BOOT Recommends: Podcasts I listen to - travel and non-travel

Here are a list of the Podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis. There are others I dive into an out of but these are a regular part of my week/month

News & Current Affairs

• NPR: Most Emailed stories
• NPR: Fresh Air
• NPR: Business Story of the Day
• ABC: Conversation Hour
• BusinessWeek: Behind the Cover
• New Yorker: Comment
• New Yorker: Out Loud
• New Yorker: Campaign Trail
• Economist: From the Paper
• Economist/CFR.org: World next week
  
• Economist: Certain Ideas of Europe
• Economist: Democracy in America
  

Travel

• Travolution Purple Pod

Tech and Tech Business

• BusinessWeek: Technology & You
• Buzz out Loud (BOL)
• This Week In Tech (TWIT)

Misc

• Napoleon 101
• The Onion Radio News

TRAVELtech: Travelzoo announce 1 million subscribers in Asia Pacific, 100,000 in Australia

Brad Gurrie - Managing Director for Travelzoo Australia announced today at TRAVELtech that Travelzoo in Asia Pacific have hit the 1 million subscriber mark with 100,000 of those in Australia. Offices now in Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.

TRAVELtech: Global Review proves what we all knew - Consumers are almost impossible to predict

At TRAVELtech we heard from Karen Grinter of Global Reviews - a company that undertakes usability surveys. She conducted a survey with 98 users on their web searching actions to search tests:

1. Find the cheapest flight from Melbourne to Perth from Tullamarine, arriving before midnight and with check-in

2. Find the cheapest hotel in Brisbane, 5 mins from Botanic Gardens, with a pool and for less than $400 for two nights.

Here is a quick summary of the results of the survey:

Search: 47% started with a search engine

• 32% used the search engine via an installed search bar;
• 37% entered in a brand name, a large proportion searched a full URL in Google. In effect treating it the means for using a browser;
  
• Of these 18% clicked on a paid advertisement - the rest clicked on organic listings; and
  
• 0% (yes ZERO percent) looked at the second page.

Aggregaters: 44% went to an aggregater. In a specific Wotif Example Grinter noted that despite there being two places in the Wotif search results for the consumer to view a map. Not a single clicked on that link. Instead they left the site and looked to Google Maps or Whereis and sometimes (but not always) returned to Wotif to book. Consumers simply did not see the map links despite what industry people would view and very prominent links.

Suppliers: 6% went direct to a supplier (in the first instance) but 45% of aggregater visitors (in the case of the air ticket) indicated they would normally go from the aggregater to the supplier to book to avoid paying booking fees and because they trusted the results more.

Themes

• All about the first page in SEO
• Air aggregaters and buying traffic and losing sales to suppliers
• Consumers continue to miss buttons and tabs that we think are clear and obvious
  

TRAVELtech: World Nomads and Footprints - building a brand by giving money away

The story of World Nomads launching Footprints is an amazing one. World Nomads CEO Simon Monk shared the story at TRAVELtech.

World Nomads is an online insurance company that decided to add an optional $2 charitable donation into the purchase path. More of the story here but quick version is that not only have they generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity, they also opened up a marketing channel. The donations spawned a video documentary which spawned an in-flight video series and eventually a distribution deal with National Geographic. Money raised for poor communities and global branding and marketing paid for by travel media companies and airlines.

The latest iteration of this story is that now Footprints is a stand alone charity business with an API. Means that any company that does a deal with Footprints can have access to functionality to charge a $2 charity donating and join the program. They are targeting a very ambitious $1billion. Amazing stuff. Love it.

TRAVELtech: Stayz doing more than $100mm a year. Now valued at $36mm according to Fairfax

James Cassidy - the General Manager of Australian vacation rental listing site Stayz - put a rhetorical question to the Audience. Was it worth it for Fairfax Digital to buy Stayz.com.au?

Fairfax Digital Media bought Stayz back in 2005 for $12.7 million. Cassidy claims that if the same multiple at the time of acquisition were applied to current revenues then Stayz would now be worth $36mm. Here are some of the statistics he shared with us about the business:

• 2007 Transaction Value - $107mm (value off bookings generated for owner/listers);
• Grown from 9.000 properties to 23,000 properties; and
  
• site re-launch generated conversion improvements of 30-40%.

The other interesting comment was that Fairfax Digital had spent a lot of time building a network of links and cross referral points with other sites in the Fairfax Digital network (like newspaper Sydney Morning Herald and vertical classified sites like Domain.com.au). He admitted that this is not about traffic generation. In fact the traffic generation of from these links is very minimal. Instead the value was in the SEO consequences. The network of links from high traffic sites performing different but at least contextual activities is crtical to the SEO activities of Stayz. Cassidy is claiming 80% of the Stayz traffic comes from free/organic search. Supported dramatically by the link network effect of Fairfax Digital.

Assuming this is right it is an amazing story behind media group network effects. That internal banners and buttons and not what the network is about. Instead it is the html code driving links and search traffic. Sounds very close to some of the grey/blackish hat activities I have seen online from travel affiliate companies.

TRAVELtech: Webjet CEO Noon calls the AU market sales of Expedia, Zuji and more

Final speaker of the first session was Webjet CEO Richard Noon. Had a great slide that I was able to quickly copy down to share with you. He showed his estimation of the annual Gross Bookings of major full service OTAs in Australia. Here is that graph as I copied it.

If you are interested in the Australian turnover of Webjet, Expedia, Bestflights, Zuji, Lastminute.com.au, travel.com.au and online for flight centre check it out.



He prepared a formula using comparative page views and PhoCusWright estimates of the Australia online travel market. He took the page views of each of the players locally and then apportioned gross bookings from the PhoCusWright estimates of total Australian OTA sales.

Later during the panel session these numbers were put to each of the bosses of Zuji and Expedia.

Expedia AU MD Arthur Hoffman dismissed the $80mm estimate for Expedia saying that this was a very pessimistic view. That actual number was "far north of that".

Zuji CEO Scott Blume - "took the fifth" when asked about the $30mm estimate. Saying that they do not break out their bookings.

TRAVELtech: TripAdvisor China "on its way"

Arthur Hoffman MD Expedia AU/NZ took time to talk through a lot of the non-retail activities of Expedia in Asia Pacific.

The stories have already broken around the launch of localised TripAdvisor products in India and Japan. Hoffman when on to say that TripAdvisor "on its way to build a more local model in China". Will call that a pre-announcement.

He is convinced you need to incorporate content and retail. Not in a community fashion but in a targeted fashion - personalised for the individual consumer. Gave an example of the integration of the SeatGuru airline seat information into the booking path of Egencia (new name for Expedia's corporate travel agency).

TRAVELtech: Zuji firing in Asia on "most" cylinders

Next up at TRAVELtech - Scott Blume the CEO Zuji (Travelocity's operations in Asia Pacific).

Zuji ha been prolific in launching across Asia Pacific. Has spread the business through organic, acquisition and multi-brand approach. Organic in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong through the Zuji brand, Organic under the Travelocity brand in India and New Zealand (though NZ used to be a relationship with an offline player) and acquisitions in Taiwan and Korea (Nextour brand). Blume said that he like this diversity in markets because

"When one country is firing, others aren't. Would love to have all 7 countries firing at once. Has not happened in in my tenure [as CEO]."

His biggest concern and view on the biggest challenges being faced by the industry are the dramatic increases in search costs.

TRAVELtech: Kicking off with stats from the Airport Economist

Fist in my series of live blogging from the TRAVELtech Year of Living Dangerously conference.
Opening session led by Tim Harcout from Austrade. Also known as the Airport Economist basd on this book of the same name. He is opening up the conference by giving us a view of the Australian economy and whether or not local travel companies should be fearing for the worst given the view from the US and Europe over economic concerns.

As Harcout described it, the world economy has "...gone from the sub-prime to the ridiculous". But Tim tried to reassure all that the Australia economy is almost unstoppable with the longest expansion in history with very low unemployment and very strong terms of trade.

The part I found most interesting from his entertaining presnetation was the statics that shows that departures out of Australia numbered more than arrivals in 2007 and so far in 2008 for the first time since trackings started. In simple terms more Australians are leaving the country to holiday/travel overseas that visitors entering the country. Does not mean a complete disaster for inbound players are there is still growth for inbound but for the first time the outbound providers have the upper hand in Australia.

TripAdvisor into Vacation rental through purchase of FlipKey

Another play by TripAdvisor. This time they have acquired vacation rental player FlipKey. Hotelmarking.com has the press release here. Even though FlipKey is an accommodation provider don't confuse them with an intermediary like the Expedia owned Hotels.com. If I understand the FlipKey model correctly they are a listing service. They charge either or both of a listing fee and per email referral fee. In other words it is an online version of a yellow pages or pay for listing directly. I don't mean that to be a negative or derogatory, rather to highlight that it is an advertising business (like the rest of the TripAdvisor Media Network) not a retail business (like the Expedia business).

I am continuing my updated list of their acquisitions.

• Flipkey
  
• Airfarewatchdog.com
• OneTime.com
• Virtual Tourist
• HolidayWatchdog
  
• smartertravel.com
• bookingbuddy.com;
• TravelPod.com;
• Travel-Library.com;
• SeatGuru.com; and
• Cruisecritic.com.

I always close these stories with the reminder that Expedia owns TripAdvisor as you'd be surprised how much search traffic I get asking the question "who owns TripAdvisor"

Update: Sprice launch and better Sydney search results

Did a post last week on Euro and Asian meta-search company Sprice.com and their site re-launch in Singapore and the number of hotel results appearing for Sydney.

It has been pointed out and confirmed that the search results were for Sydney Nova Scotia not Sydney Australia. In my trial search I simply types in the word "Sydney" and pressed return. Nothing on the page indicates that it is the "wrong" Sydney (apologies to any offended Canadians). Have redone the search (see shot below) and produced 4 pages of results. Apologies to Sprice for not picking this up in the post. I would still argue for Sprice improving the destination resolution so that it is much clearer which destination is being searched (again see shot below) but this is a much better position to be in. A Sprice contact mentioned on email to me that they will be working on this.

Still is a strange bit of AdSense in that the shot contains a Wego advertisement (and a Bezurk one too). I suggest Sprice add this to the list of things to update as well.

Qantas story and ad mishap in Age newspaper

Australian Broadcasting Corporation media industry show Media Watch picked up a great "why did we put that ad on that page of the website" story involving Qantas and the online version of Melbourne's Age newspaper. Check it out.

601 not out

Every hundred posts I do a quick summary of what has been dominating the blog. A regular "not out series" to keep readers up to date. Started first with 101 not out and continued with 201, 301, 401 and 501 not out.

A number of different industry themes came out in the last few months

• Gotcha Capitalism - how companies (including travel companies like Budget) hide fees and charges that undermine the advertised price. Not even Moose Hunters are safe.
  
• Airline Bad news is everywhere - bad news days for airlines became band news months and weeks. But clearly it is all the fault of those thieving, stealing, cheating oil speculators
  
• Start up changed names as the URL trading industry heated up - Kango became UpTake, Vailoma became TripSay and Bezurk became Wego
• BAR - I argued that BAR does not build brand in hotels
• India - Expedia entered the market, maybe bought a slice of TravelGuru and Ram from PhoCusWright and I talked and talked about what this meant for a heating up region. Revenue Management seems to be the first thing to be burned
  
• Content: is there money in it and if so what is the mode?. TripAdvisor think so and are buying up everything they can to prove it. The money is also starting to flow in Asia. But there is also trouble as the eyeball chasing advertisers are beginning to hold onto their money
  
• Last-minute model on hiatus: I called the Last-minute booking model on hiatus and maybe dead (model not company). Others picked up the story (without crediting me); and
• Mobile : I started the first in a series of thoughts on mobile technology and online travel.
  

And on the fun/quirky/ranting side

• Qantas to decided to give up on rewarding frequent flyers by introducing a flawed and plain out nasty to consumers AnySeat rewards program. You now have to fly to the moon (literally - 2.5 million miles) to be able to book a first class seat to New York
  
• BOOT made it into the Australian Financial Review but that did not stop Google from accusing me of being a Spam merchant
  
• We had a first competition on the BOOT with rude consequences
• As always the most consistent part of the blog - that no matter how much hope it wont be the case, the in-flight entertainment system on Qantas failed again and again; and
  
• Phillip Wolfe of PhoCusWright (with a lot of help from Rod Cuthbert of Viator) brought together a great group of online travel players in Sydney. The BOOT tried to the same thing in London and ended up with a much smaller (but no less interesting) group of bloggers.

And the BOOT got his butt kicked with a genuine, take not prisoners, hopefully never to be seen again Royal Flush.

I am still writing, hope you are still reading.

TRAVELtech next week - see you there

TRAVELtech is next week, August 26 at Cockle Bay in Sydney. See you there. Martin has put together a great list of speakers. He has been kind enough to offer me a media ticket so will be live blogging at the end. Find me and say hi if you are attending.

Meta-search Sprice announces revamped Singapore site - celebrates by showing only 2 hotels in Sydney

UPDATE - please see update

Sprice.com (previously called Fare.net) has been on my radar for a while because they raised some $10mm last year. However the first time I looked at their search results I did not like what I saw. There were plenty of hotels but the UI has hard to navigate and made comparison of hotel rates cumbersome and difficult. I was therefore interested to read a story on TravelMole announcing that they had revamped the Sprice.com Singaporean website. The functionality looks a lot better, is easier to navigate and has that clean & crisp travel2.0 light tones buzz about it. But (and this is a big but) on my random search for Sydney hotels check in 28 Aug Sprice.com returned only 2 hotels. As you can also see from the screenshot below the Google AdAense bar contains a strange collection of ads for US, UK and French destinations. Sprice have the UI issues fixed but need to go back to the connection and monetisation side of the business and do a lot more work.

Skytrax vs the BOOT - who do you agree with as the World's Best Airline

This year at the Skytrax 2008 World's Best Airline awards was Singapore Airlines' year (once again). Let's see how the Skytrax top 5 compared to the BOOT.

The Skytrax top 5 Airlines:
1. Singapore Airlines
2. Cathay Pacific
3. Qantas
4. Thai Airways
5. Asiana

The BOOT top 5 Airlines
1. Singapore Airlines
2. Virgin Atlantic
3. British Airways
4. Cathay Pacific
5. Qantas

Amazed to see that neither BA nor VS made the top ten in the Skytrax list. As hard a time as I give Qantas - I agree that they deserve the award for the Best First Class Lounge. The Sydney lounge is in a class beyond any other I have visited. It is with some interest that I note that Qantas is nowhere to be found on the list of best inflight entertainment. It seems a minimum criteria for the award is that the inflight entertainment system works

Thinking about online travel and mobile technology

It is often a press release on a company activity that brings me to think about a market trend. In this case a press release from Australian owned hotel chain Rydges turned by thoughts towards mobile. In this release Rydges announced the launch of a WAP site for booking and searching at m.rydges.com.

Mobile has been a constant form of chatter and speculation since 2000. I was in the UK at the time and BT must have spent millions of pounds telling British consumers about how WAP would change their lives. They invested even more in launching new brands such as Genie (now defunkt and part of O2) to promote WAP and mobile services. Not to be left out of the "dotmobile" boom, Vodafone and Vivendi launched Vizzavi with an offline marketing campaign that would make even Pets.com's poor old shareholders shake their heads with despair (Vivendi eventually sold out to Vodafone). Lastminute.com rushed out a mobile booking and voice activated services - again with no result.

There was a sense of panic in the air - if you don't get into mobile the whole business will collapse. Now remember this was 2000 - mobile penetration was less than half what it is now and there was not even a hint of standards or platforms/operating system stability in mobile. Lots of money - near zero results.

Every year since we have had another round of buzz around mobile. PDAs hit the market, Blackberries spread like weeds, Nokia dropped the word "phone" form internal memos and language in favour of the word "device", Windows Mobile finally because somewhat usable and the iPhone became the number one product launch in living memory (in terms of buzz vs sales). At each stage mobile was hot again. Thankfully now the response is a little more measured. Now we know we have to develop mobile plans and products but it is not a panic.

Response to this buzz has to be managed because it is really difficult to build a mobile product. With a website there is a lot of platform standardisation a company can relay on. So long as you code your site to be viewed by IE and Firefox (and maybe Safari) then you enough of the market covered. However with mobile there is no platform standards. Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, Apple, Windows all have different ways to displaying/accessing web pages. In the case of WAP almost every second device requires a different layout mechanism. There is also the debate about whether or not you take a browser or downloaded application approach.

This brings us back to the Rydges announcement. They have gone for a non- application based WAP approach. The hook for consumers is that bookings through the site qualify for a priority rate (worth 10% off BAR). According to their eCommerce Manager Stefan Drury by 2010 they are aiming to do "at least the same number of room nights through mobile as the primary www.rydges.com website". I like the intention but think the real work should be done outside of WAP and targeted at the browser/application approach.

I am going to treat this post as an intro/part 1 post. In later posts I will take a look at some of the online mobile companies that have come across my radar taking different approaches to mobile booking on travel. What do you think about mobile. Is now the right time to panic and build and launch as much mobile as you can?

thanks to Gaetan Lee on Flickr for the photo

Tips for how to demo a startup for investors

Product demonstrations is the biggest test a start-up goes through in raising cash. If you are with a start up planning a series of presentations for capital raising, then TechCrunch is carrying the text from a recent Calacanis email on the tips for giving a start up demonstration. I receive a lot of requests by email on tips and tricks for raising angle/VC funding. I like Calacanis' list so recommend you take a look if you are looking to raise capital. There is a peculiar back story on Valleywag going on around this list of tips where a competitor of Calacanis in the conference world is claiming that Calacanis plagiarised the text for these tips but is also refusing to provide evidence. Strange back story but good tips.

thanks to airnos on flickr for the auto slicer product demo photo. Love that coleslaw

Ryanair hates Kayak - promises to cancel tickets booked through meta-search

eyefortravel are quoting Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary as saying that he will cancel all bookings made on Ryanair flights through meta-search. As he puts it

"We want to cause as much chaos for the screen scrapers as possible"

This news comes a week or so after the coverage of a looming issue between AirAsiaX (long haul offshoot of Asian low cost carrier AirAsia) and Webjet (Australian based OTA that uses an aggregation engine to combine non-GDS available fares) over Webjet's reported intentions to screen scrape for access to AirAsia X fares.

I understand the argument of the carriers here that meta-search or aggregated search based engines end up pounding the websites (or rez systems) of the carrier, especially where the connection is based on a robot/screen scrape rather than a direct connect. But on the other hand when an airline opens itself to the internet and search engines and enjoys all the benefits of being indexed and discoverable by consumers, they cant then complain when people build mechanisms for more effective forms of search.

In the case of Ryanair, I am sure they are down on their knees and grateful to the SEO leprechauns that they are the number one for organic search result for "cheap flights london dublin" (see shot below)



To then turn around and complain about other search players wanting to build indexes as well is a bit like trying to have your un-fetted search cake and control it at the same time. This is especially true if you are a low cost airline. If as an airline you believe that your prices are the best and are the definition of your product then you should embrace aggregated/meta-search as it will prove your case every time. Seems like O'Leary now likes Expedia but hates Kayak.

BTW - what is Etihad doing bidding on Google.com.au for the keywords "cheap flights london dublin". I know the UAE airlines seem to have unlimited marketing budgets and an insatiable desire for growth but surely the clicks from this are a complete waste of money. Whoever their SEM agency is needs to be roused from the marketing conference bar room and put back to work.

Update - if you want to hear a different view check out Timothy O'Neil-Dunne's post on the same subject "Ryanair clams down on Screen Scrapers - Agents too?"

Struggling to track EXPE, PCLN and OWW? Thankfully Seeking Alpha has a summary

Three big earning releases last week in the online travel industry. Made for a lot of material to listen to, read and digest. Thanks to Sramana Mitra at Seeking Alpha you don't have to fret. She has put together a one page summary of the highs and lows of the releases from each of Expedia (EXPE), Priceline (PCLN) and Orbitz Worldwide (OWW). Is this week's BOOT recommended read.

Aerolíneas Argentinas to be nationalised. Am convinced US and Euro airlines will also be seeking help soon

Wharton has some very interesting analysis in this article over the nationalisation of Aerolíneas Argentinas. We have to all prepare ourselves for a series of bad news stories from Airlines. Cathay Pacific just announced their first loss in 5 years (bloomberg article). Nationalisation is usually a very emerging economy solution to a problem with problems at important national assets. However with the UK government bail out of Northern Rock and US government coming to the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac I am predicting that we will see US and European airlines receiving some help (or lots of help) in the form of government hand outs by this time next year. Especially if their BS scare campaign blaming oil speculators is successful.

thanks to jmiguel.rodriguez for the photo from flickr

Dear Readers - what should I do with this comment?

Dear Readers. I need your advice. A commentator under the tag "Conny Vige" has tracked down almost every post I have written about or including Expedia and posted this

"Hi. You have created an interesting and informative blog. I have heard and read about Expedia a lot. It is a great travel experience. You can easily plan your vacation sitting at home or at the office. You can never be sure 100% that everything will go right. I browsed this great site www.pissedconsumer.com and found the customers’ feedbacks on the company. Interested?"

I can't decide whether or not to delete them or let them stay. The argument for keeping them is that they are not offensive and are contextual (ie are in Expedia posts). The argument for ditching is that they are repetitive and might be link hunting for "pissed consumer". The ultimate test of course is whether or not they are spam. I have committed to keep all comments on the site that are not defamatory, spam, nonsensical or full of vitriol/personal insult. So - what do you think. Keep or ditch?

UPDATE - the BOOT readership has spoken. Will be deleted the comments (and any further) but will keep this post up to highlight the comment once.

Emirates to ditch in-flight magazine - changing of on-plane advertising market

Emirates have announced they are scrapping their in-flight magazine (Open Skies). Brand Republic is reporting that the magazine adds a tonne of weight to each A380 flight. They are touting this as both a green and cost cutting initiative. I refute the green part as this is an airline that has just announced showers in the A380 first class area. That is going to add a wasteful half a tonne of weight to the plane in extra water (according to Airwise news).

This tells me an interesting story about the economics of in-flight advertising. Airlines traditionally make a lot of money from in-flight magazine advertising as they have a great travelling demographic and a near certainty of circulation and readership (especially on long haul). The scraping of this magazine is probably more to do with the changing on-plane media habits of consumers. With Emirates carrying 600 channels of entertainment (that WORK my dear Qantas flying readers) they have provided the audience (passengers) with less reason to read the magazine at the advertisers with a more enhance media to utilise. My guess this is not a fuel or green decision, it is a marketing and advertising sales decision. What do you think?

Hat tip to Darren at Travel Rants where I first saw the story

thanks to erdanziehungskraft for the photo from flickr

Bejing Olympics: Translate Server Error restaurant

If you have not seen it yet pop over to Adfreak.com to see the shot of the Beijing restaurant that clearly relied on a website to translate the cafe's name from simplified Chinese into English. The result - the cafe is now called "Translate server error".

Hotel Sales Report - you can't give them away

Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels has issued a report that in H1 2008 $13.9 billion worth of hotels were bought and sold. That might be a big sounding number but it is down 76% on the same period in 2007. The declines are most pronounced in the Americas - which saw an 81% decline. Ehotelier.com has the whole story and some graphs.

Another interesting stat from the report - 84% of the transactions were for hotels of value less than$100mm and only one at greater than $1billion. It may be that this trend is unrelated to travel market decline and more related to the credit crunch and resulting inability of institutions to raise the debt that is needed to finance large hotel acquisitions. I hope that is the answer and not that this story along with the RevPAR story are indicating that the market is going south.

thanks to the Chris & Sandra Marshall on flickr for the photo

TRAVELtech is coming: Year of Living Dangerously

Next up on the conference agenda is Martin Kelly's ever popular TRAVELtech. Martin has been kind enough to offer me a media pass. I look forward to real time blogging from the back of the room. Managed to pick up some very interesting stories last year. Conference is at the end of the month in Sydney - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at Dockside, Cockle Bay, Sydney.

Start Up competition at WIT Web In Travel 2008

The preparation for Siew Hoon Yeoh's Web In Travel conference 2008 is in full swing (October 21 & 22 in Singapore). She has put an interesting little twist on the preparations for the event this year. In addition to the usual road of speaker and panel session, Siew Hoon is organising a "Start-up Pitch" competition. Along the lines of a mini, travel industry focused Demo or Techcrunch50, she is inviting online travel start ups to submit their ideas to the competition. Top 3 will then have a chance to present at the conference. Winner gets a "a Professional Development Program (PDP) voucher from the Cornell-Nanyang Institute of Hospitality Management (CNI) worth US$2,500 (valid for 2009) as well as the opportunity to take their winning idea to the next level with the investor judges." If you are an online travel start-up and interested then more, then here are the details.

General information on the Web In Travel conference is here. I am speaking at it - see you there.

Blogger (Google) to the BOOT: You're spam and you're out of here

It has been a very trying weekend for your BOOT blogger. On Friday I received an email from Blogger (with a capital "B" and owned by Google) telling me that

"Your blog at: http://tims-boot.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog."

I was given 20 days to lodged an appeal and have the blog re-instated. In the meantime I could not post any new items.

Blogger was full of apologies this morning. They returned by access to the blog, blaming this on a bug that caused problems for a large number of blogs. Here is what they said

"We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data."

For those interested here is a screen shot of what it means to be locked out of Blogger



thanks to allspice1 over at flickr for the photo

e-Travel Blackboard covering Tim Hughes (i.e. me) at eyefortravel

Just back from chairing Eyefortravel Asia Pacific Sales and Marketing conference. eTravel Blackboard have a report on my presentation (ie the non-chairing part) here called "Online consumers need help to understand too much information". More on the conference and other posts as soon as I can get through work and inbox backlog.

Techdirt article on Airlines against meta-search

Thanks to a tipster for forward this article from Techdirt article on Airlines against meta-search called "The Airlines' Ongoing Struggle With Price Aggregation Sites". Worth a read.

Snaps to matt.hintsa for the photo via flickr

Online Content and Advertising: Are the Eyeballs drying up?

Old school online travel was about selling travel to people. Consumers would search, put in a credit card and end the process with a done transaction. New school online travel is about content and eyeballs. I have talked before about the "zero percenters" - sites which control none of the content on their website, instead relying on user generated content. Even more recently I spoke of the significant ad network that is now the TripAdvisor Media Network. I have also come across a dedicated ad network for travel content sites called - in a very creative move - The Travel Ad Nework. All of these sites and networks depending on eyeballs and advertisers willing to pay for those eyeballs. There is trouble on the horizon for ad dependent players. ValueClick Media (the second biggest of the independent advertising networks) pre-anounced their results last week. They are predicting revenue of $163-$164 million versus expectations of $166-$170 million. This slight miss caused the ValueClick stock to plunge 18% in one day. A few days later and the stock is down almost a third. Are the dollars chasing eyeballs drying up???

thanks to sean dreilinger from flickr for the photo

Preparing some questions for Lonely Planet

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago on an announcement by Lonely Planet of plans for an offline store at Sydney Airport. I was critical of the focus, time and energy being spent on something other than online. Since that post I have had a number of emails sent to me with some recent Lonely Planet online activity. I have also been doing some reading of my in preparation for next week's eyefortravel Asia Pacific. One of the speakers for the event is Andy Conroy, Global Online Director, Lonely Planet. Here are the series of announcements that I have discovered:

• Launching a channel on Youtube;
• Launching a mobile site in Australia;
• Joining up with Expedia and Hostelworld for joint accommodation sales; and
  
• Launching an API to provide direct connectivity to reviews and content.
  

Am looking forward to talking to Andy Conroy on how these things all come together.

UPDATE - unfortunately looks like Andy is no longer able to attend eyefortravel. Will have to save my questions for another occasion.

Start up tips from founders of businesses that did not make it

Jeremy Liew of Valley VC group Lightspeed Ventures has a good post on this blog this week called "Post mortems on two failed startups from their founders". Touches on two stories from two different startups that failed. First a list of 7 mistakes from Monitor110 (raised $20mm) and the second a top ten list from a company that did not raise money.

If you are in the start-up business, then this is worth a read.

Thanks to bootload on flickr for the image

Winner of ticket to Eyefortravel Asia Pacific

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

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

Prize Winner

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

First Reserve

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

Second Reserve

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

What Next??

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

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

Here are the questions.

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

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

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

Qantas Frequent Flyer Any Seat change - a 1 cent slap in the face

I have been fuming about the recent changes to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. In classic Qantas speak, they have announced a revolution in their program through the launch of Qantas Any Seat Rewards. Rather than limiting the number of seats available for purchase with frequent flyer miles, they split the seats that can be purchased into two types.

There are "Classic Award" seats. These are seats available under the same fixed points basis - 64,000 for one way to London Economy. How many of these are available on any particular flight is anyone's guess.

Then there is the new Any Seat Awards which do not limit the seat availability (other than number of seats on the plane) but it is price on application. Qantas will only tell you the Any Seat points price once you call them. Shocking stories are emerging. Over at frequentflyer.com.au they are running a competition for the "Most Expensive Anytime QFF Award". A couple of examples.

• Perth to Alice Springs under classic is 16,000 points. Under Any Seat 203,000 points; 1169% premium;
• Perth to Sydney to LAX to New York return in first class under classic is 384,000. Under Any Seat 2,459,244 points. A premium of 540%; and
  
• Sydney to Frankfurt business return in June 2009 (a full year away) is 256,000 under classic. Under Any Seat 1,137,133. A premium of 354%.
  

Only Qantas could have the outrageous gall to spend millions on marketing to promote as a benefit to me a program designed to increased the cost of frequent flyer seats.

One of the people posting raised a fantastic example of Qantas using this program to rip off consumers. User "platy " tracked a Honolulu to Sydney one-way flight departing in a month's time for 128,000 points. This is a flight that can be bought for $400 inc taxes. That means 320 points per dollar. Eight times the usual redemption rate. On a business class trip to the US I usually collect around 42,000 points (including status benefits) at at cost of around $12,000. That means I am getting about 3.5 points to the dollar. If it costs me 320 points in the dollar to get an Any Seat reward then Qantas is valuing my loyalty at a reward of about 1.09 cents in the dollar. For every dollar I spend they want to reward me with a 1% rebate. I suspect that we are seeing the end of value in the Qantas Frequent Flyer Program.

In a world where they consider to reward loyalty with a 1% discount then there is no longer any point balance value to loyalty with Qantas. There maybe other value drivers for customers such as lounge access but points are no longer a reason to be a QFF.

If you think it is just bloggers that are mad then check out the rant by Paul Sheehan in the today's Sydney Morning Herald under the heading "Qantas Burns a Precisous Resource" . He concludes that

Qantas enters the oil shock era as one of the world's strongest, largest and best-managed airlines. But the last four times this once doggedly loyal Qantas frequent flyer went to Europe he flew on Air China, Etihad and Finnair

Note to Qantas and Qantas Frequent Flyers. Singapore Airlines has been running an Any Seat Reward style program for years. The difference they tell you up front the price for redeeming a seat not allocated to frequent flyers. The difference is simply double.

Airline Revenue Management in India - one price to rule them all

I have been enjoying my regular email and phone exchanges with Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright on the online travel market in Asia. Our last few chats have been on the Indian travel market because 2008 has been such a boom year for the industry there and he recently put together a special report on the region.

Yesterday he sent me through this fascinating screenshot from a Cleartrip flight price tracking graph. It shows over a three week period the prices for flights from Mumbai to Chennai. The different colours show the different airlines (ie Black is Spicejet with the cheapest price and Red is Magenta is Kingfisher with the most expensive).

The reason this is fascinating is that there is virtually no change in price regardless of the departure date. Each of the airlines has effectively set themselves price for the flight regardless of day of week, day of departure, competitors price or days out from departure. Revenue management has been thrown out the window and replaced with a single price strategy. Badrinathan contrasts this to October 2007 when he was putting together his report. During this time he noticed wild variations in pricing including dramatic decreases in price the closer customer's booked to the date of departure. Clearly the industry is trying to find a strategy to mitigate against the exploding costs of fuel. It has swung from constant and almost irrational change to no change.

You have to believe that the best strategy for an airline to survive staggering fuel costs would be to improve and increase revenue management activity rather than to adopt a one price to rule them all approach. Thanks to Ram for sending this through.

UPDATE - Last Chance: BOOT has one free pass for Eyefortravel Sales and Marketing in Travel Asia Pacific July 29-30 (Sydney)

UPDATE - last chance to submit questions to win a free ticket to eyefortravel asia. Will extend deadline to Monday 21.

On 29 and 30 July your BOOT correspondent will be chairing the eyefortravel Sales & Marketing in Travel Asia Pacific conference at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney. This conference will be a great opportunity to hear the latest on the travel industry and network will colleagues. Eyefortravel have passed on to me one free two day (bronze) delegate pass (normally A$1,395) for a lucky BOOT reader. I have an idea for a competition, with the winner getting their hands on this delegate pass. This is a great opportunity to have the BOOT audience contribute questions for speakers at the conference. So here it is. The pass will go to the best question sent to me to be asked of a speaker at the conference. Steps to enter are:

1. Look at the agenda (here) and the speaker list (here);
2. Draft a question in the comments of this blog clearly identifying which speaker the question is for. Clearly you will have to put your name or identifier in the post;
3. Make your entry on or before July 18 July 21;
4. I will announce the best question and contact the submitter on 21 23 July; and
5. If I can't track you down to tell you then I will pick another winner and keep picking until I can find someone.

The winning question and other questions will be put to the speakers at the conference.

If you want to listen to my introductory podcast for this event then click here.

If you want to register for the conference then click here.

Goes without saying that the pass cannot be redeemed for cash or transferred. Transport and accom and all other costs of attending are a matter for the winner. Judges decision is final and please don't be a pain in the arse and bug me or Eyefortravel over any aspect of this post.

Expedia buys Venere.com news at 11

Am on the blacberry so no details to give but announcement is clear. Expedia has bought the Italian dominant Venere.com. First foray of EXPE into the retail model and it must multiply their Italian biz by 3-5 times. More as details come through.

Poker Break - BOOT gets wiped out by a Royal Flush

A break from travel to share a poker story. Above is a photo of my first and (hopefully) only loss in no limit hold'em to an honest to God royal flush. My hand is the suited ace nine up against the suited queen four. The community cards came down from left to right (ie flop ten, ace six). I raised pre-flop and was called by the competitor with the queen four. I checked the paired aces that came down, he went all-in and I called. We turned cards to show me in the lead with the pair of aces and him on a flush draw. Not only was I beat by the flush drawn coming off on fourth street king of spades, I was then destroyed and humiliated by the Royal Flush on the river with the jack of spades. The chances of a Royal Flush in Texas Hold'em - 649,740 to 1.

BBC confirms paid GBP £89.9m for 75% of Lonely Planet at a trailing P/E that looks to be higher than Expedia

At the time of the announcement of the acquisition by BBC Worldwide of 75% Lonely Planet there was no mention of the price paid by the BBC. This week the BBC Worldwide have published their 2007/2008 annual review containing the some more information.

The BBC acquired 75% of Lonely Planet for GBP £89.9m valuing Lonely Planet at GBP £119.9m. The sale included a put option for two years (expire 31 Oct 2009) for the remaining 25% to BBC.

Travolution is also reporting (more) plans for a website relaunch and reports that Lonely Planet's sales to March 2008 were £23.1 million for a trading profit of £4.3 million. Ultimately there were losses of £2.1 million due to site development costs and the web business losing £3.2 million from sales of £2.3 million.

That puts the multiple for Lonely Planet's valuation at somewhere around 5.2x trailing revenue. To put this in perspective Expedia is trading at 1.85 times trailing revenue (according to Yahoo! finance). To be fair, this not a very good comparison as I am sure the margins on publishing (Lonely Planet) are significantly higher that than the margins on a business still heavily dependent on air (Expedia). However if we assume that Lonely Planet's profit is a good proxy for earnings then their trailing P/E is 27.9x compared to Expedia's 17.83 (according to Yahoo! finance). That seems odd to me (unless I am getting my numbers wrong).

Here is the full Lonely Planet section of the review

"On 1 October 2007, BBC Worldwide acquired a 75% shareholding in the Lonely Planet group of companies for a total cash consideration (including acquisition costs) of £89.9m. Goodwill of £73.2m was recognised and is being written off over its estimated useful economic life of 20 years.

Under the terms of the purchase agreement the other Lonely Planet shareholders may exercise an option to sell all or part of their 25% stake to BBC Worldwide at any time up to 31 October 2009. As the minority shareholders are deemed to have retained the risks and rewards of ownership for their 25% shareholding, the put option liability has been recognised in reserves rather than as an increase in the cost of investment."

My analysis back in October last year of the sale announcement is here.

Olympics. Good for China Tourism or bad. Here are two views

Will the Olympics be the "Authoritarian Games" or a chance for "Hotels [to] enjoy a roaring trade". Roy Graff has both side of the argument over at his China travel industry blog.

thanks to Nod Young on flickr for the I love Beijing image

US Airline industry embarrasses itself by blaming woes on oil speculators

Most of the major US airlines sent round an open letter blaming the skyrocketing oil prices and resulting economic consequences on

"Speculators [who] buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again" (here is the letter in full)

They have even supported a very serious looking website called "Stop Oil Speculation Now (or SOS NOW)". The ludicrous argument by the airlines is that when speculators enter the market they sell the oil to each other with no intention of delivery with the only consequence is driving up the price. This is an absolute lie.

The airlines are the first to tell the markets about their financial genius when they successfully hedge against fuel increases and save $$$$ in fuel costs. Hedging can only occur because there are speculators in the market that are prepared to bet the other way. If you remove speculators, then hedging disappears and the airlines will have no facility at all for planning ahead of time for fuel purchases. They will have to do what you and I do - turn up to the pump and pay the price on the day. There is no one in the airline industry that wants to do this and therefore remove speculators and hedging.

If speculators disappeared then it would dramatically increase the uncertainty for airlines in fuel prices resulting in increases in prices rather than decreases.

This is a blatant and almost pathetic smokescreen to cover up efforts to beg for government support/handouts and set up someone else to blame when the chapter 11 bankruptcy filings start.

Thanks to Mark Ashley at the Upgrade:Travel Better blog where I first saw this story. He has some good analysis of this in his post which I encourage you to read.

Shame on you airTran, Alaskan, American, Continental, Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Midwest, NWA, Southwest, United and US Airways.

thanks to frunt on flickr for the image

Lonely Planet to open an offline store at Sydney Airport with help from Lagardère

Last week TripAdvisor announced another step in its plan for world online travel content domination with the acquisition of a meta search engine (OneTime.com) and a large travel social network (Virtual Tourist). Lonely Planet - arguably the number one offline travel content company - has gone completely the other way by announcing plans to open a Lonely Planet concept store at Sydney Airport. This store (I am quoting from the DFN Digital article)

"...will sell the full range of Lonely Planet books and a range of travel accessories and gift items. It will also feature online interactive portals showcasing Lonely Planet’s digital content, and staff will be trained to offer specific travel advice to travellers."

In other words, books, magazines and young people who should know what they are doing. The store will be operated by Lagardère Services Asia Pacific who are famous for running Airport book stores and news agents.

I had hoped that after the sale to the BBC, appointment of new online staff and attempts at launching new onlien products that Lonely Planet would finally take the steps necessary to turn themselves into an online content company and join the now 15 year old online revolution. But instead the quote from Lonely Planet sales and marketing director Howard Ralley about putting the Lonely Planet brand on a store front is that it is

"an exciting evolution for our brand. It's something we've discussed for some time."

I think that this was time that should have been spent opening up the brand, site and content to online distribution. Am I being too harsh? Do you think that the next frontier for Lonely Planet should be offline?

Transit Cafe - Asia's most influential women in travel

The Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Travel was interesting reading but had an Americas bias. Siew Hoon over at the Transit Cafe (and organiser of the WiredinTravel conference) has put together an Asian focused list with her pick of the top 8 of Asia's most influential women in travel. Unfortunately no online travel leads made her list but interesting reading nonetheless.

Uptake nee Kango raises series A of $3.95 led by Shasta Ventures

Quick news thanks to alarm:clock that review meta-search site UpTake (previously Kango) has closed a series A fund raising round of $3.95mm lead by Shasta Ventures. The number of destinations covered by UpTake is expanding fast and presumably the cash will accelerate this. More on them here and an interview with CEO Yen Lee here.

New Marketing for Zuji - can the Travel Guru and open the Beans

The above is a image of a real can of beans being used to promote the Travelocity owned Zuji.com in the Asia Pacific region. I am (again) late to comment (too much work and sick recently) but here are my thoughts on this.

Zuji is used to spending money on big marketing ideas and used to it not working. Back in 2003 Zuji burnt through cash in a bonfire of marketing activity not see since the pre April 2000 dotcom boom days. It looked like they bought out Sydney Airport with posters and paraphernalia everywhere. On television and radio they ran a very peculiar - almost psychedelic - series of campaigns around how the Zuji Travel Guru would help customers find the right price and right product. I have been (unsuccessfully) searching high and low for an online copy of the ad to show you as it cannot be described accurately in words. M&C Saatchi put together the piece under the tag line "your online travel guru". Even as a travel insider the ads made no sense - all I understood at the time was that a lot of money was being spent for no gain.

On Martin Kelly's Traveltrends I first read that Zuji was trying a different but no less weird marketing tack some 5 years after this less that successful TV effort. The new campaign is to promote the savings from Zuji's dynamic packaging through selling cheap consumables. First beans with toothpaste and toilet paper to come. You don't believe me. Here is the video. I had my mouth open in disbelief watching this campaign outline.


My tip to Zuji - this is not a good idea. It trivialises your brand by associating it with a basic food stuff. In addition you are asking consumers to make a complicated link between the beans and your product. Finally if you think somehow that this is working with beans for the love of marketing do not put your brand on a packet of toilet paper.

At least they are sticking to the famous marketing idiom "if at first you don't succeed spending millions on a Travel Guru idea, then spend more on FMCG". Oh - that's right there is no such idiom.