October 2008 Archives

Bloggers rejoice!

According to figures from ComScore, approximately 14 million UK web users visited a blog of some description in August this year.

These are fantastically high figures and represent half the overall internet audience in the UK.

But for those tapping away in the consumer travel space it appears there is a lot of work to do before the mainstream public - rather than tech-heads - flock to the hundreds of decent travel blogs out there in the ether.

The most popular blogs in the UK are:

Endgadget.com (243,000 unique users)
Unrealitytv.co.uk (225,000)
Gizmodo.com (223,000)

Interestingly the most popular web categories amongst the blog-reading audience include the following:

Technology (1.9 million UUs)
Women - community (1.9 million)
Entertainment - news (1.8 million)

So far travel doesn't feature anywhere in these various leaderboards, which in some respects is a surprise given that travel, porn and gambling are still three of the most popular activities for which people use the web.

We are all obviously delighted for Expedia UK following its recent move to swanky offices in London's Covent Garden.



But clearly the outfitters of the new pad thought our enthusiasm would stretch to letting readers learn more about the logisitics of putting together the electronic infrastructure.

For those still paying attention, Expedia's new offices are running on the Brand-Rex Cat6Plus system for a "flexible structured cabling system to support high-speed network connectivity".

What readers might find slightly more interesting is the revelation that the new building includes 44 miles of this stuff.

Okay! Now we're impressed!

This 44 miles is almost the equivalent of journeys between London and Cambridge or Leeds and Manchester - or walking 73 times between Expedia's old home in Soho Square and the new pad in Covent Garden.

For cable fans everywhere, here's a pic kindly supplied by Brand-Rex in its press release (no label included, but it looks like a network cable junction box - perhaps!).

Everyone will remember the mild furore over the summer when Google was suddenly found to be patrolling driving around various roads in the UK taking pictures for its Google Street View product.

One of Google's vehicles was spotted in Sutton this week, home to Travolution Towers, though what they would want to photograph in a sleepy suburb of Surrey is a mystery to many :-).

Anyway, not put off by the less than favourable publicity, Seety.co.uk launched this week with its own version using Google Maps.

Seety has been busily recording footage from as many streets in London as possible.

Users can plot their whereabouts on the map and then bring up a walkabout tour in another window.

Fun, but a bit slow.

The picture below shows where I am sitting right now (in a well-known coffee emporium on Oxford Street) as I write this post, less the glorious sunshine, alas...

Let's face it, travel social networks are a dime a dozen increasingly popular, so sorting the wheat from the chaff is critical.

Anyway, we've come across Local IQ recently and it's rather good, mashing up Want To Go content with useful advice. There is also a very unobtrusive Q&A, knowledge building system... which we like a lot.






The kind founders have given Travolution 150 exclusive beta passes for readers to try the system out.

To take a look all you have to do is go to the Local IQ homepage, click register, enter your details and the following promotion code:

LOCALMAY

DirectHolidayBookings has started a petition on the Downing Street website to ask prime minister Gordon Brown to put a stop mobile phone calls

Now, some might suggest that our erstwhile leader currently has bigger fish to fry, but it's an issue that refuses to go away and travel companies know they can make a bit of PR hay out of being associated with coming out against something which divides travellers.

The citation reads:

"This petition appeals against airlines allowing mobile phone calls and texts during flights. Currently, a number of airlines including Ryanair are trialling this service in partnership with various communications companies.

"It is important that this doesn't become common practise within the commercial aviation industry as this will mean that passengers are subjected to excessive noise levels caused by people shouting into handsets or irritating and loud ring tones."

[The industry, it seems, never misses an opportunity to have a pop at Ryanair as well]

DirectHolidayBookings boss Andrew Gibson said this of the petition:

"It seems that this is just yet another way for airlines to make more profit using any methods available.

"We all know how annoying it is when somebody is talking loudly on their phone in a restaurant or on other forms of public transport - I think it's important to stop this happening on planes too."

[Wonder if Gibson has ever used his mobile on public transport?]

Now we can all raise a disinterested smile and assume that this is simply a PR exercise. But these petitions do sometimes carry some weight.

Veteran Gurkha soldiers recently won a case to stay in the UK after completing their military service and parents of young children out there will know, of course, that CBeebies presenter Justin Fletcher was awarded an MBE after a petition on the site.

The mobile petition is live and will run until April 2009. It currently has 25 signatories.

Whoever said blogging is all about personal vanity is probably right if they just read this post as an introduction to Web 2.0.

Users of Twitter - yes, Travolution is - can now see how popular they are via an index and ranking system known as Twitter Grader.

It measures how often a user 'tweets', number of followers, who is on your follower list, etc, etc.

Anyway, Travolution has a grade of 95.4 out of 100.

Our sister title Travel Weekly (twblog) is scoring 95.9 [HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!? :-)...] and TravelRants, for example, is up there with 97.1, the highest ranking Twit in Leeds, apparently (sorry, Darren!).

Interestingly the service does have a few handy features, such as indicating which other Twitterers it might be worth following.

Jemima Kiss (Guardian) and Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK), for example, came up in our list.

You've got to laugh at some of the paradoxes in the travel and media industries sometimes.

Frommers has published a new guidebook - 500 Places to See Before They Die - so tourists can "learn about and plan a visit to see rare cultural, historic, and natural places before they are irrevocably altered or even gone forever".

That bastion of environmental and socialogical concern, The Observer newspaper, ran a piece about the book yesterday, highlighting some the areas under threat.

The page carrying the online version had a very worthy ad from Vestas, the "No.1 In Modern Energy". But also a lovely banner ad from, er, McDonalds.

You couldn't make it up...

........and not a pretty one, according to the BBC's Market Data page at midday.

NB: The empty column on the lower left-hand side.

The Association of European Airlines has released its August/September traffic update this week, and it's very grim reading indeed.



When the person running the organisation says; "these figures are the weakest our industry has seen for 25 years," you can be sure it's tough out there.

Secretary General Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus explains that "external shocks" - 9/11, SARS, Gulf Wars - caused passenger traffic to decline, but the current malaise is the first time since the early 1980s that the drop can be explained by "essentially economic factors".

There are 28 member airlines of the AEA. Most of Europe's big carriers -BA, Air France, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic - are members. Ryanair and easyJet are not. The level of detail provided by members is surprisingly detailed - in some cases, it's almost market sensitive.

The release runs to eight pages, with an eye-watering array of monthly and year-to-date statistics, broken down by individual carrier as well as sector length. I'll leave analysis of RPKs and ASKs to those who might know what they are and have a look at the easiest to understand marker - load factors.

In the nine months to end-September, the average load factor for AEA members was 76% - which means that so far this year, one in four seats has not been sold. Not sold direct, not sold by an OTA as seat-only or part of package, not sold by an agent.

During the period British Airways reported a load factor of 73.5%. BA is as technology-literate an airline as they come, but despite its array of distribution channels, to say nothing of its marketing clout, its flights are still taking off one-quarter empty.

The situation is even worse at bmi - its load factor this year is 66.3% - so that's a staggering one in three seats unsold so far this year.

It would be okay if the unsold seats were at the back of the bus, but recent soundings from the corporate travel sector - so often the cash cow for scheduled airlines - suggest this is unlikely. And in the current climate it's unlikely that yields from the seats sold will show any increases.

The implications are various and manifold. Airlines can't generate ancillary revenues from an unsold seat; OTAs can't dynamically package; bed banks need the airlift to sell their beds.

And with the quietest few months of the year still to come, the picture isn't likely to improve any time soon.

Many airline CEOs have said there is likely to be a bloodbath in the sector this winter.

On the basis of the AEA's stats, they could be right.

Times may be hard but Facebook has money to spend for the right application.

Last week the social networking service announced the 25 winners of its FBFund, which had some 600 applicants.

Among the winners were two with direct travel connotations - Black Drumm (applications that help people organise events such as a trip to the Himalayas) and TrailBehind (which is all about finding great places to hike).

Here's a list of the other winners on Mashable and they all get $25,000 to spend on developing their idea.

In addition, five of them will get $225,000 from Facebook, venture capital firm Accel Partners and Founders Fund.

And, they don't even have to hand over equity in the idea!

Get developing...

Start-ups are by their very nature pretty innovative beasts.

In fact, more often than not, they have to be innovative in order to gain a foothold in an existing industry or push forward a completely new concept.

But what happens when an organisation starts growing, increases its workload, staff, product range and, inevitably, gets bogged down in the detail of corporate life?

Playing with numbers is simply not as interesting.

In other words: as companies grow and perhaps lose their mojo, what can they do to get it back?

The reason for all this is that a recent Financial Times article about online travel mentioned lastminute.com's new Lab project.

The new Lab, the report says, "will help rediscover the travel site's inner start-up".

There is, of course, a certain 'spirit' about any company, especially in its early days.

So while companies claim they are doing the equivalent of heading to India to "find themselves", important questions remain.

Will gathering brainy innovators together in a darkened room to come up with wacky ideas, while the rest of the company goes about running the business, really bring back the mojo?

Not sure...

Needless to say, you've got to hand it to lastminute.com for sticking to (or rediscovering) its principles.

So lastminute.com is making a fair bit of noise about its latest piece of functionality - a box that allows users to type in structured sentences when looking for products rather than old school keyword-based seaches.

Pronto - not sure about the name - is the latest attempt in online travel agencyland to bring about a far more human approach to searching. Expedia's Inspiroscope (...and what about that name?!) was another fantastic piece of functionality when it launched almost two years ago.

So what we do think?

Online psychology is getting to be a bit of a theme for us, so here's the latest gem.

It's another piece of US research claiming the internet brings family members together.

There we were mistakenly thinking it was glossy brochures.

The survey, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals nearly half of respondents feel the internet and mobile phone technology increase the quality of communication within their homes.

More than half, 53 per cent, also said the web improves the quality of communication among family members living apart.

The study also reveals search is gaining ground on email as the most popular online activity and points out that it could have something to do with a minor political event about to take place across the pond.

Households with married couples and children are amongst the most enthusiastic adopters of the net and mobile communication devices. Come on, own up, how many hours have you spent recently with your kids on clubpenguin.com, miniclips, the lego site or the latest equivalent.

Unsurprisingly, a quarter of the 2,252 respondents said they now watch less TV.

We first came across themall.TV earlier this year. At the time we were extremely sceptical about it, given that it is nothing more than a online, graphic-led walk-through of a shopping centre (or mall, to our US readers), where users can then "interact" with different retailers.

It is, essentially, an affiliate site with a twist. Well, a physical one, as users walk to the front door of each shop and then click through to the host site.


Since then the idea was launched fully a few weeks ago (the site got a line in the Guardian) and travel companies appear to be having a punt.

The travel "floor" (you get to it via a lift) has a string of major travel brands including TUI, Trailfinders, Travelsphere and quite a few major airlines.

Chief executive Ishmael Bahdur called last week on a bit of a PR offensive.

He claims the site has had 36,000 visitors in the space of two weeks, with 9,000 of those in the travel section. That's an impressive sum in some respects - although he wouldn't say how people had actually clicked through to the one of the partner sites (i.e. how well this relative enthusiasm is helping out his revenue model).

One question mark is why would a consumer visit TheMall.TV when product search is available on a string of other sites? Is the user experience that good so that users would happily browse a virtual supermarket with no product information or availability?

So the final question is this: an interesting idea that travel companies should at least try out, or a far too quirky brainchild of some clever developers that needs a bit more work?

For fear of upsetting our existing community from the old blog and following comments here on the blog and via email, the blogroll was created this evening.

We were always going to do it - you lot are just so impatient.

We have split it into two parts, initially - blogs which are primarily focussed on industry readers and those targeting consumers.

Obvious omissions, let me know.

In the next few days we will add other blogs Travolution regular looks at.

Many of you will have looked around and will be getting used to the new Travolution website.

We welcome ALL feedback, and we've had plenty already. So thanks!

One of the things that many readers and users say is the idea that Travolution has created a community around the various things it does - whether it is our events, the old blog, or the magazine.

Anyway, with our new site we want to start start harnessing that community in different ways. We have lots of ideas, but in the spirit of, er, user generated collaboration we thought it would be a good idea to see what else our users want from us or think we can add.

Treat this post as an open thread and add your ideas into the comments section below.

Away you go...

In March we had reports from American psychiatrists telling us Internet addiction could soon be diagnosed as a mental illness.

It's all here.

Then, a couple of days ago, there was this on ZDNet.

It seems bright people at the University of California have worked out that middle-aged and older adults could benefit from surfing the net.

Who needs Dr Kawashima's Brain Training? Maybe, soon there will be a Wii game based on surfing the net, getting frustrated and not finding what you want. You could be scored on how high your blood pressure goes!

And recent research from Yahoo says that we're afraid to switch off our communications for fear of missing something. [See our earlier blog on it].

So, basically doomed if you do, and doomed if you don't!

Yes, indeed, the new place for the Travolution Blog is right here, within the new Travolution.co.uk.

Don't adjust your sets - it clearly is very different from our old incarnation.

Some good blog fodder from today's Yahoo 2009 preview with developments centred on relevancy, open internet and social media.

What does it mean? The search giant is taking those cornerstones and applying them across its new homepage, search, mobile and mail.

The result is consumers being able to aggregate search, mail, social networking sites and anything else targeted and relevant to them in one place.

The new homepage (currently in beta) enables users to plug in applications such as eBay and flickr from a library. Search developments include much richer, relevant results as well as anticipating what consumers are trying to find. The search service is also being opened up so developers and other companies can use it within their sites. And mobile developments include quicker access from the phone's menu and providing users with relevant answers and valuable information.

The thinking behind the developments is the consumer quest for 'return on attention' - a higher return on the time we invest - here's wikipedia says.

Yahoo research shows 68% of us feel it is getting more difficult to to balance life and work, 89% of us have information fatigue syndrome and 63% are worried that if we switch off we will miss something.

So, according to Yahoo Europe marketing man Kristof Fahy the search giant has to continue to do the basics really well and think about new areas such as personalisation, relevance, being open...

The developments look slick so watch this space as releases are slated for end of the year/early next year.

An interesting new site launched in the US this week.

Whole Travel is primarily a travel portal for the eco-concious amongst us but has some very good Uptake-esque search functionality allowing users to browse for products based on emotive keywords.

Some very good pieces of functionality and Ajax-driven tools, as well as decent look and feel, too.

But as comments on TechCrunch ask whether a travel site like this will fall foul of the economic situation, where consumers become less concerned about the environment and focus on price.
So we asked Whole Travel for a response:

1) Whole Travel contains not only luxury resorts, but also $10.00 camping sites. It has a wide variety of experiences

2) 42% of online travelers identify themselves with green and said that it's a major factor in their decision making

3) It's a niche area that is usually not as affected by price

4) Economic situation affects everyone on some level, but this particular niche will most likely not be as affected as most beause of their desire to find travel experiences.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution