that of Sweden-based RM Rocade in 2004, is $15 million. So my guess would be that IgoUgo was acquired for significantly less than $10 million.

Jim Donnelly and Tony Cheng, IgoUgo founders, had this to say on the subject:

...over the past few years we've tossed around many big ideas for IgoUgo but lacked the resources to implement them. With the financial backing of Sabre, however, IgoUgo.com promises to grow into the site we've always known it could be. This acquisition affords us not only access to Sabre's extensive distribution channels and content sources, but also the funds to
pursue longtime goals like faster site performance and the development of new kinds of content.

Note that site performance is cited a problem that couldn't be solved by any means other than acquisition by Sabre, which probably means that prior to the acquisition IgoUgo was growing out of its existing Internet infrastructure, but couldn't afford an uprgade... Not a good position to be in when negotiating a sale, and another sign of relatively low purchase price...

Second, valuation of a growing company is a complicated exercise. Structuring an aquisition is even more complicated. Very few people will tell you any details, especially since pre-acquisition discussions are usually covered by confidentiality agreements."

Thanks for the comments Sam

Travelport break-up: GTA rumour

You know my belief that 2007 will be the year that Travelport is split into three. Well the number one source of traffic to my blog over the last two days has been versions of this search phrase in each of Yahoo! and Google - "travelport may float GTA". Here's an example. Search engine traffic is by no means definitive but as the Worldspan acquisition by Travelport proved, it is more than enough to start a rumour....

UPDATE - Looks like I broke the story first - thanks to anon below who pointed to an eyefortravel article adding to the rumours and speculation. As anon comments the rumoured float valuation of GBP500mm is almost 12% less than the original amount paid by the "old" Cendant paid for Gullivers.

Good results for Wotif

Wotif's half yearly results have just come out - and they look good. Total transaction value reported at AUD$250mm and net profit after tax just short of AUD$12mm ($11.9). This is more than 50% growth on the same period last year and almost 30% growth in transaction value on the previous six month period. I have pondered out loud that Wotif have a huge challenge to maintain growth levels without demand market expansion (which requires non-English language support) or new products (such as white-label affiliate functionality, customer reviews and loyalty programs) but they keep proving me wrong. Well done.

Here is the full release.

Expedia vs Tripadvisor (?)

Following on from my post about Expedia and TripAdvisor "Striking a Deal", Kevin May at Travolution has been hearing rumours that internal talks have broken down (at least in Europe) on how to implement this "deal". As I mentioned in my discussion of the original "deal" this is likely to because of two factors. Firstly each Expedia POS is a separate profit centre to the other and certainly to to TripAdvisor. Meaning that anything one profit centre "gives" to the other without compensation is a lost opportunity in meeting an internal target. Secondly there is a risk on the search engine rankings of Tripadvisor if it casually gives the content gold to Expedia. Can't wait for Kevin to divulge more from his sources.

UPDATE - May 07, Expedia.co.uk will add TripAdvisor review content by "end of 07". That is more than 7 months away so a very strange announcement and does little to calm the rumours of discontent at TripAdvisor over this "deal"

201 not out

If doing it twice makes a tradition, welcome to the traditional BOOT speedometer post marking 201 entries in the blog (101 not out is here).

The last 100 posts have clearly been dominated by meta search companies with my Business of Meta-Search Travel (BOMST) side line including:

• Boom time capital raisings for Sidestep, Farecast and a mind blowing round for Fare.net;
• Content deals, UGC deals, elephant deals and product launches a-plenty for Sidestep, Kayak, Lonely Planet and Bezurk; and
• Debates, advice and interviews with start ups Hotelsbycity, Asiatravelmarket and Travelpost.com (in fact I still owe Hotelsbycity an answer)
  

But the other sectors were just as busy:

• The PE firms went crazy buying everything in sight - Flight Centre, Qantas and Sabre.
  Even the smaller guys had a taste of the PE goodness with eDreams and GoVoyages joining the feast;
  
• Qantas managed to annoy me even more than usual by first ignoring me, then playing a game of "no it doesn't" every time someone told them that the Qantas VOD system was busted and finally by being involved in a mile high story what wasnt;
  
• Travelport continued its acquisition fever by merging Worldspan into its Galileo business. In a display of the power of search engines and search logs - the BOOT called the deal early based on record traffic from Atlanta, Denver and Parsippany to the BOOT in the weeks leading up to the deal;
  
• The Transportation Security Agency in the US went a bit crazy and started arresting every Tom, Dick and Harry;
  
• I went a bit video crazy with new business seats that are just plain old, 1950s nostalgia that looks a lot like 2007 marketing and a poker vid makes to sweat more than a Friday night stand-by; and
  
• I bade farewell to full time venture capital work at Netus (though I am helping them out on a project part time at the moment)
  

Things to watch in the next 100 (ie my predictions) are:

• Priceline changing its approach to Asia. With the Hutchison Whampoa group no longer a shareholder and the Asian growing fast - Priceline has to make a new move;
• Heating up in the full service online battle in Australia as Webjet, Travel.com.au, Expedia and Zuji all launch new products but all of them will fail to achieve the growth rates of the hotel only leaders Wotif.com and HotelClub/RatesToGo;
• More rumours and maybe a deal or two around the Travelport break up;
• Even more meta-search and UGC/Travel social networking launches in Asia Pacific, Europe and America; and
  
• More consolidation between the offline players (like the MyTravel-Thomas Cook deal in Europe and the MFS/S8 merger in Australia) as they try and make up for missing the online revolution.
  

And finally through some strange quirk that I did not plan, we had a lot of animals on the blog in this 100 from elephants to dinosaurs to suicide bomber donkeys.

Oh- and England won (some of) the cricket.

Webjet's plans for UGC and packaging are "almost here"

Two pieces of news (well almost news) on Webjet's new product plans out today - updates on their user generated content and packaging plans. Both are great sounding products and the right move - but I think a little more is needed to make them perfect.

Their user generated content plan is to launch a user review and social networking site. Previously called "Planit" the new working is "PLANITONEARTH". As per my earlier comments this is probably due to the fact that the Planit URL was already owned by a design company. The current PLANITONEARTH URL does not yet resolve to anything but is registered by Webjet.

I like this idea and by committing a million dollars, Webjet is indicating a preparedness to put in the significant time and money to build the huge scale and regularly updated features needed to be competitive in travel social networking and UGC. However I still advise them to rethink the name. Planitoneath is a big mouthful. It does not roll of the tongue as easily as Tripadvisor or WhereAreYouNow. Additionally, even though they have cleaned up the confusion with Planit the design company, there is the potential for confusion - well really search engine ranking dilution - with PlanitEarth (an environmental research group).

The next announcement care of TravelWeekly is that Webjet's package product/content is just two weeks from launch (after a four month delay). Again a critical step and product for Webjet. I remain confused as to why consumers continue to feel comfortable paying service fees of more than $24 per domestic booking on Webjet when the competition (ie travel.com.au and flightcentre.com.au) charge less than $10 and the airline sites direct charge nothing . Webjet needs to have a package cross sell system to generate the hotel revenue that will allow them to drop this fee before consumers wise up to the disparity.

Functionality will be critical to the success of the packaging engine but equally will be the content and inventory available to Webjet. The article re-iterates the importance that Webjet places on inventory from S8 inventory (very soon to be renamed Stella Resort Group) which will give them most of what they will need for families on the Gold Coast.

However for Webjet to truly deliver on packaging and hotel only plans it needs to establish an in-house product team devoted to contracting hotels property by property, chain by chain. White label deals with Travelport and large scale deals with Stella/S8 will not give them the domestic coverage and hotel influence of a Wotif or HotelClub/RatesToGo, nor will it allow them to compensate for the possible technology lag they will have behind Expedia's packaging. Building such a team will not be cheap - will likely take a commitment much like the $1mm planned for Planitonearth - but if Webjet wants to be a package/hotel player it will be essential.

UPDATE - m-travel are quoting Webjet as saying that planitonearth is out of beta an into full release. Sounds good except as at the time of this post (30 July) the url planitonearth.com.au is pointing to a "Server Not Found" page. Only way to access planitonearth is via the Webjet site itself. They will need to fix that.

Going going gone for GoVoyages

Accor's GoVoyages was one of the early winners in online travel in France. Was seen as one of the few successful examples of a hotel supplier setting up an independent multi-inventory sales channel. News now that Accor has sold the business for Euro281mm to Financiere Agache Investissement (Groupe Arnault). It is not only another private equity deal in travel but also fits into the management buy-out basket.

Important terms for the deal include the Accor retaining preferred distribution rights forfor three years. Press release also divulges that GoVoyages generated EUR118 million in revenue and EBITDA of EUR13 million in 2006.

Accor's rationale for the sale is clear - in this very competitive environment they need to focus on the core business of owning, managing and running hotels. However I think they might have left this business too soon. The French online market has taken longer than most expected to take hold. Given the earlier successes of online travel in the UK in 1999/2000 it was expected that France (and Germany) would follow suit very quickly. However it took until at least 2005 before the big and small players began to make traction in sales (and profitability) online in France. GoVoyages is one of the leaders here, is profitable and (I assume) is growing. Accor probably feels comfortable with an exit of more than 20 times earnings but given that the market is finally taking off, that Expedia and Priceline are trading at 30 times plus and that the management loved the business so much they wanted to buy it, if I was advising Accor I would have suggested they hold on for a little longer.

Now that is inflight entertainment

Not sure if Qantas has been hearing the criticism over its broken in-flight video on demand (VOD) system. But can confirm that from news reports today there are clearly still ways to have a fun time on a Qantas flight. News.com.au is reporting that a Qantas staffer and Hollywood super-star Ralph Fiennes were

seen exiting the same toilet moments apart.

The staffer denies that anything happened saying that

"I went to the nearby toilet and entered it, he followed me and entered the same toilet. I explained to him that this was inappropriate and asked him to leave. Mr Fiennes became amorous towards me and, after a short period of time, I convinced him to leave the toilet, which he did. I left the toilet a short time later. At no time did any crew member come to my assistance.

so it looks like there are no new entries due in any Mile-High tracking systems.

Poker and Online Travel

There are lots of links I could try to raise between online travel and high stakes poker such as the bluff and counter bluff between the airlines and the online travel agents (witness EXPE vs AA), the big bets being placed by private equity firms in taking out Flight Centre, Travelport, Qantas and Sabre (to name and few) and the hidden aces competition between Sidestep and Kayak where each tries to bring another content play to the table to improve their hand.

I could use all this to justify the poker video below but in reality it just such an amazing piece of video that it deserves to be shown on its own account. It is a clip from a High Stakes poker game involving two of the greats - Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen - chasing one of the largest pots ever seen. Watch and enjoy!

BOMST - More green for Sidestep

Sidestep have closed their third round of funding after cashing a cheque for $15mm from Trident Capital, Leader Ventures and Saints Capital. If memory serves this is almost the same size as the previous two rounds (which added to $17.5). Trident has been involved from the beginning but first time they brought in others to share the risk. Sidestep has been very active in expanding their content plays to draw more traffic and improve stickiness. Am sure their plans are that those efforts plus this new money will see them to scale and profitability.

Nostalgic Pan Am video highlights 50 years of standard marketing messages in Airlines

Am engaging in a bit of YouTube airline video surfing (see AA business class post earlier) and came across this one showing highlights of the now defunct Pan Am's Jet Clipper service on its introduction in the late fifties. If you ignore the content (praising the warm food, stable trip and ground breaking overhead lighting), the feel and timbre is exactly the same as the current crop of enhanced business class advertising (see the Singapore Example here). The core marketing message for non-LCC airlines has not changed in almost 50 years. There are no other products I can think of where you can say the same thing. Either the airline industry is immune to culture changes or as much as culture changes we still seek the same things from airline travel (comfort, certainty and escapism) or (as the LCCs would argue) the major airlines marketing departments haven't changed in 50 years.

Very late to comment on Viator.com

Through a happy co-incidence I had a chance to talk on the phone with Viator CEO Rod Cuthbert. If you are not familiar with Viator, they are an Australian based global online destination services company. It has been remiss of me not to talk about them before today.

Founded in 1999 they were one of the first to specialise in non-decrementive destination services (by non-decrementive I mean inventory that does not necessarily related to a specific seat on a specific day to a specific event like Ticketmaster or Ticketek).

Though they have had the early lead, this market is now a much more crowded space with each of the major full service players (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity etc) now fully stocked with inventory, old world players like GTA making their extensive inventory available through OctopusTravel.com, the meta-search players attacking the space (eg Sidestep) and new entrants emerging every day such as the recently launched Isango.

I put it to Rod that these (especially the full service players) would present a significant challenge for Viator. I asked him about how worried he was about the advantage that the full service player might have in directing their huge flight volumes into a cross sell path involving destination services. Rod had a couple of good replies - here is what he said:

1. Search Engines: destination specific search engine traffic (ie "Las Vegas Tours", "Jet Boats in New Zealand" etc) favours the dedicated specialists rather than the full service players;
   
2. Purchase Timing: purchase patterns for destinations services are not (with online consumers) aligned with travel arrangement - customers buy destination services at a later time to air and hotel, nullifying the advantage of the full service providers; and
3. Focus: both in terms of the single product and technology focused, but also in their M&A activities including the recent purchase of Vegas based and focused LookTours.
   

On the corporate side they have some good backing with uber PE firm Carlyle and early funding from Australian VC Technology Venture Partners. Rod shared with me that projected 2007 revenues are $65mm and staff numbers are just short of 100. Naturally Viator see their future in an acquisition by one of the bigger players - but not yet. Claim they want to crack the $100mm revenue mark first - so looking for a deal in 2008 or 2009.

Well done to all at Viator (including some fellow Cendant/Travelport refugees such as great Ken Frohling) and best wishes in the battle with the full service players, meta-search and new entrants.

American Airlines new business class

Poor American Airlines. When they are not stranding passengers on the tarmac for hours, or battling Expedia on commissions for distribution, or trying to explain why there is not a single seat on their flights between San Fran and New York that anyone wants to sit in, they have have tried to build some buzz around the impending re-launch their of business class. Here is a YouTube video that has compiled some footage from various sources to try and show what the seats are going to look like.



I wanted to construct a witty comment on this but one of the YT video comments says it all

"Great... now they're only one generation of seats behind Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines..."

If you need a reminder about what the new Singapore First Class is going to look like - here is the link.

BOMST- Interview with AsiaTravelMarket founder

After my initial post on AsiaTravelMarket, had an opportunity today to speak with Global Travel Market CEO Dave Simmons on his thoughts about travel meta-search and plans for the company.

You will remember (or not) my initial recommendations to AsiaTravelMarket were to:

• ensure that they added more content/inventory/suppliers to their search results;
• bring a booking engine to the front page; and
• potentially to re-think the name to avoid confusion with the other companies that have the words "AsiaTravel" in their name.

Dave and I had a very constructive conversation on all three of these. He made a couple of good points in reply to my comments which I will share with you:

1. The targeted nature of AsiaTravelMarket (and the sister sites like AustraliaTravelMarket) creates a very attractive audience for advertisers, especially tourist bureaus and CVBs. More so - he claims - than a generalist meta-search companies;
2. The platform is very modular, making it a great vehicle for building white-label sites for customers. Quotes the Malaysian Tourism Office's commissioning of GTM building MalaysiaTravelMarket - opening up dramatically different revenue streams that those accessed by the generalists; and
3. Their competitors in each source market (ie the UK versions of Expedia, eBookers, Lastminute) continue to under-invest in destination information and destination focused services especially in Asia.
   

I agree with all those points (except to the extent that Expedia is trying to more combine its TripAdvisor content and Expedia booking power as evidence by the recent buzz around the "deal" between the two). However I cautioned him on doing too much to target the customers he thinks he wants (very destination focused, very comfortable with multiple paths to information and content, very adept at using meta-search) and potentially ending up a market base that while very niche and lucrative is not large enough to achieve scale. We also agreed to disagree on the brand issue.

On the corporate side he shared with me that they plan to be cash flow positive within six months. Current operations are funded out of angel and founder rounds including and investment from Peter Wade (founder of Travelbag in the UK).

Dave and team have clearly thought through their model and plans. I look forward to hearing more.

EXPE vs AA - its a draw

PR announcement overnight that the brief stand-off between Expedia and American Airways is over. Expedia will again be selling business class and international fares for AA. Here is the (very) brief announcement. Can only assume that Expedia wanted more money per ticket, AA wanted to pay less and they met somewhere in the middle.

Bravo England

A break from our regularly scheduled Travel Program. I shared the Schadenfreude of one of the greatest English own goals of all time so it is only fair that I say Bravo England for beating Australia tonight in a one day cricket match. Here is the final score.

It has taken a flogging in 5 test matches, 3 one day matches, a Twenty20 match and as well as a handful of domestic embarrassments including losing the "unloseable" second test in Adelaide and scoring the lowest one day total (110) in (by coincidence) Adelaide other than a minnow (cant remember if it was Bangladesh or Zimbabwe) for England to find the magic touch and convincingly beat Australia- but they have. Well done to Freddie/Vaughanie's lads.

BOMST - More money for Farecast

Thanks to Techcrunch - fare compare with a twist site Farecast had raised a monster sized $12.1 million in their second round of funding. Still in beta (though it is of course very cool to be in beta), Farecast's claim to fame is that as well as providing fare meta-search it aims to predict whether or not fares will go up or down. Currently covers departures from 75 US cities (all domestic results). Great idea and with more than $20mm raised so far, there is plenty more to be spent making this come true. The VP of Marketing and Product Development has an interesting blog of his own. While it is updated only frequently, you will find a link in my blog roll on the right hand side (or here).

Downside of independent property listings

Nice little legal battle is engulfing some of Sydney's "elite" over desires to list apartments for short term leases (ie a week or so) on online hotel sites. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on an imminent court battle between a number of owners of apartments at the AEA Grand building in Sydney's Darling Harbour and the City of Sydney Council over zoning. The owners want to rent out their apartments by the week, the Council wants to stop them and Wotif.com is caught in the middle (according to the SMH article but I could not find a listing on Wotif of the AEA Grand).

Is an example of the regulatory and operational problems that have been hitting a number of the extranet only, flexible data structure online hotel players like Wotif.com, RatesToGo.com and Priceline's Activehotels in accessing and supporting rentals of independent property inventory. It does not take much for a property owner to put up a property for rent of sites like these - a couple of photographs, text, rates and a process for picking up a key. It is hard and expensive for the product/inventory managers at the sites to verify the legality of using the premises for short stay. If lawyer had to be involved in every approach from an independent property then hotel acquisition would grind to a halt. But you cannot ignore this inventory - independent properties are the last frontier of sale online.

The answer is:

• for product/inventory managers to be trained on how to minimise the risks (ie reject private homes, search the web for other listings and yank the property as soon as there is a hint of problems);
  
• to prepare the customer care team with an action plan for dealing with customers that are stung by a lock-out; and
• develop new products for supplier access. The "old fashioned" extranet approach needs to be reworked to support a property that has only one room.
  

Flight Centre - doing in right in corporate travel

e-travel blackboard are reporting that Flight Centre's corporate travel management arm - FCm - have made a play for the east coast market in the US with the acquisition of a 25% stake in Garber Travel Services. I have been (rightly) critical of Flight Centre's mistakes in the online market, however as both a consumer and observer of business travel I believe they have made a number of smart strategic and tactical moves in the corporate market - so while I do not know Garber Travel Services, I congratulate FCm on continuing their expansion. As a consumer of travel I have a previously commented (here) on FCm's great service and the need for an air-warrior/warrioress to have a strong travel management company - even in this age of online. As an observer, Flight Centre have managed to acquire and integrate a number of smaller travel management company with little or no observable integration headaches, maintaining standards and bringing scale and savings.

Have to end this quote with a "curse you Google" moment. Is it just me or is publishing using Blogger becoming a risky business. This is the second time I had to write this post due to Blogger eating the last attempt.

Blogger fighting airline delays

Blogger and real estate broker Kate Hanni is angry - and with every right. She and 100 other passengers were on diverted flight AA 1358 from San Francisco to Dallas. The flight ended up in Austin Texas due to bad weather. The plane, passengers and crew were stranded on the tarmac with no way out or off for more than 8 hours. Bottled water and substantive food quickly ran out and it was down to pretzels and that crappy water in the toilet taps. Kate is leading a charge in the US for legislation to protect consumers here. Here is her blog and here is an article in the NY Times on the story. The airline says

“There is some dispute over exactly how dire the circumstance were on that flight. I do have flight attendants reports saying no toilets overflowed. We ran out of bottled water but we still had plenty of drinking water.”

Another piece of brilliance in airline customer service. You are a customer stranded on an American Airlines plane - no real food, no bottled water, no way off, surrounded by screaming kids, receiving irregular updates on what may or may not be happening, dreading the stench from the toilets and the passengers etc etc etc - but according to the airline there is uncertainty as to how bad things were.

I have almost been there. On a trip last July from Sydney to New York I had the "pleasure" of AA from San Fran to NY. We landed in NY ahead of a storm but were stranded on the tarmac for three and half hours waiting for the lightening to clear to allow the ground crew to return to work. That was a tough period - especially as we were 50 meters from our destination - I can only imagine how bad it would have been for more than twice that time. On a good day you cannot find a seat on an AA flight that anyone would describe as good.

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".

Subscribing to the BOOT - now with email updates

Have just added the ability for readers to subscribe to email update from the BOOT. If you want to subscribe please enter your email address into the subscribe box on the right side of the page (or this one here). Naturally I will never pass on your email address to anyone - will only be used for updates of content from the blog.

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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.