July 2008 Archives

Our story on Tuesday said

Here's a quick test you can take which the creators hope will be able to identify gender based on your browsing history.

The Mike on Ads blog has all the details of how it works.

And take the test.

Anyway, my results. In IE7:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 62%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 38%

In Firefox:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 21%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 79%

I use Firefox for browsing and IE7 for Google Reader and RBI intranet tools.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: New Scientist Technology Blog

A few months back we ran a post about how high-end hotel outfit Mr & Mrs Smith were looking for someone to redesign their blog.

Well, they have a shiny new effort courtesy of Jason Badrock.

Take a look at the new Mr & Mrs Smith Blog.

Interestingly, they've also optimised the blog so it can be read on an iPhone.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

In the TimesOnline travel section:

Meanwhile, in the TimesOnline news section:


Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Jet2.com is the latest travel firm to fall foul of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.

The latest round of adjudications handed down from the ASA includes a wrap across the knuckles for the low-cost airline for an email it sent which said discounted fares were available on certain flights.

Two potential passengers complained when they couldn't find the low fare on the Jet2 website.

Jet2, in its defence, said the fares were available and provided documentation to the ASA to prove it.

What went wrong here, then? Well, Jet2 didn't mention that the full fare would also include a "complusory fuel supplement charge".

It seems that all Jet2 needed to do in order to appease the ASA is add the word "from" in front the advertised price as only 33% of the fares on each flight were available at the discounted rate.

Read the Jet2 ASA full ruling.

Anyway, Ryanair have learned that you can push the ASA into fits of apoplexy and get a nasty ticking off. But sometimes, as someone mentioned a few months ago, that rebuke is worth it if you can get shift a heap of tickets quickly through a sale.

We are, of course, not suggesting that Jet2 did this.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

A press release from Telestial.com we featured on the main site today is rather interesting.

[Read about our new press release policy]

Anyway, it's a mobile based service which allows users to update a "journal" (blog!) on the move, which is not new, of course, but then the automatic interface it uses is rather nice.

The Telestial demo.

And some screen shots.




Kevin May, editor, Travolution

It's probably just worth referencing this simply because Nathan Midgley from Travel Weekly and I have waded in to a blog fight (!!) about why travel conferences are often held overseas.

Take a look, join the baying hordes...

As a journalist I find arguing via a blog deeply unsatisfying. The debate does not ebb and flow in the usual way and, dammit, you just can't see the whites of your opponent's eyes!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Amazing what can happen in just a few minutes.

STA Travel Buzz is following Travolution and they are also using Twitter in a very different way from lastminute.com's effort.

The page is maintained by "molly", a "travel-happy blogger gal who loves trains, planes and her EeePC" and obviously works for STA.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The lastminute.com-twitter debate is still rumbling on.

And it seems the floodgates are beginning to open.

This morning we have had two new followers to the Travolution Twitter account - Devon Hotels and Directline Holidays.

Devon Hotels is using the service very much like lastminute.com, plugging deals etc.

But Directline Holidays appears to using it in a different way, throwing random thoughts about travel into the ether.

The only problem they have, and need to rectify soon, is that the last update was March this year!

So based on the Twitter idea of responding to the question "What are you doing?", some might construe that the only answer from Directline over the past few months was "not a lot"!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: twitter

Silicon Valley loves a new product, especially when it reckons itself to be a Google challenger.

So there has already been plenty of hype about the new Cuil search engine, which has a fantastic pedigree amongst its founding exec team and - the launch clincher - an index of around 120 billion pages, around three times as many as Google, according to a FT report earlier today [link not available].

The engine has some good features and is displayed in an uncoventionial way (assuming Google is the status quo here for second).

For example, the keyword 'london' throws up the usual and relevant results and has a handy extra toolbar on the top-right hand corner which allows users to break down the results quickly into different categories types such as attractions, economy etc.

[Just forget for a moment that Ken Livingstone - pictured in the search results - is not in office anymore]



But we thought we'd also run a quick test, the ubiqutous search query 'flight new york london' to check what kind of results are coming in.

Alas, relevancy disappears entirely.


Type in "new york london flight", however, and you'll get 50 results.

We'll go back to playing around and report back.

Please feedback via the comments section any early impressions of Cuil.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: cuil search engine tom costello Anna Patterson

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

Travolution is currently followed by over 200 people on Twitter - the micro-blogging service and on-off darling of Silicon Valley.

[Follow Travolution]

Our latest fan is everyone's favoruite pink online travel agency, lastminute.com. The email arrived earlier today:


The OTA joined the service earlier this week, according to the updates list on the lastminute.com Twitter page.

This is the first UK OTA we have found to be actively using Twitter as a brand. There are plenty of individuals from travel companies using Twitter.

Anyway, inevitably, lastminute.com is using Twitter to flog, er, lastminute deals - five in one day this week.

It also has a decidedly garish screen!



So the question is this: do I want to follow lastminute.com - and have its updates getting in the way of other, perhaps more personally relevant people I'm following - if it is just going to serve deals to into Twitterland?

I can see why they are doing it - just not sure if I want it.

What do you all think?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: twitter lastminute

There appears to be increasing amounts of moaning and groaning about the state of the travel press - it's PR-driven, cut and paste jobs of press releases, no follow-ups or a second perspective, copying content from other media without reference to the source, etc.

Some media providers are more guilty than others, but to counteract one element - re-writing press releases - we are conducting an experiment over the next few weeks.

From now on Travolution will publish in full as many of the press releases it can on the main Travolution website.

These articles in the news section of the site will be clearly marked with "Press Release" at the beginning and not bylined by any Travolution staffer.

Announcements that we feel should be followed up - or are time-sensitive - will be analysed and written by our own team.

It could, of course, backfire horribly in some way, but we'll see.

Please let us know what you think.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Thomas Cook's first every digital magazine is up and running - and it's pretty good.

The Ceros Media-hosted magazine has embedded video and direct links to relevant pages on the main Thomas Cook website.

The question is whether anyone will use it.

Have a look here.


[Disclosure: Ceros produces the digital editions of Travolution and Travel Weekly]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Well, kind of.

Enormous interest in our story yesterday about Thomson-First Choice not being particularly enthusiastic about the Superbrands programme.

Within an hour or so of our story going out, Stephen Cheliotis, chief executive of the Centre of Brand Analysis, which runs the judging process for the Superbrands 500 list, was on the phone.

Cheliotis was keen to point out - as a PR rep had done repeatedly earlier in the day - that there is absolutely no connection between those who pay to be "members" of the Superbrands programme and those who appear on the list.

Fair enough. We had that in our original story anyway.

So then we got onto talking about the judging process for this year's Superbrands 500.

As we noted previously in our , a list of around 1,350 brands is selected by the TCBA from numerous sources. The list is then put in front of an Expert Council of luminaries from media, marketing, ad agencies etc, which decides on a list of the best 750 brands.

The 750 are then put to a public vote of around 2,500 people, which decides the top 500.

So it turns out that Thomson was a lowly 964th in the 2008 expert list and didn't even make the public vote. The experts clearly think of Thomas Cook in a much better light.

First Choice was in 1,039th position.

This means that the all-conquering Thomas Cook was 892 places higher - in the final list - than Thomson. Crikey.

The whole thing gets even more bizarre when Cheliotis revealed that Thomson managed to get in the 2007 top 500 list in 161st.

Some might call this a rather tragic fall from grace (hilarious, Thomas Cook would probably say).

Others will be looking to the Expert Council for an explanation as to why a company which featured in a reasonably high position one year can not even be considered worthy of the top 750 the next.

Cheliotis told us the make-up of the council changes every year, which will account for differences of opinion, of course.

There is "invariably some volatility" in the list, Cheliotis adds. Indeed...

Anyway, we suspect Thomson-First Choice won't be too distraught at missing out this year, as their comments indicated yesterday, but will be keen to see where they feature in the pre-public vote next year.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: superbrand superbrands thomson first choice

When your mother told you to always put on clean underwear before leaving the house you probably thought it was in case of an accident.

Well, it seems mothers out there are far more advanced, technologically speaking, than we ever thought.

What our mums were really thinking was new technology about to be introduced at airports across the US that can see through your clothes.

Read the full story from the Chicago Tribune but it seems it's lumps, bumps, warts and all!

Some may call it an infringement of civil liberties blah blah, others are happy for it to go ahead in the interests of security.

Passengers can of course object and opt for the traditional frisk or worst case scenario - strip search!

Choose your poison but Chicago's O'Hare airport will be among the first to get the full-body imaging machines.

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Hotel Girl points to a bizarre story of how a group of people managed to get into the kitchen of a hotel in the UK's Lake District in order to unearth the secret recipe of its famous sticky toffee pudding.

They managed to secretly film the start of a demonstration of how to make the pudding, only to be discovered by management. Ooops.

Anyway, they posted it on Youtube, much to the disgust of the management.



Kevin May, editor, Travolution

So plenty of coverage everywhere about the release of the latest Superbrands survey of top brands in the UK.

Google tops the list for the first time, ahead of Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and the BBC.

In the travel-hospitality world, British Airways comes out on top (5th), with Hilton (20th), Eurostar (47th) and Virgin Atlantic (70th) all featuring in the top 100.

Thomas Cook has made a great PR play today with its top billing amongst tour operators and agencies in 72nd position, beating Kuoni (340th), Sandals (355th), Expedia (401st) and Lastminute.com (476th).

And this is where all this branding stuff gets murky and silly.

It was only last year that Expedia was named the coolest travel brand in the, er, Superbrands' Coolbrands list.

So, one question:

Is it better to be a 'cool' brand or a 'super' brand?

Anyway, back to the Superbrands list. Well done to Thomas Cook (which, according to marketing boss Simon Carter is "head and shoulders" above its competitors). But is it REALLY 46 places behind the Royal Albert Hall, for example?

Take this one step further and you could also ask the following question:

If the Royal Albert Hall is 46 places ahead of Thomas Cook, how on earth can Thomas Cook be at least 428 places higher than Thomson, its biggest and bitter rival and, let's face it, a fairly big travel brand in its own right.

[Thomson actually doesn't figure anywhere in the list of 500 brands]

And THAT is the problem with branding lists - not that Thomson doesn't feature, but that the results are so random when all evidence to the contrary (sales, adspend, offline and online presence, word-of-mouth and history) indicates that a company such as Thomson should at least have a higher ranking than Maltesers, Stannah Stairlifts and Nicorette!

There are plenty of people who have strong views about Superbrands et al - the comments button is dying to hear from you...

* The Superbrands selection criteria can be found on its website.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: superbrand

Apart from the fact that it is slowly falling into the Adriatic Sea, Venice has a dwindling population problem to contend with as well.

In 1500 it had around 200,000 living on its stilts, but it has been slowly shedding residents ever since - down to 100,000 in 1970, 78,000 in 1990 and just over 60,000 in March this year.

A pressure group. Venissia.com, was formed recently to campaign for protecting the Venetian way of life and attract more people to move to the city, is using the a rather downbeat but unique way of demonstrating the problem.



The shop window, close to the Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal, has a direct feed to the official population figure, allowing residents and tourists alike to witness in real time the decline in the number of residents in the famous city.

Incidentally, the blame for the decline is being put squarely on tourism industry. There is a huge surplus of hotels and not enough residential accommodation. In fact, a recent law was proposed to allow hoteliers development access to any other building within their area.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: Guardian Travel

Technorati tags: venice italy venissimo

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

Travolution has suffered from the dreaded anonymous commenters on a number of occasions.

But there has been an interesting exchange in recent days on OpenParenthesis which followed a post about importing travel itinerary content onto Dopplr.

It was a reasonably dry article until 'Thomas' posted "I don't find Dopplr very useful" into the comments section.

'Thomas', it turns out, is an employee of TripIt.com - which pioneered the email upload system for travel planning networks.

Anyway, John Eckman, who writes OpenParenthesis, decided to out 'thomas' and within three and half hours got a gushing apology from Scott Hintz, one of Tripit's co-founders.

Our policy here, for what it's worth, is that we have kept comment moderation off for about 12 months or so now. We normally find out, in the same way as most do (via DNS and IP addresses), who anonymous commenters are and will publish the name of their organisation if needs be.

More on Musings.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

We think Kuoni's latest tips to recall your holiday might be a recipe for disaster.

The operator has got together with memory expert and cognitive psychotherapist, Professor Martin Conway from the University of Leeds, to devise ways to keep the memories alive, which don't include buying tacky sounvenirs.

It's all about using your senses and top of the tip list is holding a dinner party and serving some of the food you ate on holiday while taking your guests through the trip with holiday snaps.

Could this be a step too far? That old 'you had to be there', saying rings true and friends don't really want to hear about your holiday in that much detail.

Other tips are a little more realistic such as finding a local restaurant which serves similar food and taking lots of photos.

The final tip could again be a bit of a friendship-breaker - as the operator suggests telling everyone about your holiday.

ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Guest blog post from Michael Lacy, boss of Handy Group:

The chap next to me in the queue outside the O2 store at 7.30 on Friday morning had sold his ‘old’ iPhone on ebay for £180 the evening before.

Ahead of us the sales director of the local Ford Dealership had taken the morning off so he could be one of the first with the new phone, and so it went on.

I probably didn’t need to be there but I wanted to know who these people were, prepared to stand in line from midnight for ‘just’ another phone.

There were fifteen people ahead of me and I turned up at 7.00am. At 8.02am, when the store opened, there were another thirty-five behind me.

At 8.05am O2’s computer systems crashed (again) so it took more than an hour to process just one customer.

And it was the same story at the other 399 O2 stores around the country.

About a third of the queue I was in gave up when it was announced they only had four 16GB versions in stock and others went when they realised they probably wouldn’t see their families over the weekend at they rate they were processing customers.

Yet very few in these lines were ‘geeks’, early adopters for sure, but an eclectic mix of ages, men, women and children (Mum’s were there, armed with ID), previous ‘iPhoner’s’ and those new to iPhone.

This readily available user group opportunity was too good to miss so an impromptu survey was taken – albeit from a ‘sold’ audience; internet access on the move was most important to 40%, internet access and voice was most important to 36%. Internet access was least important to 0%; 40% said they would likely buy travel products from their phone.

After demonstrating - on our own system - how easy it is to buy a week at a hotel in Paphos from Hotels4U or to book a car from Hertz, or a flight on Easyjet – this increased to over 90%.

To someone working in the mobile ‘space’ these figures probably aren’t surprising. But what surprised me was the amazement and acceptance of internet applications built just for mobile.

Most were willing to live with the limitations of viewing a fixed line site in miniature but when shown applications, freely available, with no download from iTunes, no pre-registration – and in full screen, adoption levels more than doubled.

Would any online travel company imagine that producing a website the size of a billboard would be effective? Yet in a recent travel industry telemarketing survey by Handy Group 50% had no mobile strategy.

Michael Lacy, chief executive, Handy Group

LonelyPlanet.com has announced a new accommodation booking service in partnership with Expedia Distribution and hostelworld.com.

Travolution reported last week that BBC Worldwide paid c£90m cash for a 75% stake in LonelyPlanet late last year, with a view to exploiting the profit potential of the web site. The commercial terms of the deal with Expedia Distribution and hostelworld.com are not disclosed (‘twas ever thus) but it’s a start to monetizing a site which has 4.6m unique users.

Lonely Planet prides itself on the independence and quality of its advice by using a team of 360 professional writers to review hotels and hostels. But if the site is to become a profit centre in its own right there are many dangers to this independence. When deciding which hotels to review, will LP be more inclined to look at properties which it can sell? If ‘Martin’s B&B’ isn’t available through the partners, but ‘Kev’s B&B’ next door is, which one is the most likely to get a write-up on the site?

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

I’m sure I read somewhere that ‘If news editors are looking for something new with which to strike fear into the heart of middle England, online privacy could be answer.’

This Saturday, the print edition of the Daily Mail belatedly picked up on the ‘Google Streetview car in the UK’ story and plonked it on the front page.

The mid-market tabloid also put the story onto its web site, complete with explanatory graphics. The story has prompted 84 comments.

On the same day another story was posted, headlined House prices falling at fastest rate for 50 years. This one has only 38 comments...

Martin Cowen chief writer Travolution

The Purple Pod returns after a small break for the summer. The episode features Alex Bainbridge (Travel UCD), Peter Deane (Handy Group) and David Flower (Gomez).

To the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington yesterday, where the great and the good of the female variety met for the Association of Women Travel Executives summer lunch.

Your correspondent was invited into the inner sanctum to host an interview on-stage with Carol Marlow, president and managing director of luxury cruise company, Cunard, and member of the Carnival Cruise board in the UK.

Distinctly un-Travolution territory, in more ways than one, but a rather enjoyable event.

One of the guests over lunch explained to me why women conduct business in different ways then men - more considerate, creative, social.

Roll on an hour or so and my final question to Marlow: "What kind of company would Cunard be if it had a man as its president and managing director?"

After bluffing a bit, Marlow made the sisterhood scratch their heads slightly, when she said:

"It would probably be better run."

Her ongue was probably planted very firmly in her cheek, but it was a funny moment.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

This is your last chance to complete a survey we've been involved in with Wiley Travel.

The Whatsonwhen Web Content Trends Survey will take you just five minutes to finish and you could win a £150 Amazon voucher.

Just ten parts to the survey, do it over morning coffee!

Here it is.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

One could surmise from these two examples of creative headline writing (which stand out a mile in RSS feeds) that the Telegraph has a bigger axe to grind than the Guardian over the T5 situation.

From the Guardian's travel section today...


And the Telegraph...


The actual figure is 932.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The next Travolution Question Time brings together a stellar line-up of executives from across the travel industry for an intimate and engaging evening of debate.

September 23rd in London. Full details here.

Expedia’s new vice president for EMEA, Alex Zivoder, will make his UK travel event debut alongside other well known figures in the online sector, Paul Evans (Lowcostbeds) and Chris Loughlin (Travelzoo). Joining them will be Mark Tanzer, chief executive of Abta, and Justin Cooke, the man behind award winning digital agency, Fortune Cookie.

This, the fourth in the series of Travolution Question Time events, promises to be yet another excellent opportunity to interrogate and network with some of the leading lights in the industry.

Get a ticket (£65+VAT).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Last week we highlighted how Matt Harding, creator of the Where The Hell is Matt videos, had produced the 2008 version of his fantastic jaunt around the globe.

Anyway, Adage.com has an interesting article about how Stride chewing gum got in the act with its sponsorship deal - and scuppered the best viral marketing deal of the decade for travel brands the world over.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

There are some issues that just seem fire people up.

Take yesterday’s story leading our enews bulletin, revealing some detail of the Expedia-Tripadvisor partnership.

We found some data via Compete.com which showed how much Expedia benefits from upstream clicks from hotel search pages on its sister user review site in the US.

It captures 48% of these valuable leads. Accommodation aggregator Hotels.com, which is also part of the Expedia Inc empire, grabbed a further 11% of clicks.

This means that almost three out of five of all outbound ad clicks from Tripadvisor on the US site go to one of its sister companies.

We eventually managed to get a comment from Tripadvisor, but only confirming Expedia is “one of its biggest” advertisers.

This may well be PR sleight of hand as one could surmise that Expedia, according to the Compete figures, is clearly the biggest advertiser on Tripadvisor if most of the outbound clicks go to its site.

So to summarise some of the correspondence we received yesterday after publishing the story:

What must the others, who should surely be known as “some of the other biggest advertisers” on Tripadvisor, think about Expedia’s dominance of the outbound clicks?

If Expedia is only “one of the biggest”, are its ad copy-writing skills that much better than its big spending rivals to the extent that it can lure users away from clicking on other ads? [Tongue firmly planted in cheek, one suspects, with this one]

There were also plenty of comments about whether Expedia’s outbound click share correlates to the share of ad revenue on Tripadvisor from Expedia – an topic area Tripadvisor would not discuss yesterday.

All food for thought, though…

NB: More on the Compete blog.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: expedia tripadvisor user review

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

Make of this what you will:



Kevin May, editor, Travolution

A nice bit of housekeeping to share:

Professor Dimitrios Bulhalis of Bournemouth University is joining Travolution as our first research editor.

This honorary position will see him over the coming months coordinate the publication of academic content and research papers for our readers.

Managed to grab a few words with Dimitrios for the announcement:

It is a great honour to work with Kevin and the Travolution team to bring eTourism research to a wider audience.

Bringing eTourism research and practice closely together will enable industry to implement emerging tools and methodologies whilst researchers will benefit from getting involved in real industry problems and professional practice.

I look forward to interact dynamically with the wider community and to exchange knowledge on a global basis.

This is indeed good news for Travolution and our audience. And we're extremely pleased to have Dimitrios on-board.

His blog is here. Dimitrios is part of the School of Services Management at Bournemouth Uni.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Kayak.co.uk is the latest online travel business to try to generate some consumer-facing PR by telling everyone that the Brits will continue to travel despite the tough economic conditions etc, etc...

But there’s a paragraph in the release which might be of interest to Travolution’s readers. When asked about booking,

‘nearly every respondent (96%) said they preferred to research holidays online
instead of visiting a high street travel agent (2%) in order to research new and
exciting destinations and to find the best deals.’

So people who respond to online surveys on a travel web site use travel web sites to buy travel. No surprise there then, other than the fact that one in fifty kayak users still thinks they can get a better deal and advice on the high street!

But there’s more:

Almost half of respondents (46%) typically visit between two and five travel
websites and nearly a third (31%) will visit up to ten. A dogged 20% of
respondents, intent on thoroughly researching holiday destinations and finding
new ways to trim costs, will visit 11 or more travel websites.

This provides a nice contrast with some research put out by Google at the start of the year which said that consumers visit on average 22 travel websites before booking.

It looks as if customers are evolving – those who have cottoned onto kayak are more targeted in their searching than people starting out from Google.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Following the recent furore over changes to Google's brand name bidding policy, executives would probably have been hoping for an easier ride for roll-out of the search engine giant's latest initiative from the US.

Google is reported to have been filming in the streets of London for its Street View additions to Google Maps.

But now it appears privacy campaigners are not happy at all - oh no, they are not.

Google has already started snapping away in France, but UK rights group Privacy International has kicked up a fuss about the Google car's presence on the streets of the capital.

[Pic from Tour de France cycle race route in France]


The BBC reports:

Privacy International has also asked Google about 'the steps, if any, that you have taken to consult the public over the use of their images for what is, in effect, a commercial purpose'.

Mr [Simon] Davies [of PI] added: 'Google likes to think of itself as a global player. In reality it is acting like an irresponsible adolescent.

'It's time for the company to take responsibility for its actions and to do the right thing.'

Now one suspects that unless a court injunction follows (unlikely), the efforts of PI will probably be in vain in this area.

Nevertheless, Google must be wondering what this annoying little island of ours has against it at the moment.

UPDATE: Techcrunch UK has a good picture of the camera-car in action.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: google maps street view tour de france

While trying to check out if lastminute.com is matching its rivals Expedia and ebookers with our quest to find cheap as chips fares to Los Angeles in November, we came across this:

[Click on the picture to enlarge]


The message reads:

The good news is that our fantastic offers are proving so damn seductive, that it seems that everybody is trying to get a piece of the lastminute.com action. The bad news is that we've had to give our site a chance get its breath back (in a manner of speaking).

So that's alright, then.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: lastminute

[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

It's going be a bit light on the blogging front today, so here's an open discussion for the new Cruisepricescompared.com site, which launches today.

The site has been created, according to Travel Weekly, so that travel agents can list their cruise deals direct to consumers. It's free for agents to list the deals and is a simple referral system (a bit like Cheapflights at a basic level).

So what do people think of the concept, and of the site itself?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

A few months back, E-Consultancy posted a pretty downbeat review of the Thomas Cook website.

The timing of the review couldn't have been worse as Thomas Cook was in the middle of making some major changes to the site.

Anyway, E-Consultancy has taken another look at the new site and re-posted.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

...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!)

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

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

With however many millions of blogs out there, it’s no surprise that there are quite a few devoted to frequent flier points. It might be more of a surprise that 20 bloggers from FlyerTalk.com were invited onto OpenSkies inaugural flight recently so that they could blog about their experience.

I wonder if there were any print journalists on board?

Talking to Chris Vukelich about the airline’s distribution and web strategy for today’s Travolution news story, it was evident that the blog on its web site will play a big role in the development of the OpenSkies brand and business. Having helped out already, the blog will not be forgotten when its digital campaign gets more tactical.

I mentioned print journalists early because it reminded me of something which came up at the PhoCusWright Bloggers Convention at ITB earlier this year. The consensus was that it was okay to invite bloggers on ‘press trips’ if the organiser of the trip felt the coverage on the blog was worth it.

So was it worth OpenSkies’ while giving away 20 return flights (and a weekend in Paris)? We’re back to where we started – how do you quantify non-transactional engagement with an online community when there are however many millions of blogs out there?

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Perhaps it was a slow news day at The Observer for the latest edition, but at least it managed to find the time to collate some of the best quotes from Ryanair's Michael O'Leary.

Full list.

Highlights include:

[On travel agents...] Take the f**kers out and shoot them.

[On increased airport security...] You don't see the government confiscating lipsticks and gel-filled bras on the London Underground. Most of them couldn't identify a gel-filled bra if it jumped up and bit them.

And, not forgetting, his recent comments regarding, er, ancillary services in business class.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: Airline Business Blog

Technorati tags: ryanair

So after two months of private beta testing (we had access here), Tripwolf has finally come out of the shadows to the wide - and scary - world of the discerning traveller.

The buzz surrounding the project will now need to be translated into usage and, most importantly, engagement.

There's no point in having a travel social guide if no-one gets involved in it.

So the public version has a few nifty tools:

• A printable PDF guide which can be created by dragging and dropping content into a widget.
• Content brought in automatically from Flickr, Wikipedia and Youtube.
• Facebook integration.

In addition, the start-up, which has attracted investment dollars (around $1.2 million) from i5invest, has pulled off a coup of sorts by persuading MairDumont to throw all its content into the site - for free.

MairDumont is "Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides" and produces titles under the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands.

So while the site is pretty impressive on the whole, TechCrunch raises an interesting point when it says:

And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

The name would've been a good place to start:

Tripmate, Tripwiser, Tripbase, Tripup, Tripology, Trippert, blah, blah, blah. After Tripadvisor, few stick in the memory. This is not a good thing...

Anyway, let's see how they get on.

They have a fancy video to demonstrate how some of the bits work:



[NB: I was interviewed for the Tripwolf blog a few weeks back]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: facebook tripwolf

PING! Truly shocking news from the inbox: some businesses are expecting their employees to work as normal when they are travelling on business.

So says iBAHN, ‘the worldwide leading provider of secure wired and wireless broadband services for hoteliers and meeting organizers.’

Men over the age of fifty feel under the most pressure to put in a full day’s work when on the road, while 18-29-year-olds have the most relaxed approach. This could be a Generation Y dynamic, although my money is on the fact that men over 50 are likely to have a more senior position than the young’uns so feel more work pressure generally.

But then we don’t know anything about where iBAHN’s “findings” come from. Call me a pedant, but I like my consumer-facing research served with a healthy portion of sample size and methodology.

I’ve never worked in PR but I can see where this release is headed – iBAHN bigging up its own product which allows you to work "in the relaxed and stress free surroundings of a hotel room, lobby or bar".

If I did work in PR at least I’d be getting a good night’s sleep. Travelodge has some research of its own today – sample size 4000 – which says that people in PR and marketing are getting 7 hours and 7 minutes sleep per night, second-only to those perennial slackers in the ‘media and creative’ industries who have an extra five minutes in bed.

Excellent news – time for my mid-morning nap.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

So last week we discovered that easyJet is – at last – appearing to be willing to work with OTAs on an official and direct connection into its fares and availability engine.

This follows its tie-in with a number of technology companies and GDSs to enable third party bookings.

This is, of course, the antithesis to Ryanair’s (current) policy.

EasyJet’s move delights many (especially the no-frills carrier itself, and the tech firms getting the glory of having the coveted easyJet API), but is still raising concerns throughout the industry.

The consternation raised by some – privately most of the time – is that easyJet takes a surcharge on the booking fee for using the API.

Some tech companies are actively avoiding the temptation to sign up to the API simply because their customers are so against paying the surcharge.

Which is fair enough.

A decent source on the tech side adds this to equation:

“There is a general feeling going around that easyJet will start pushing their dynamic packaging product a lot more going forward and this means that they want to stop other companies from competing with them.”

“Or if they do, easyJet wants to make sure that they get a share of the additional revenue generated by dynamic packaging their flights (the "POS fee").”

Throw all this into the widely held belief that the new easyJet site will be focused on more than simply providing flights (ie. full service, OTA-style approach) and the strategy becomes clearer: access at a price, but come to our site for a better experience.

There is no doubt that this is just the latest example of how airlines (given the right partnerships and vastly improved user experience) are at least acting like they are desperate to become more than just suppliers of a single and simple product, like an airfare.

The final point to consider is that – sharp intake of breath – will consumers care, or notice?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: ryanair easyjet