++Good news day for Ebookers - MSN ahoy++

More details here, but ebookers - with its parent company Orbitz - has secured a deal to provide full online travel agency functionality on the MSN Travel channels in the UK and US respectively.

A few things spring to mind:

• Best piece of partnership news for ebookers in a long time.
• The new Orbitz-wide technology platform is clearly working from a business opportunity perspective.
• Global deals can be done.
• Blood is clearly NOT thicker than water - why Orbitz over Expedia [the OTA it created in 1996], which previously ran the search and bookings tools on MSN.
  

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Webby Awards agree with Travo judges

Looks like a clean sweep for Kayak in recent weeks.

The meta search engine has won a coveted Webby Award in the US, just a fortnight after scooping a Travolution Award.

Kayak landed the People's Voice award and flight prediction site Farecast won the main Webby in the travel category.

An American roadtrip series from the New York Times won in the travel category for online video. Discovering Cross-Cultural Solutions Brazil scooped the People's Voice prize.

[Valleywag has a typically cutting piece of analysis regarding the Webbys. NB: no money changes hands at the Travo awards]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: farecast kayak webby

Maybe Microsoft just misses running Expedia

Extremely light on the blogging front recently as we're preparing for the Travolution Summit and Awards next week.

So, alas, we've not been able to follow-up on our Farecast story from earlier in the week with any sensible analysis.

Anyway, it turns out that rumours suggesting Expedia was the buyer were a bit wide of the mark and Microsoft is new proud owner of Farecast. Maybe someone mentioned it at an Expedia-Microsoft alumni party?

How about this for an understated announcement on the Farecast Blog:

We’re excited to confirm that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft! This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers. We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come. On behalf of the Farecast team, thank you.

Perhaps rather sensibly, comments were not activated on the post.

The deal has, predictably, got the Silicon Valley types foaming/frothing at the mouth, with some earlier in the week excited enough to say any deal should be seen in the context of a Google-Expedia deal.

Our prediction on that: get over it. Always happy to proven wrong, of course.

The best coverage we've seen is on the Motley Fool, which suggests Farecast's fantastic prediction technology should be used by Microsoft to work out when it should bid more for Yahoo!.

Maybe Microsoft has simply just given up on Yahoo! and sees Farecast as the next best thing. Oops...

For some serious analysis of the Farecast deal, Musings typically has the best. Over to you, Mr Bainbridge.

Yen Lee on the UpTake Blog has some more.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: expedia farecast microsoft google

All the fun of the Farecast...

The Seattle Post Intelligencer is reporting that Farecast has been sold for $75m (£38m at today’s exchange rate).

The buyer is currently not known. The report suggest Expedia as ‘one natural choice’. Expedia told the paper that it doesn’t comment on rumour and speculation, as we all know by now.

Farecast positions itself slightly differently from other travel2.0 businesses. It datamines historic pricing data from a number of partner sites to let customers know if the current price offered is likely to go up or down. Its air fare tool is well established, its hotel channel still in beta.

The business has an impressive line-up of VC backers, as reported by Travolution’s US correspondent last year.

Farecast’s model is an interesting one, and with intelligent search being such a buzzword at the moment it'll be interesting to see who has taken it over. $75m/£38m is an interesting price point – spare change for someone like Google, well within the range of someone like Amadeus, maybe a punt too far for someone like TUI Travel plc.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Priceline does a Farecast

Farecast - the air ticket trend site - has made quite a splash in the US, although the concept has yet to catch on here in the UK.

So Priceline has announced a similar piece of functionality, known as Inside Track.

Innovative, flexible, consumer-focused and price-led tool.

It seems that OTAs are now beginning to look at the whizzy functionality created by the so-called Travel 2.0 start-ups in the US and take the best bits.

This is where it might get tricky - or, alternatively, open up new opportunities - for the Silicon Valley types.

If the big boys begin to wade in with their own nifty tools and tricks, start-ups will be forced to innovate once again. Which can be good (they will always have first-mover advantage) or bad (they run out of ideas).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: priceline farecast silicon valley

Travolution@PhoCusWright Brussels - Where the puck is it all going?

Bob Offutt, senior technology analyst at PhoCusWright, has just used a 15-minute speech to bamboozle delegates perhaps recovering from a slumber after lunch.

He references a US ice hockey player who used to say: “Look where the puck is going.”

Alongside the usual suspects, like user-generated content – “it’s nothing new” – and contextual advertising, Offatt reveals some key areas where innovation is going to lead the industry into what PhoCusWright calls Travel 2.0.

Perhaps most interesting for large number of travel companies is where travel search is heading, or tackling the “large sea content our there”.

The meta search sites – which, in fact, feel like a bit of a dirty word round here today – are popular with almost a third of online users.

But the likes of Farecast and Farechase are around the corner, with amazingly clever uses of tools such as Flash and Ajax [see our Explanations 101 for definitions], while Del.icio.us is also expected to feature heavily as a search tool.

Finally Offatt turns his attention to mashups. The ex-Sabre executive has used a variety of APIs from various sources to create Bobstravel, a fictitious travel service provider that exists solely by using content from other sites.

He uses Yahoo! Trip Planner for guides, Michelin for restaurants, Flickr for photos, Dolphin Dynamics for flight search and Hotels.com’s IAN tool for hotels.

Mind-blowing…

And apparently there are on average 2.77 new mash-ups created every day.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Cool websites - according to Time

Everyone on holiday? Editorial no-brainers? Nothing else going on in the world?

Well, probably not the last one, but it does seem like everyone is falling over themselves to produce lists of “best ever websites” and the like at the moment.

Today’s offering comes courtesy of Time magazine in the US, which has produced a list of the 50 Coolest Websites.

"Many of this year's choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips," says the producer of the piece, Maryanne Murray Buechner.

So here are the five sites it selected from the travel sector:

* Meta search site Kayak

* Hotel and restaurant review site Yelp

* Car-sharing site Zipcar

* Airfare prediction site Farecast

* Public transport site Hopstop

Times has also picked a handful of search engines: Accoona (so-called artificial intelligence site) and Snap (apparently a serious competitor to Google).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution