New Skyscanner site in Beta

Check it out the new Skyscanner website. Explanation of features.

Results page:

Route map:

Busy week in meta search land.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: skyscanner

Challenges for Mr Kayak Europe?

Kayak has moved today to appoint its first European and Asian managing director, namely Faisal Galaria, a seasoned global exec from Skype, FON and most recently jaman.com.

It's a critical position for Kayak, let's no beat around the bush here.

After receiving plenty of plaudits for its user interface and Ajax-heavy gadgets - a Travolution Award in 2008, in particular - it is now time to start delivering on the huge expectation.

So what will be the key goals for Galaria in his first 12 months?

Will the current strategy of white labelling and plenty of online marketing be enough to push Kayak beyond the gushing praise of many in the industry to become a major player?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: kayak sidestep meta search travelsupermarket

The package holiday clicks on

Moneysupermarket’s trading update issued to the London Stock Exchange yesterday contained only one paragraph about travelsupermarket, but it was an interesting one nonetheless.

With most travel search engines in private hands it’s good for journalists, to say nothing of its competitors, that the UK market leader is obliged to let us all know a couple of times a year how it is doing.

The statement said that H1 08 revenues should be around 45% ahead of the same period last year, ‘with package holidays in particular performing well, based on improvements to the core product.’

These improvements are not specified, but could be technological improvements - the connection to the tour operators systems – or content improvements - signing up more partners.

But the fact that traditional package holidays are alive and clicking online is a good thing all round. A travel product which the internet was supposed to have killed off is flourishing, thanks to the internet.

It might also be a sign that travelsupermarket’s multi-million pound TV advertising campaign is working. Unless of course it’s just the tour ops dumping stock. Or using travelsupermarket as a marketing tool.

Martin Cowen chief writer Travolution

TravelSupermarket will be delighted with this praise for Expedia

Or not.

The technology section on the Guardian website could hardly contain itself this week with a glowing tribute to Expedia, titled "Indulge your flights of fancy".

The puffery article started with something along the lines of:

...it's often the simplest, quickest and cheapest way to book a trip if it includes a flight and a hotel

And ended with:

as a one-stop supermarket that covers everything from cruises to corporate travel, Expedia does the job

Expedia's ad/PR agency - which we must, of course, had nothing to do with such fantastic coverage - will be over-the-moon.

However, there's another, er, supermarket on the UK travel scene which might be rather concerned about such flattery.

Yes, indeed. TravelSupermarket, which just happens to run travel search facilities on the Guardian website and has a handy - yet perhaps now, rather inaffective - box alongside the story about Expedia.



"Book a trip today", it says. But obviously not until you've checked Expedia!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: expedia guardian comment is free travelsupermarket

The (infamous) CEO interview with Steve Hafner at the Travolution Summit - hello TravelSupermarket

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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

Travel on the money

Travelsupermarket.com ‘has delivered strong [Q1 08] results with revenues and visitors in excess of 50% ahead of the same period last year,’ according to a statement issued to the London Stock Exchange by its parent company, moneysupermarket group.

Nothing else about travel is mentioned – the statement focuses more on how the business’ money channels are doing in the UK’s current economic climate. Overall, revenues from mortgages, loans, credit card and savings channels are up 10% off the back of a 15% increase in visitors.

Loans and mortgages have been ‘challenging’ but revenues remain level with Q1 07. Credit cards and savings have grown significantly thanks ‘improved commercial terms with providers’ and more visitors.

The personal finance sector is not Travolution’s area of expertise, but there is some crossover with travel. It appears that there is still a demand for financial products (as there is for travel) and consumers are using vertical search businesses to see what products are still out there, as much as to see what the best deals are.

The statement says that ‘the performance of our business shows the benefit of a difficult market to the price comparison channels.’

And when has travel not been a difficult market?

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

What is it about running an online travel company?

David Soskin, chief executive of Cheapflights, steps down.

Chris Nixon, managing director of TravelSupermarket, steps down.

Brent Hoberman, chief executive of Lastminute.com, steps down.

All loved being entrepreneurs. At least two weren't so keen on the numbers game, prefering to innovate and be in "start-up" mode.

Makes you think...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Finding transparency in search

There’s a big difference between talking about ‘ improved conversion rates’ in a press release and using the same phrase in a regulatory filing. So when moneysupermarket group plc tells the London Stock Exchange that its travel vertical has improved revenue per visitor as well as revenue per transaction in 2007, the OTAs need to look at numbers as closely as travelsupermarket’s direct competitors.

Travelsupermarket.com’s 2007 numbers show big increases across its metrical board;

• visitors 37m (06: 19.7m)
• transactions 30.6m (06: 17.2m)
• click-based revenues £13.6m (06: £6.8m)
• total revenues £15m (06: £7.5m)
• revenue per visitor £0.41 (06: £0.34)
• revenue per transaction £0.43 (06: £0.40)

Looks like the millions of pounds put into TV advertising is working then! Analysts were shown a slide based on a ‘custom defined Hitwise report’ which ranked travelsupermarket as the UK’s most visited travel comparison web site in January – the key month for bookings in the UK.

So travelsupermarket.com seems in quite good shape for its new MD. Travolution Towers has learnt that there is a shortlist of three – former travel supremo Chris Nixon is overseeing the hunt and said he wanted someone with international experience at senior level. Travel or search experience – watch this space.

And what about the travel search generally? Kayak’s takeover of Sidestep at the back-end of last year showed the sector has legs when commentator such as Henry Harteveldt at Forrester pointed out that, in the US at least, travel search's market share was holding steady at 12-15% of the online travel sector.

Kayak.com had 5.72% of the UK market in Jan08, according to travelsupermarket’s Hitwise report. Sidestep, bless, had 0.94%. Kayak remember raised $196m as part of the SideStep takeover: Mobissimo is lurking with its revamped intuitive and customisable engine. SkyScanner – 11.34% of the UK market in Jan - picked up some funding of its own in November.

And with the market leader in Europe’s biggest online travel market confirming improved conversion rates and hikes in visitors and revenue per visitor, 2008 could be the year when travel search finds itself.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Travo weekly round-up #3

Here are the top stories by visits on the Travolution website for the week ending Friday 1 February 2008.

• Opodo profits to trigger investment in site.
• Sky picks Expedia-TripAdvisor for white label deal.
• Telegraph reviews travel search business.
• Cheapflights will not be rushed into float decision.
• WAYN approach over sale - but not by AOL.

Best of the blogs:

• Google Suggest, from Les Exploers.
• 10 questions for tour operators, from Musings.
• Microsoft-Yahoo dino deal, from Buzzmachine.
• Facebook apps on any site, from TechCrunch.
• SEO millionaire, from SearchEngineWatch.

Please post and further recommendations in the comments section.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The travel conference of the year!

Big day today. We are officially launching our Travolution European Summit 2008, produced in association with PhoCusWright.

We have started assembling what we believe will be the best line-up of participants from the online travel industry you are likely to find anywhere in the UK in 2007.

Confirmed so far:

• Caroline Cartellieri, Expedia UK (managing director)
• Graham Donoghue, TUI UK (new media director)
• Steve Hafner, Kayak (chief executive)
• Adam Healy, VibeAgent (chief executive)
• Brent Hoberman, Mydeco.com (executive chairman)
• Chris Lee, Barclays Commercial Bank (head of travel sector)
• Yen Lee, Kango (president)
• James Lohan, Mr and Mrs Smith (managing director)
• Ian McCaig, Lastminute.com (chief executive)
• Chris Nixon, Travelsupermarket.com (acting managing director)
• Andrew Owen Jones, Amadeus (director, travel distribution solutions)
• Jeff Revoy, Yahoo (Europe vice president, search and social media)
• David Soskin, Cheapflights (chief executive)
• Robert Torres, Google (managing director, travel advertising and marketing– North America)
• Gareth Williams, Skyscanner (chief executive)
• Philip Wolf, PhoCusWright (president and chief executive)

More names will be added in the coming weeks.

Delegates places, more information, programme, and the rest, available from the conference website.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Number One or Number Two - the topsy turvy world of online rankings

Thomson is understandably chuffed to pieces after overtaking Expedia in the first few weeks of January in the Hitwise online agency rankings.

Being able to say "We are the #1 online travel agency in the UK", or similar, on promotional material goes a long way. Not that Thomson has used it in that way yet.

But the scene at the top of the pile changes often.

The top ten for the week ending 13 January went like this:

• Thomson Holidays
• Expedia
• Lastminute.com
• First Choice
• Thomas Cook
• TravelSupermarket
• Cheapflights
• TravelRepublic
• Teletext Holidays
• Ebookers

But here is a graph illustrating the relative positions of Thomson and Expedia throughout 2007.


One can read a few things into this:

Seasonality impacts on Expedia and Thomson in different and/or the gap between the two is incredibly close, meaning the positions change frequently.

The other thing to note with the remaining sites in the top ten is the presence of TravelRepublic (above Ebookers), the inclusion of non-travel agency sites (Cheapflights and TravelSupermarket), and the absence of Opodo (number 12 or 13 normally).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: hitwise thomson expedia

Who will be the next outsider to make a bold move in travel?

our latest column in Travel Weekly:

For much of its history, the fate of the industry was guided by those who lived and breathed ‘travel’ for most of their professional careers.

An ambitious rep or counter clerk in an agency could rise through the ranks of a company or sector to become a key figure in shaping how the business developed.

Relationships – for ours is, perhaps more than any other, a ‘people’ industry – were an important catalyst in securing deals.

This is still the case, of course, but the web has enabled people with no previous interest or experience in the travel industry to swoop in with a big idea and make a success of it.

This is good news for the existing travel industry. Competition from outsiders with a fresh prospective can only be a positive thing.

In the past few years a number of supposed outsiders have made their mark on the web in a big way.

Travelsupermarket.com, Skyscanner.net and WAYN.com, for example, are all led by people with little or no experience in running travel businesses – but are doing an excellent job.

And, lest we forget, Expedia was created pretty much as a side project by that well known tech firm Microsoft.

The point to all this is that disruptive influences from outside the normal confines of a sector should be watched carefully, rather than shunned as ‘not one of us’ or ignored.

Something we are often asked is what outsiders are likely to emerge as big players within the travel industry in the coming months or years.

This is difficult to determine, such is the pace at which this industry develops, but from personal experience, there is one organisation we at Travolution feel has the opportunity to make a huge impact.

After spending countless hours browsing the web last June trying to find a holiday, Family May settled on one from a rather unlikely source.

Watch out for eBay.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Rubbish link baiting - legalilities ahead?

Someone left some comments on New Year's Eve against two posts.

After looking at the source - which the commenter provided - and some links in the text, because the comments were poor and off-message, it turns out that a string of blogs have been created using existing travel company brand names.

There is, some might argue, nothing wrong with that. But the blogs are not content-driven and exist only to scrape some revenue out of Google AdWords.

The same person/organisation, it appears, has created the following blogs:

BestAtTravel.Blogspot.com [which has nothing to do with BestAtTravel]
DialAFlight.Blogspot.com [ditto Dial-A-Flight]
Travel-Republic.Blogspot.com [ditto TravelRepublic]
Travel-Supermarket.Blogspot [ditto TravelSupermarket]

It beggars belief that these make any money from AdWords, so what's the point?

Well it also looks like someone holds a bit of a grudge at least against one of the companies.

In a post (one of two) on the BestAtTravel blog, there is a link to a "blog" about BestAtTravel's co-founder, Rita Sharma, which many would conclude has been created by the same source.

The content is not very complimentary - and a decent lawyer would have a reasonably good chance of bringing about a libel case against the content owner.

All very messy and unhelpful.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Not in my back yard

[UPDATES at bottom of post]

UK travellers have given a clear signal to the environmental lobby and our recently green-enthused political parties: we don't really care an awful lot about eco issues and will not alter our travel plans.

Or so say the findings of a poll carried out by TravelSupermarket.com.

The survey of 6,000 UK consumers found that half believed international travel is damaging the environment (good news so far in terms of recognising the apparent problem) but 93% have NOT changed where they go on holiday because of environmental concerns.

Oh.

Other stats:

• Almost half of those questioned do not feel guilty about flying
• Londoners feel the most guilty (25%)
• Two in five said they would never consider a holiday in the UK
• Almost 40% would not be prepared to pay green tax

TravelSupermarket's Bob Atkinson says it is "alarming how little people are willing to adapt".

It shouldn't really be alarming at all for travel companies. What do they expect?

Anyway, what should people do?

• Take fewer "exotic" holidays (that'll coincide with consumers not wanting UK holidays, then)
• Try "mental offsetting" - use energy saving lightbulbs and recycling

It seems the mental offsetting currently means forgetting about it all as quickly as possible.

UPDATE: Click with Technology has carried out a serioues of Facebook polls in recent weeks. Here is a relevant one to this post.

What would stop you from going on holiday?

• Terrorist activity - 49%
• Exchange rates/£ worthless when travelling - 18%
• Environmental impact of flying - 11%
• Government taxation (eg ADP) - 11%
• Increased mortgage costs - 11%

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: environment travelsupermarket

Travolution Autumn Conf: Can easyJet learn to love third-party distributors?

EasyJet distribution development manager Jerry Dunn talked at length about the uneasy relationship between the airline, which likes to sell direct, and other distribution channels - meta search sites, OTAs and so forth.

Currently these players are using screen-scraping technology to get hold of easyJet's fares, a method which Jerry describes as 'not robust'. But, of course, it drives sales.

So what's an airline to do?

Well, you develop an API to give the brand more control over what fares are presented and how. And easyJet is doing just that. But only for the corporate travel market, which it has historically had trouble capturing.

The API should be available to selected third parties at the beginning of next year.

Tackled by Travelsupermarket's Chris Nixon on whether easyJet can work closer with alternative distributors in the leisure market, Jerry waxes positive: "I do think there is more we can do". It looks like the door is far from closed...

Nathan Midgley

Strange change at TravelSupermarket

Okay, so yesterday we teased Lastminute.com (and John Bevan) a little bit with their job advertisement for a new UK marketing director.

But some breaking news from TravelSupermarket is straight out of leftfield.

Chris Nixon has demoted himself.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: travelsupermarket moneysupermarket jobs

Germany next for TravelSupermarket?

Have funds, will expand.

This could be the motto for TravelSupermarket as parent company MoneySupermarket looks to spread its wings.

Icero.de was launched this morning for German consumers looking for car insurance price comparison.

This is the first expansion of the core MoneySupermarket brand into Europe and will no doubt trigger speculation that other European countries will be next for local language sites.

The obvious question is whether the travel meta search element will follow? More than likely by our reckoning.

Whether TravelSupermarket will get into Germany before Cheapflights does is another question.

TravelSupermarket would not comment this morning on any plans for global domination expansion overseas but admitted it is always looking at new opportunities. Quite...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: cheapflights travelsupermarket moneysupermarket germany

The future for Kelkoo - the black sheep of meta search

The Financial Times today reports Yahoo! is considering its options over price comparison site Kelkoo.

[Full report here - will need subscription in a few days]

This is a bit of a funny one as, in terms of travel, Kelkoo almost feels like the outsider these days.

Talk to anyone in the travel search/price comparison arena and Kelkoo barely warrants a mention.

There is always plenty of back-slapping between the likes of TravelSupermarket, Kayak, Sidestep, Skyscanner, even Cheapflights - but when was the last time anyone heard Kelkoo mentioned in the same breath.

Mind you, it has managed to achieve the Holy Grail of travel search: apparently securing a relationship with Expedia, although Travelsupermarket works with on some car hire products.

One suspects this story is going to develop...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: kelkoo yahoo meta search price comparison

Some of the meta search engines don't deserve our money, say Expedia

At a recent Travolution advisory board meeting, Clive Peoples, head of customer communications for Expedia UK, was brutally honest about how the company rather dislikes views some meta search engines.

There are a lot of companies out there that will spend a lot of money just on advertising just to generate traffic and get bought by another company – and they are not long-term models. I have no interest in helping them do that.

In the US there is work we’re doing with Kayak and other companies, but there’s just an awful lot of companies launching and we’re not looking to channel any of our profits into their back accounts to help build them up.

Ooh, ouch.

Now many people would assume that Peoples just happened to be talking about TravelSupermarket, which has splashed a rather considerable amount of cash on TV advertising - and has failed to persuade Expedia to work with it.

When pushed a little further, Peoples said:

We’ve got a very large brand, which is very good for us as we get a lot of traffic directly.

Not being present on TravelSupermarket does not cause us any problems at the moment, because what we are seeing is that people are going to TravelSupermarket and are coming to us anyway as well.

We think this is rather fascinating stuff from Expedia and goes to the heart of the meta search-online travel agency issue.

What stage should the likes of TravelSupermarket be at before Expedia will allow its products to be listed? Some would suggest that a recent floatation - via its MoneySupermarket parent brand - on the London Stock Exchange might illustate resemble some degree of longevity.

But perhaps not.

Tim Frankcom from Yahoo! and Kelkoo defends the meta search model against accusations that it can destroy brands.

It’s going to be good traffic because it’s been refined, been through a filtering mechanism, so if it can be acquired at the right price and as long as they can convert it into a booking, then it actually makes sense for OTAs and suppliers to take part in it.

The problem exists in other parts of the industry, where business types are still struggling to find ways to work together.

At a recent private dinner in London, the boss of an online travel agency struggled to comprehend why the boss of a very large traditional tour operator would still not allow a partnership.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: expedia travelsupermarket meta search travel agency