So many twists in the tale...

Our story on Tuesday said American Airlines could pull the plug on its product feed to Kayak because it doesn't like the way its aa.com search results have to compete with orbitz and cheaptickets results for the same flights

The airline said it could end its relationship with kayak and sister brand sidestep as early as TOMORROW unless concessions were made!

In the meantime, site analytics specialist Compete has come up with some pretty interesting stats on what AA stands to win or lose from such a move.

In June kayak and sidestep sent 1.3% of all visits to aa.com.

These visits converted extremely well with Compete's findings showing that almost 5% of all conversions on aa.com came from kayak or sidestep.

And, visits referred from kayak and sidestep to aa.com converted at 9.3% in June, quite a lot higher than the airline's own website average per visit of 2.7%.

The flip side of the coin is this - Compete also analysed the rate of people clicking over to AA flights on Orbitz revealing that 72% make their way to aa.com anyway at some point over a month.

So, AA will seemingly lose a chunk of business by withdrawing from the meta-searchers but in all likelihood get a good chunk of it back a week or two later!

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Technical error or lucky find? PhoCusWright here we come!

[UPDATE (x2) at the bottom of the post]

Travolution is off to California in November for the PhoCusWright conference.

So, browsing Kayak - and other sites, hasten to add - for a flight from London to LAX, and we find this little nugget of good fortune:


The search results shows an Air France return flight from LHR to LAX on the required dates. On the Air France website it is £862; on ebookers £384!!

Schurely schome mishtake?

Follow the link through to ebookers and - da-da - the same fare is still there:


We also carried out a search starting from the ebookers engine and same again:


Now for some this would be an incredible coup. And indeed it is. But it seems to be too good to be true.

We asked someone more familiar than us with booking engines, fare loads and the like to get an idea of why the fare is so incredibly cheap.

• Loading error (either automated or human).
• Revenue management system on the blink.
• Some commercial deal where ebookers/Orbitz wants to put a certain volume through just prior to a renegotiation with an airline - so will take anything.
• Some event happening in the UK at the same time (with lots of people coming from states) - hence extra flights have had to be put on - and now demand has to be created in the opposing direction (but that would have impacted all flights).
• Its what they intended.

Or, on a lighter note, our mole suggests, it could be the seat by the toilet.

If anyone has any further suggestions, please add via the comments section.

UPDATE:

According to the ebookers' flight team, this discovery is in fact good fortune and the price is correct on the site. A message reads:

Ebookers should nearly always have cheaper fares than the airline's direct site (with the exception of BA where ebookers match).

Which they would say, of course.

Anyway, it also appears that Expedia has gone all laissez faire with Air France and is also offering the same ticket for £374. Opodo also has it for £378.

It's a wonder the OTAs stay in business! We jest...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: orbitz ebookers kayak phocuswright los angeles california silicon valley

++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

TripAdvisor spending more money - but now involved in search

There appears to be no stopping TripAdvisor's Steve Kaufer and co with their desire to buy as many "travel media" properties as possible.

The Expedia-owned company has bought two further sites, VirtualTourist and OneTime, both for undisclosed fees.

The addition of the pair to the TripAdvisor Media Network will give the user review firm an impressive 32 million unique visitors a month.

Of the two acquisitions, OneTime is probably the most interesting. It is essentially a travel search site which allows users to find deals across a number of OTAs (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity) and meta search engines (Kayak, SkyScanner).

Previously TripAdvisor and its string of community sites were all primarily concentrated on producing or sharing content, much of it user-generated, but with OneTime it has reasonably discreetly added decent travel search to its armoury.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: tripadvisor virtualtourist onetime travel search meta search

Leading travel stocks after a third of 2008

[UPDATE at bottom of post]

Some interesting stats...

Expedia: started 2008 on $0.31 a share. Now $0.25. -19%

British Airways: started 2008 on £3.09 a share. Now £2.48. -19%

EasyJet: started 2008 on £6.13 a share. Now £3.24. -47%

MoneySupermarket (owner of TravelSupermarket): started 2008 on £1.40 a share. Now £1.14. -19%

Orbitz Worldwide: started 2008 on $8.50. Now $8.78. +3%

Priceline: started 2008 on $1.15 a share. Now $1.26. +10%

Ryanair: Started 2008 on Euro 0.39 a share. Now Euro 0.30. -23%

SilverJet: started 2008 on £0.48 a share. Now £0.15. -69%

Thomas Cook: started 2008 on £2.82 a share. Now £2.66. -7%

TUI Travel: started 2008 on £2.94 a share. Now £2.41. -18%

Travelzest: started 2008 on £1.01 a share. Now £1.02. +1%

Travelzoo: started 2008 on $0.14 a share. Now $0.11. -21%

UPDATE:

Sam I Am asks in the comments about the market conditions as a whole.

FTSE 100: started 2008 on 6456. Now 6215. -4%

NASDAQ: started 2008 on 2652. Now 2464. -7%

So one might say that the Orbitz and Priceline in the US - and not Expedia - are bucking the trend, while airlines in the UK are seeing a decline in share price worse than the overall market decrease.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

People love using Wikipedia for information about travel companies

Wikipedia has created a tool which reveals the number of searches carried out for any keyword.

It's interesting in the context of the sheer number of times people are looking for information on individual travel companies.

Obviously one thing to ponder here is the extent to which consumers (let us assume it's primarily consumers for now) will go to learn more about a company.

Is this a question of uncertainty on the part of potential customers? Or the web just showing that if information is there, people will want to find it.

Anyway, here is a sample showing the number of Wikipedia searches in February 2008 for various travel related companies.

British Airways - 230,694
Eurostar - 23,980
Expedia - 21,323
Orbitz - 10,627
Virgin Atlantic - 10,194
Thomas Cook - 8,742
Lastminute.com - 1,273
Ebookers - 968
Opodo - 834
Kuoni - 24

One remarkable thing about this is that Google was searched 334,841 times - just 100,000 more than BA.

And now you can play around with the tool at the heart's content.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: Travelvine [side project of Darren Cronian of Travel-Rants] for flagging this up.

Technorati tags: wikipedia wikitravel wiki encyclopedia

Sun, sea, sand and search

Orbitz Worldwide, owner of ebookers.com, has added a feature to its (semi) eponymous US site which might raise a few eyebrows in Europe, not least among the big vertically integrated tour operators such as TUI Travel plc and Thomas Cook Group.

Orbitz.com features a link through to MyIdealBeach.com, where users can specify who they are (such as friends or honeymooners), what they want from the hotel (gay-friendly to all-inclusive) and what they want to do (golf to fishing).

‘Travellers want a different, better way to search for complex trips than just by dates and destinations,’ says Heather Leisman, Senior Director of Merchandising for Orbitz, in the press release.

Too right!

Travellers might also want to search more than the 450 pre-selected hotels currently on offer, but it’s a start.

TUI and TC have argued that one advantage they have over the OTAs is access to beach inventory - through the scale of their buying power, to say nothing of the fact they actually own or part-own a number of prime beach-front properties.

Even if this tool does turn up on ebookers in the future, it is unlikely that the balance of power will shift but it’s food for thought, particularly as Leisman also says that myidealbeach.com ‘marries the expertise offered by a traditional travel agent with the ease, convenience and breadth of options offered by an online travel site.’

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution.

Messy Yellow Pages?

PING! Email arrives from Yellow Pages in the US, which is going down the meta search route.

A new site, Yellowpages.travel [remember dot-travel?], searches across Travelocity, Hotwire, Kayak, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelzoo and a few others for flights, hotels, cars and packages.

What seems like a nice idea actually then throws up a rather odd interface - perhaps it's just us? - where the source brands are displayed across a horizontal and the user then clicks on each to get results, or sent off to the website.


Thoughts?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yellow pages expedia kayak orbitz travelocity

Yahoo! should! buy! Expedia! or! Orbitz!

Following last night's post pondering the state of Yahoo!, Silicon Valley guru Sramana Mitra has shared her thoughts on what Yahoo! should do next.

Given that it's probably losing the search battle with Google, Mitra reckons Yahoo! should snap up an online travel company.

But not just a content site or meta search engine. Oh no, aim high.

Yes, really high - like Expedia, Priceline of Orbitz.

"Yahoo should acquire one of them, and become a serious player."

A few questions about these pearls of wisdom:

• How much should a company which has lost $20 billion in market cap over two years be willing to pay for a business like Expedia?
• Is this really the right strategy?
• How would the market react to a - still reasonably signifcant - search company owning a online travel company?
  

Mitra offers more advice on the GigaOm.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: The Boot

Technorati tags: yahoo expedia priceline orbitz

Travolution@PhoCusWright 07 - Anti-Long Tails

Okay - so the theme of the conference is 'Braving the Long Tail'.

However...

Michelle Peluso from Travelocity reveals a not-so-Long Tail side when she says: "I don't think we will become specialist content experts."

Steve Barnhart, chief executive of Orbitz Worldwide, at the beginning of his keynote after lunch, raises a few laughs when he highlights the irony of hosting a conference about the Long Tail of Travel in the "fat part" of travel's long tail: Orlando.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

When is a hotel website not a hotel website - or a list not a list?

The BOOT highlights an intriguing website called TopHotel100.com.

It is basically a catalogue of the most popular hotel-related websites on the web, based on the number of other sites on the list that "mention" [in other words, link] them.

[A bit like Technorati]

But the list itself is rather odd. The top ten goes something like this:

• 1 Tripadvisor.com 2,110,000 (mentions)
• 2 Booking.com 1,760,000

And then straight out of leftfield:

• 3 MySwitzerland.com 1,570,000

Normal services resumes:

4 Orbitz.com 1440000
5 Holidaycheck.de 1,420,000
6 Marriott.com 1,330,000
7 Expedia.com 1,290,000
8 Voyages-sncf.com 1,230,000
9 Travel-library.com 1,080,000
10 Kayak.com 1,020,000

Is Kayak a "hotel" site? And VoyagesSNCF is a rail-led/online travel agency site. It seems astonishing that there are 1.5 million mentions of MySwitzerland.com contained on the other 312 sites.

As Hughes on The Boot says, he doesn't actually care as the overall list is quite a good who's who of decent hotel sites (with the odd bizarre exception), but there is certainly a faint whiff of the Link Love going on here a bit.

We've submitted the Travolution Blog to see how closely they monitor entries.

We were asked to add a link or logo in order to get listed. [TOP 100 HOTEL SITES]

Struggling to find the link on TripAdvisor and Expedia, unsurprisingly.

We'll keep you posted......

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: hotel 100 lists

One unhappy customer

Here is an interesting tale of how a technology company - Inside Messenger - ended up banging its head against a brick wall (repeatedly) when it's API plug-in to one of the world's biggest online travel agencies broke down.

Read the full story here.

Inside Messenger runs the technology behind a travel search tool for use on messaging services such as Windows Live Messenger.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Spend most of the day offline...

...and all hell breaks loose.

While Travolution was hosting its latest advisory board meeting, Blackstone - owner of Travelport (Ebookers, Orbitz et al) - was busy splashing out an astonishing £13 billion on the Hilton hotel chain.

Well, fancy that..

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Let's tick one off the list

It appears our rumourmill round-up yesterday was right on the button:

1) Travelport’s OTA brands, Orbitz and Ebookers, will seek an IPO on either the New York or London Stock Exchanges.

Travelport has just issued a press release confirming as much.

The short statement says:

"Travelport Limited, the parent company of the Travelport group of companies, announced today its intention to sell a portion of its ownership interest in its Orbitz Worldwide businesses, comprised of Travelport’s business to consumer businesses, in an initial public offering.

"The size of the ownership interest to be sold and the amount of proceeds to be received from the disposition of Orbitz Worldwide are yet to be determined. A portion of the proceeds will be used by Travelport to reduce its outstanding indebtedness."

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Rumour mill has a new spring in its step

With so much speculation doing the rounds recently about the fate of some leading online travel brands, especially concerning Travelport and its portfolio of brands, we thought it might be worthwhile listing them all:

1) Travelport’s OTA brands, Orbitz and Ebookers, will seek an IPO on either the New York or London Stock Exchanges.

2) In lieu of an IPO, Orbitz and/or Ebookers will be snapped by potential suitors Expedia Inc, Priceline, or Sabre Holdings.

3) Sabre Holdings, which has received European Commission approval to be acquired by US-based private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group (TPG), will itself be spun-off, possibly to Amadeus (though that alliance might have a tough time getting regulatory approval).

(TPG separately owns a stake in G2SwitchWorks, which was created by a former Orbitz executive to rival the traditional GDS systems, and has co-invested in non-travel related projects with private equity firm The Blackstone Group, which has a stake in Travelport.)

4) Silver Lake Partners and TPG will keep Travelocity as their core asset and build up a complementary portfolio by acquiring other consumer-facing travel brands…possibly Expedia.

5) Google will buy everything - end of story.

But seriously, since all four GDSs and their respective subsidiaries are already loosely affiliated through mutual stakeholders, a re-shuffling of assets as enumerated above is not inconceivable.

The big question is just how much shuffling can the market and regulators bear?

Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer, Travolution

Travolution@ITBPhoCusWright--Godfather says Google to launch travel site

"It is only a matter of time before Google launches a travel search engine."

Such was the message from the so-called Godfather of search marketing Danny Sullivan, chief technology officer of Search Engine Land, who opened the PhoCusWright@ITB conference in Berlin.

Obviously, Sullivan is a religious Travolution reader. We've been reporting regularly about Google's flirtation with its own travel arm, dubbed Troogle.

Visitors to Google.com searching for a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example, will now find direct links to the leading US online travel agencies--Expedia, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, Hotwire, Priceline and Travelocity--in the first search result.

Visitors can also search for departure times directly from the Google results page.

Surprisingly, Google currently does not charge the online agencies for the privilege of sending what are likely millions of holiday searchers to their sites, according to Sullivan.

But the free ride is not likely to last.

"Google is doing this now because it's good for them. They know these agencies are where people are looking for travel and Google wants to show consumers that it can do a lot more than just a general web search."

Sullivan predicts Google will eventually go the way of Yahoo! Travel, which offers a similar "smart" search result, but restricts the results to its online agency subsidiary FareChase.

He added that it will also only be a matter of time before recognised Google users (so those with a gmail or google account) will begin to receive personalised search results, which will vary from the generic results that an unknown Google user would receive.

Google subscribers can already personalise the Google home page with the local time, weather and horoscope.

The big question remains: When will Google finally reveal its true plans for the travel sector?

We still have two full days of conferencing ahead of us, so stay tuned.

Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer, Travolution

Orbitz-Ebookers mutterings

Much rumour and speculation in the industry this week, once again, about the future of Orbitz/Ebookers et al.

The latest round of titter tatter began on Tuesday when the New York Times published a story about Travelport considering a spin-off of its Orbitz US online travel agency, "less than six months after leaving the public markets", and perhaps even here in London.

Tim Hughes commented here that perhaps a reason for the London listing could be to avoid the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

Others, however, are suggesting somewhat darker reasons: roll out the Orbitz brand into Europe at the expense of Ebookers, despite it heading for a major relaunch in April 2007.

For many of us a lot of this doesn't really add up.

Why would Travelport spend a hefty amount on a rebranding of Ebookers, only for it to be scrapped and replaced with a site Europeans are unaware of?

Equally, while Travelport may indeed be considering spinning off various parts of the business, despite only eight months or so since its $4.3 billion takeover by Blackstone, surely the high profile - and profitable - brands are worth more in the long term?

Bring me a City analyst...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Expedia pull-out could certainly set precedent

Anyone who was surprised by American Airlines’ recent decision to yank US first class and business class fares off the Expedia.com web site should take a stroll down the cluttered runway that is aviation distribution history.

For starters, American’s move is almost comical - though probably not to Expedia bosses. The airline was a co-founder (or co-conspirator depending on who you ask) of the online distribution phenomenon.

Like its peers, American initially viewed the internet as the anecdote to the pricey GDS.

The airlines still do see the internet that way, only today they’ve twigged that it only really works on the balance sheet if the majority of sales are coming through thier own sites.

Well, hindsight is always 20/20.

American’s recent move is a sort of revelation. You can almost here AA accountants asking, “Hang on a second…why aren’t we controlling the sale of our premium fares?”

To use an old, yet quite applicable adolescent term: Duh!

Sure, Expedia existed and was already a household name before American, along with four other US major carriers, established bucket-fare site Orbitz. But, way back in the late 90s, before anyone figured out just how much power the internet would wield over airline distribution, the likes of Expedia weren’t a threat (even though, of course, they were).

Northwest Airlines sniffed the danger in 2002 when it pulled net fares off the Priceline website, so, again, this is not exactly a new tune American is singing.

The airlines have gone several rounds with the online players over the years in an attempt to claw back control over their most valued products.

American’s recent move simply highlights the point that the airlines have figured out that handing over total control of their inventory is destroying their yield and that they must do something about it.

In other words, it should not come as a surprise if other carriers soon follow American’s lead.

As for where that leaves Expedia...well, you could almost argue they will be left right back where they started and doing what they do best: selling the heck out of cheap fares.

Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer, Travolution