Lastminute.com has a 'social media press office'

Okay, this is an industry first, of sorts.

Or maybe that's just because of its confusing title.

The pink'uns have created a blog on the blogspot platform to run alongside the Lastminute.com Twitter activity and, one suspects, a whole host of other Web 2.0-esque marketing activities.

The Lastminute.com Social Media Press Office is - by the looks of things - another outlet for offers - but perhaps we'll see some commentary, too, on industry issues, seeing as it's a blog and all that.

[Thankfully the background is not as garish as its Twitter page!]

Maybe this will go some way to appeasing the recent moans and groans from Travel Rants to have more involvement from travel companies in blogging.

Probably not.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Title and address FAIL - delusions of grandeur?

Arriving back at Travolution Towers after some time away, and wading through the snail mail.


Not going to publish the name and company of the sender, although if they know something I don't... please get in touch.

In the meantime, hello Travelocity!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: fail failblog

Dead lastminute.com - the full(ish) story

So last Friday we revealed how lastminute.com and a string of sister sites had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

It actually turned out to be a pretty serious problem, as our story today indicates.

The sites - including Medhotels, Holiday Autos and Travelocity.co.uk, as well as the Tesco.com white label - remained offline until 2am on Saturday morning, over ten hours after the "power outage" at IT supplier Colt took place.

We have only limited information about the circumstances surrounding the problem but questions will certainly be asked of Colt, no doubt about it.

Some might translate "we're working with our provider Colt to ensure this doesn't happen again", to actually be code for "we're going tear strips off these guys after our sites went dark for over 10 hours on one of the busiest days of the year!" - but probably not.

Anyway, it's a tricky area to analyse as it is completely impossible to monitor every travel site on the web to gauge how often something like this happens.

It was only good fortune that we saw the dead LM last Friday afternoon and stuck around until the wee hours of the following morning to see when it returned. We actually gave up at 1am and went to bed!

So, how common is the problem? What do travel companies do in a situation like this? Apart from panic.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

If travel brands were foods...

...would you associate Travelocity with baked beans? Well, groovy marketing people in Australia seem to think so after pushing the Zuji-Travelocity brand onto tins of baked beans.

And whatever next?

Expedia as a big bag of chips ("Let Yourself Go..." Geddit!)

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

Next instalment please...

Forbes.com runs a revealing if frustrating interview with Travelocity CEO Michelle Peluso.

Revealing, because it charts the early career of one of the sector’s most important figures. Taking a risk, taking time, going against conventional wisdom, recognising when a business model ‘is in the tank’...familiar themes for any aspiring entrepreneurs.

Frustrating, because the interview stops before 2005 when Peluso oversaw Travelocity’s takeover of lastminute.com. Buying a business for more than a billion dollars - less familiar...

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Run, Google, run...

Steve Hafner, CEO and co-founder of kayak.com, talks to Philip Wolf, giving a level of insight into his business which would have the corporate PRs of a listed company looking nervously at their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance notes.

Kayak is on the verge of launching a travel-specific vertical ad network, giving Google a run for its money. Hafner suggested this would happen 'within 45 days'.

Kayak bought Sidestep for $175m, essentially to get the audience. But Sidestep's travelpost.com will become Kayak's user review site, giving tripadvisor a run for its money.

Kayak will get the range of European hotel inventory through agency partners, supplier partners and, interestingly, 'hooking into a GDS', giving the bedbanks a run for their money.

Kayak employs 58 people - 32 in technology, the balance in the commercial teams. Travelocity has 10,000. Hafner says: 'We're all web sites, so that's where we all should be innovating, but they haven't changed theirs much in the past ten years, despite their massive human capital.'

Metasearch will work in Europe because of online penetration levels and supplier fragmentation. While there are more metasearch in Europe than the US, Hafner 'isn't too impressed with their technology'.

Kayak is the suppliers' friend - it can offer better conversions than Google, while its ad network will be cheaper than Google.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

PhoCusWright@ITB08: Getting the measure of a business

PhoCusWright CEO Philip Wolf introduced a new metric at the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit in Berlin this morning - clout per headcount.

He pointed out that Sabre employs c5000 people; the combined kayak/sidestep operations have 52.

Soundbite aside, the point made is that these 5K people are a cost that the OTAs have to factor in any pricing to suppliers. Metasearch can provide suppliers with a more qualified lead from a lower cost base.

Perhaps.

The year of global convergence

So, it seems 2008 is the year for Travelocity to move to a common technology platform for its online brands - lastminute, travelocity, reisefeber....

The company says it has set itself milestones over the coming months to achieve the migration.

We bet it has!

Orbitz Worldwide had many a false-start last year when it was going through a similar project with its ebookers brand.

They could send the handbook over to Sabre although somehow we think that's unlikely.

Besides, Sabre chief innovator, Dr Ben Vinod, tells us it is all going well and 'rapidly.'

He talks about the potential for exploiting 'synergies', which in this case means enabling all of the brands to use the same solutions such as Travelocity's 'experience finder.'

Whatever angle you look at it from - it makes for exciting times ahead!

Linda Fox, lead reporter. 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

Travolution@PhoCusWright 07 - Roadtrippers

LeisureLogix has won the Five Minutes of Fame competition, based on a delegate vote of presentations from sponsored workshops over previous days.

They run a white label product in the US for roadtrippers, utilising car hire and hotel bookings.

And they are already up and running on Travelocity.

So, well done, LeisureLogix.

Take a look...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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

Travolution@PhoCusWright 07 - Worse than the IRS

Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity, takes to the stage for a 20-minute plea for unity within the online travel industry.

But this is not an industry love-in.

Peluso reels off a string a worrying stats regarding consumer satisfaction with travel websites.

On the whole the online travel agencies perform very poorly, with satisfaction levels either flat or declining.

"Together we can make this industry more satisfying for consumers between us," Peluso urges delegates, many of which are arch rivals of Travelocity.

It clearly needs to. OTAs come out worst than the dreaded Internal Revenue Service in the US.

Cue nervous laughter...

Ouch.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Lastminute.com marketing team were 'perplexed' by electrocution ad

In April this year we ran a post featuring a bizarre video ad which had been produced for Lastminute.com.



Understandably the post sparked a few comments.

Yesterday the producer of the ad, Matt Huntley, got in touch to let us know what happened:

I wrote, directed and co-produced this ad. There was no involvement from Lastminute.com whatsoever.

It was funded by me for my showreel, it could have been for any travel company but at the time Lastminute.com weren't doing TV commercials.

We presented it to their marketing deparment in the hope of selling it (more for the exposure than the money) but they didn't seem very interested (more perplexed!)

Shame as it has proven really popular. But what the hell do I know?!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: lastminute.com execution electric chair

Hasta la victoria siempre

"Forever, until victory". Or at least until you get found out.

The US Office of Foreign Assets Control is $182,000 better off after Travelocity was found to have broken rules originating from the Cold War which prohibit companies from trading with the Communist haven of Cuba.

This is really rather naughty in the eyes of the US government, who take a dim view of companies who trade with the devil small island in the Caribbean without a license.

According to The Register, Travelocity claimed the transactions had only been allowed because of a "technical malfunction". Nevertheless they managed to do it on 1,458 occasions for, er, over six years.

[OFAC statement]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution Technorati tags: castro che guevara cuba travelocity treasury

Pegasus has a blog

US travel technology company Pegasus has joined the likes of TripAdvisor, Marriott and Travelocity and launched its own corporate blog.

And it's called, er, Pegged.

The people behind the blog say they they hope over time it will "stimulate plenty of discussion about our company and the myriad of ways that Pegasus touches hotels, distributors, developers, customers, partners and employees in this exciting time for the travel industry".

Let's hope not. The best travel company blogs have tended to be those that try not to flatter the company or its customers.

TripAdvisor's Snarky Owl is funny, for a start, and doesn't try too hard. Even Bill Marriott's blog has its lighter and controvsersial moments.

Let's hope the Dallas-based Pegasites [we just made that nickname up, but it kinda works] can also bring us all some insight - and entertainment.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The Joy of SEO

Search engine optimisation can be a fickle business at times. Indeed, travel companies up and down the land are known to agonise long into the night about where they appear on that Official Gateway to Instant Traffic, Google.

Digital marketing agencies are appointed; months are spent on designing Google-friendly landing pages; complicated keyword folksonomies are created – all in the hope that the consumer will chance upon seeing an entry in natural search listings for a company, product or destination.

And then some upstart comes along and shows them how it’s done, without any special investment.

Type “flight search engine” into Google and appearing in first place, as you might expect, is a high profile meta search engine – Skyscanner, in this case.

But what is this? In second place is that pesky Travel-Rants consumer blog.

In fact, the US version of Sidestep, IfYouSki, GooFlight and VisitBritain are the only pureplay "flight search engines" to appear on the first page.

So, well done to Mr Cronian of Travel-Rants – a developer by day with a passion for travel, writing his blog purely as a hobby.

The message here is simple: good content – or content deemed important by others on the web – can be as valuable as any investment in a digital marketing strategy.

NB: If anyone doubts whether “flight search engine” is a phrase in demand (it not being destination specific, for example), just check out the number of companies bidding against it in Google’s pay-per-click listings.

TravelSupermarket, Travelzoo, Opodo, Ebookers, Airline-Network, Kayak, SkyScanner (again), DialAFlight, Expedia and Travelocity obviously consider it worth paying money for every click.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: search engine SEO pay-per-click natural search

Lastminute.com ad spiked before hitting the airwaves

Not sure about this TV ad for Lastminute.com, apparently filmed in London in 2005.

It was supposedly only a test commercial, but I imagine someone thought better of it [probably just as Travelocity was about to buy the company!]



Maybe it will be resurrected if viral marketing picks it up again...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: lastminute.com execution electric chair

Biggles, gnomes, oh my...

What is the world of online travel coming to when the leading players in this space start employing fictional characters to pump up their sales and then issue a press release commenting on the escapades of their made-up creatures to boot?

First we had Cheapflight's "Where the hell is Biggles?" campaign on YouTube, and now we have "The Roaming Gnome" from Travelocity hitting the screens of MySpace.

US-based interactive marketing company Click Here says its latest online effort to showcase Travelocity’s beloved ad icon is realising huge success.

In a press release, Click Here notes that the gnome is “not all about fun and games” (of course not, gnomes are serious business).

The company adds, “Travelocity’s foray into MySpace with The Roaming Gnome was made with increases in traffic, bookings and brand loyalty/buzz, as well as exposure to new audiences, clearly in mind”.

Case in point: with minimal hype following the profile’s soft launch, The Roaming Gnome has thus far amassed more than 3,300 friends (gnomes have friends???).

To help keep the brand top of mind in the social networking space, The Roaming Gnome’s profile has an array of features for his friends to enjoy, including downloadable icons, wallpapers and profile skins; videos; ringtones; games; a search/booking widget; and access to the Gnome store on Travelocity.

And that's not all. The Roaming Gnome will apparently "actively" (what!) communicate with his friends via regular blog entries and bulletins.

Well, how do you like that?

There's only one slight problem from what I can see: It's not terribly original.

According to urban legend, several years ago a couple of backpackers nicked a gnome from an older couple's front garden.

For the following 12 months, the backpackers sent postcards to the couple, featuring the gnome in various settings around the world--the Pyramids, the Great Wall, etc.

One day, the couple woke up to find their gnome placed comfortably back in their garden, albeit looking slightly worse for the wear.

The story goes that the gnome's parents (parents???) told a local reporter about the incident and the travelling gnome legend was born.

Then again, he probably didn't have nearly as many "friends" as Travelocity's gnome.

Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer, Travolution

Online travel in 2006

2006 will perhaps be remembered as the year that the traditional travel industry woke up to the internet in a big way.

In the UK the likes of Expedia, Lastminute.com, Opodo et al have been blazing a trail for online travel agencies for years, but this year has seen those pre dot-commers realising exactly what can be achieved on the web.

Thomson, the UK multiple with a traditional bricks and mortar presence as well as aircraft and tour operating business, said it would be continuing its aggressive growth strategy that will ensure the web is its primary portal to reach consumers.

The other members of the so-called group of Big Four, such as Thomas Cook, also made a concerted effort to push their online brands.

Away from the package holiday market, other suppliers, such as British Airways, which have had an online presence for years, unveiled their own innovative new websites during the course of 2006.

Indeed the new BA.com caused quite a stir in the industry when it relaunched in November as, to all intents and purposes, it mirrored both in terms of functionality and design many of the online travel agency sites.

A string of other airlines and hotels also took the plunge and invested resources into their online businesses.

Meanwhile, Web 2.0 has moved from being something the geeky end of the internet community talked about at conferences to where some of its core principles are heralding a new age for the travel sector.

In fact, user generated content – in the form of reviews – on sites such as TripAdvisor is almost a benchmark for where a travel website should be if it just wants to scratch the surface.

The mash-up is becoming the de-facto method when trying to show some level of advanced functionality on a site.

But look beyond these already rather simple tools and there is a world of opportunity in the guise of travel social networking with sites like WAYN.com, Yahoo!’s Trip Planner and Answers, Travelpost and RealTravel.

We cannot mention 2006 without commenting on the influence of some of the key US players on the market.

On the one hand, the American owners of Lastminute.com and Ebookers is finally beginning to unravel (Ebookers relaunches in April 2007 and Ian McCaig has taken over from Brent Hoberman at Lastminute.com).

But the likes of Sidestep, Kayak and Mobissimo are expected to shake up the already burgeoning travel/meta search market. This will be a key to keep an eye area in 2007.

Finally, there is plenty to say about private equity and the role of venture capital groups in the industry.

VC-backed Travelport snapped up rival GDS Worldspan earlier this month, and just a few days later Lastminute.com and Travelocity owner Sabre Holdings was sold for a cool $3.75 billion.

Nobody is really sure as yet as to what the long-term effects will be on an industry that arguably needs stability, but in many respects is seeing large swathes being run by short-termist investors.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution