January 2009 Archives

We close our emerging markets survey today, so if you want to spare five minutes of your Saturday (come on, of course you do) to take part, please go direct to our SurveyMonkey page.

Here is the background:

Travolution is looking at issues surrounding emerging markets for a future edition of its magazine.

As a travel professional or member of the media (journalist or blogger), we value your opinion and hope you can spend just five minutes answering the following questions.

The questions are designed simply to try and understand what the industry thinks about growth in tourism in countries such as India and China - and how it responds.

Click here to take part now.

Here in the UK, given the state of the economy, most would consider buying a new domain name for $1.76 million as nothing short of, well, bizarre.

But Travelzoo in the US, in what it says is an opportunity to "serve travelers and advertisers with innovative approaches to finding the best values in travel" has paid that exact sum for fly.com.

The domain became available through the auction system sedo.com and will be used to launch a "new information website" in February this year.

In the midst of almost constant chatter about PPC and ROI during a downturn, it's actually rather heartening to hear about a hefty chunk of online ad spend which does not rely on paid-for search marketing.

Thomas Cook's major deal with Microsoft uses all the tools in the marketing stable - homepage takeovers, behavioural targeting, paid search and display advertising.

It ticks the boxes in terms of what the experts have been saying for a long time - a consolidated approach to online marketing.

The whole deal comes across as more of a creative partnership with Thomas Cook gaining maximum exposure across a number of channels, while MSN Travel moves towards a much more consumer-orientated approach.

The virtual agent/travel inspiration tool, created by Microsoft, is simple and clever and Thomas Cook is already thinking it might like something similar on its website going forward.



Microsoft hinted at more partnerships like this in the weeks to come and it makes sense - more bangs for your buck at a time when there are fewer bucks around.

The old post started like this...

"Musings talked earlier today about the new Virgin Atlantic social network - VTravelled - which is expected to launch in the next month or so.

"Not wanting to miss out on the excitement, we have our two-pennies worth to pitch in.

"We are unsure if these grabs are proofs of concept, final designs or some other pitch materials, but the following images are certainly extremely interesting."


That was a few days ago.

We then went on to mention how some elements of the grabs were, shall we say, rather interesting as they hinted at a number of commercial tie-ins for the Virgin Atlantic social network, namely a widget for a low-cost carrier and an online travel agency.

Our understanding is that the designs will not be used for the VTravelled project.

Since then and following discussions with members of the legal profession representing a number of parties, we have removed the original pictures TEMPORARILY.

For those that missed out here they are again, but modified heavily of course...

There's an interesting discussion taking place on Twitter regarding the furore over Activities Abroad's anti-chav approach. We covered it briefly yesterday.

A poll launched earlier today asked the following question:

"Is Activities Abroad's chav PR wheeze a Ratner moment (i.e. a disaster) or a Richard Branson moment?"

Within a few hours of the story whizzing further around the mainstream media this morning, Travel Republic sent out a press release saying how they would give a 10% discount to anyone with a first name on AA's hitlist of chavsters.

PR follows PR.

What this whole saga has shown is that companies (in any sector) are turning to increasingly desperate methods to drum up business. Or, should that really be read as companies are turning to increasingly innovative methods to drum up business?

The next few weeks will tell if Activities Abroad has made an enormous faux pas with its chav marketing campaign.

So while post people fawned over the cleverness of the Queensland Island campaign a few weeks back, this latest piece of PR may divide opinion as to its content but we suspect it probably hasn't done much harm at all to sales at Activities Abroad.

And it is hardly the first time that a company has used shock tactics etc to grab people's attention.

Words fail us with this one...




What isn't so clear in the clip is if the, er, pilot of the bed is former SilverJet boss Lawrence Hunt, who has recently joined the Evans empire.

The slightly more serious coverage of the relaunched Lowcostholidays.com can be found here.

Activities Abroad has sent out a viral to 24,000 promising 'chav-free' holidays.

The company has surveyed its database to find out if common chav names such as Sharon and Chantelle are among any of its customers and found they're not. Not a single one!

Here's the BBC Radio 5 Live interview with founder Alistair MacLean.

Perhaps P&O Cruises could have surveyed its passenger list to avoid the recent negative press.

We have passed a milestone today - this is post number 1,500 on the Travolution Blog.

What started out as a quick and easy channel for us to get some content in the public domain before we launched our magazine in November 2005 has certainly evolved over the past three and half years.

The first post - Searching Questions - was written by Simon Ferguson, publishing director of the TWgroup, where Travolution sits within Reed Business Information, on 1 June 2005.

It even managed to attract a comment - no mean feat in those early days of blogging in the travel media.

We initially threw up bits of online-related news and often wildly random opinion pieces, before introducing some guest posts from the likes of Graham Donoghue (formerly of the TUI Travel parish, now heading Travelsupermarket) and Heather Hopkins, who at the time ran the research team at Hitwise UK.

After a few more editions of our magazine, the blog developed content-wise into what it is today: pointed musings - sometimes ill-informed, often spiky - about the travel industry and its embrace (or not) with the online world.

Much of what we did was actually quite pioneering for the travel media - live blogging at conferences, embedding video and the like - things which seem natural now for media companies to do as part of their overall editorial strategy.

Perhaps the most significant change was the move from the old Blogger platform in October 2008 to the current Movable Type system. This coincided with the launch of the new version of the Travolution website and for the first time saw all our online content (news, blogs, podcasts, video etc) in one place.


So, fast-forward to the current day and the blog is still written mostly by myself with additional posts from our regular freelancers (Linda Fox and Martin Cowen).


 
However, blogging - especially for those where media is the core function - is at a crossroads. The microblogging giant (yes, we can call it that now) Twitter is changing the landscape yet again as it makes quick and dirty reportage even easier.

We have embraced it wholeheartedly, for many reasons, but it has already triggered the end (as we see it) of live blogging at conferences. The semi-analytical posts we used to bash out during events will probably be more reflective end-of-the-day musings now, replaced by on-the-spot snippets via the increasingly popular hashtags (#) on Twitter.

This isn't A Bad Thing - it's just another evolution in the distribution of information.

And that, I hope, is what Travolution has always been about.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone for their support.

For your interest:

Most commented posts:

* The Recommended
* Most powerful people in online travel
* Do I want to follow lastminute.com on Twitter?

Other launch day news:

* Holland rejected the European Union constitution
* Legendary basketball player George Mikan died
* Axel F by Crazy Frog was STILL the UK number one single

Travolution's favourite posts:

* Travelblogcamp - A poisonous yet healthy debate
* XL homepage paints a sorry picture of the industry
* The Superbrands thing [sigh]
* When PR irritates beyond belief
* Why is everyone banning Facebook?
* Travelmail screenshots they don't want you to see just yet
* Sidestep finds domain game a bit of a problem
* Lazy Frog Part 1 and Part 2

We were desperately trying to put all 1,500 posts into Wordle - but, predictably, the Java applet crashed every time.

So, dot-travel has revealed its plans for 2009 - raising consumer awareness and targeting large companies to migrate to the extension.

Tralliance, the company which administers the top-level domain is clearly trying to build up some enthusiasm for dot-travel

Last week the story of travel.answers sale for more than $3 million caused much scepticism from the online community.

Could it be that someone else is also trying to build up some momentum around the dot.travel top-level domain in advance of the auction of a number of dot-travel names by Domainfest next Thursday? 

Interestingly, a quick check putting dot-travel at the end of large travel companies URLs - ie www.thomascook.travel - shows Thomas Cook, TUI and Ebookers all divert to their dot-com sites, so clearly none of them are promoting it.

Reckon there must be something in this affiliate marketing drive and creating interactive buttons for publishers...

Wednesday 7 January 2009 - Flight search engine Skyscanner launches its Affiliate Programme.

Thursday 22 January 2009 - Flight price comparison site Cheapflights launches its Affiliate Programme.

Okay, so I promised in a post last week that it would be the final word with our evangilising over the Twitter phenomenon.

But then everyone went a bit bonkers yesterday after Hitwise released quite amazing figures showing Twitter's ten-fold increase in traffic over the past year.

UPDATE: Hitwise tells me this morning that 1.3% of all Twitter traffic goes to travel sites - the top recipients including Google Maps, National Rail, Expedia and British Airways.

As the Travel Weekly blog has already pointed out, two of our rival sites led their email bulletins with the shock news.

I immediately posted a question on Twitter about whether this sudden enthusiasm was some kind of Tipping Point for travel media?

Some of the replies were rather cruel [email me for the best] but one did suggest this indicates, in not so many words, that the bandwagon has well and truly started for travel with Twitter.

Fast forward a few hours and the debate kicked off on a Travelmole story - with one commenter taking a critical and very defensive stance about engaging in Twitter. Take a look here.

I'll repeat here one of the comments I left:

"The point to all this is that IT DOESN'T TAKE ANY EFFORT to just try something as simple as Twitter.

"Lastminute.com, for example, has 650 people following its updates (Expedia has a quite astonishing 1,500). If these firms sold just ONE deal as a result of someone reading an update on their twitter pages then that would be a good thing, surely?

"Especially as it probably took the marketing person approximately 30 seconds to post that update.

"I only say it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity. Like most forms of social media and innovation on the web, it is easy to try something and if it doesn't work, move away almost as quickly as you started."

Whatever your stance, this is a fantastic debate, nonetheless. Expect the debate to really take off in the mainstream media when the likes of the Daily Mail runs a typically alarmist headline along the lines of 'Twitter blamed for mortgage crisis'.

I jest.

Here at Travolution we have evangelised plenty about Twitter, but this is still for one reason alone:

There is a potential marketplace in this particular social network (no-one truly knows what it is) and conversations are taking place there which are about travel and travel brands in particular.

To simply dismiss Twitter as a fad (indeed it may well be in 12 months time) and therefore not engage in it is missing the point.

So what if it's just This Year's New Thing? New things can bring about unexpected results, but you'll never know unless you just try it.

A quite fantastic visual and factual summary has been created depicting president (for it is he) Barack Obama jaunts in 2008 around the US on the campaign trail and elsewhere in the world.

The PDF produced by Dopplr also shows who he might've bumped into most frequently during the year - unfortunately for Obama his wife Michelle is only in third place, just ahead of the gun-toting free-spirited republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

Perhaps the less than favourable - but kind of understandable - statistic is Obama's estimated carbon footprint - a whopping 42,299kg of CO2.

View the PDF here.


Hat-Tip: @worldreviewer via Twitter.

We were going to just stick up a link on our Del.icio.us feed but this probably deserves a bit more space.

It seems that the Pope, or rather the Vatican, is to launch its own YouTube channel, perhaps inspired by the successes seen by Barack Obama during his exhaustive presidential campaign in 2008.

If this doesn't demonstrate the power of social media - we don't know what does.

Details of the story are all here.

So never let it be said that the Pope is not down with the kids. [That's possibly not the greatest turn of phrase?! Ed)

Content for the channel will be provided by Vatican Radio and TV station and is apparently for devout catholics as well as casual browsers.

We'll let you draw your own conclusions - more details to be revealed next week.

Most online businesses keep their conversion rates to themselves, so Travolution was quite excited when some consumer-facing PR from Ryanair offered us a rare insight into that most closely guarded secret...

We couldn't get as close as we would have liked (so far!), but wondered if the Travo community might be able to help us get a bit further.

On Monday 12 January, Ryanair sold over 350,000 seats, its busiest ever sales day, as good as all of them through ryanair.com.

Apart from anything else, that's four sales a second.

Hitwise was able to provide us with some interesting market share comparisons between easyJet and Ryanair (see separate news story).

But it only shows percentage of visits, not the actual number of visits. If we'd have got hold of the latter, that would have given us a fairly accurate conversion rate.

How many visitors would your site need to convert 350,000 sales?

We're also wondering why Monday 12 January in particular was such a good day for Ryanair sales. Its big promotions were launched weeks before...

Did Google send more traffic to Ryanair on Mon 12? Any relevant macro-economic news that day? What sort of traffic patterns did its ancillary revenue partners such as boo.com see? Did other online businesses/tour operators have a good day too?

Or was Ryanair just dumping seats to scupper easyJet's sale which launched three days before?

Okay, so it's official: Monday 19 January is 2009's Most Depressing Day of the year (and so early in the proceedings!).

This startling excuse for a news story does the rounds every year and is typically run under the 'Blue Monday' monicker.

So if today is apparently gloomy for everyone, here are Travolution's ten reasons to be cheerful.

* Passenger aircraft CAN land on water.
* Heathrow Terminal 5 is working.
* Virgin Atlantic has made it to 25 years.
* Eight cruise ships will be launched this year.
* Holiday rental websites are booming.
* No major tour operators have folded in 2009.
* No major airlines have folded in 2009.
* Sterling is improving against the dollar. [UPDATE: Whooooops]
* Travel still inspires some of the most innovative sites on the web
* Travolution had its best seven days of traffic ever last week!

And, finally, New Order's Blue Monday is still one of the best tracks of all time.

Another set of blog awards...

Now in its sixth year, the Weblog Awards recognise blogs in dozens of categoeies (including, er, best pet blog! Cute Overload, in case you're interested).

But, more importantly, which travel blog is this year's winner?

Beating off competition from Folie a Deux, The Asian Traveler, Curious Expeditions, Notes from the Road, The Lost Girls, LL World Tour, Jaunted, Intelligent Traveler and the fantastic Cranky Flier (who we met at Phocuswright 2008) was the rather intriguing effort from Switzerland, known as MyKugelhopf - marrying food and travel!



In fact, MyKugelhopf only won by a slim margin of 29 votes!

Good work...
 

More media model machinations from Expedia Inc this week - its TripAdvisor Media Network has linked up with airline tech specialist ITA Software in a "multi-year" deal.

The significance of "multi-year" is that it's the only concrete thing we learn from the somewhat understated joint press release. TripAdvisor's press office response to emailed questions was political, not really answering without declining to comment.

The link-up is interesting on a number of levels. ITA Software produces "transactional" airline search and shopping tools, and there are a number of airline-focussed user-generated content sites within TripAdvisor Media Network.

These include airfarewatchdog.com, bookingbuddy.com, frequentflier.com, onetime.com, seatguru.com, and smartertravel.com. They generate revenues through display/banner ads.

ITA products are already used by other online businesses to sell seats. It picked up $100m of funding early in 2006, and has since signed deals with kayak, farecompare, cleartrip and farelogix. TAP Portugal, LOT Polish and Alitalia have also integrated its kit into their web sites.

So TripAdvisor's airline sites could looking at adding transaction revenues to its media income. Its response to a direct question was: "TripAdvisor Media Network are media companies, and this announcement with ITA does not signal a change in that.  We'll remain media companies."

But that's not to say that media companies aren't interested in non-media revenues: after all, Expedia Inc is an online travel agency business which generates c10% of revenues from media...

Whether the ITA deal will lead to a material improvement in revenues from the airline sites remains to be seen. It's something else to watch from the market leader.

The web was a seething mass of interactivity last night as bloggers, Twitterers and the mainstream media scrambled over themselves to get the latest on the US Airways crash.

Within minutes of the Airbus hitting the Hudson River a photograph of passengers standing on the fuselage and wings was put on Twitpic - a move which crashed the fledgling service.

The image was subsequently re-hosted on a variety sites, including here.

Most remarkable of all - apart from the fact that all passengers and crew surived the crash - was that shortly after someone had grabbed the data freely available from flightaware.com and created an interactive map of the aircraft from the moment it took off from La Guardia Airport in New York to the moment of impact.

The map only works in Firefox at the moment and cannot be embedded. Check it out.

Greenpeace has mounted a so far unsuccessful campaign against the expansion of Heathrow Airport to include a third runway and sixth terminal - a project which the UK government gave a thumbs up to today.

Given the influence that political movements have credited to Youtube in recent months (such as the Barack Obama campaign), it is somewhat surprising to see that a search for 'heathrow expansion' on the omnipresent video site throws up just 64 related clips.

But the backlash against the government's decision will no doubt intensify further, giving rise to plenty more stunts like this one to raise awareness.





More coverage at Travel Weekly.

It appears that a business called Travel411 has paid $3.3 million cash for the domain name www.answers.travel.

That's right - $3.3 million cash.

The press release appears to have been distributed by Intellectual Property Today, if the contact details at the bottom are anything to go by.

Tralliance swiftly put a statement out saying it is not involved in the secondary market of .travel names and knew nothing of the deal.

Travolution is not alone - other commentators are similarly sceptical.

$3.3 million for a web address, in any climate never mind the current one, does seem like the return of dot-com madness.

This is the last post of its kind where I evangelise about Twitter.

Although we joined the site almost two years ago (March 2007), it has only started becoming a really useful tool for Travolution in the last seven or eight months.

Our 'follower' numbers are close to 1,000, a jump of 600 or so in little over three months. We get more traffic from Twitter than Del.icio.us and Facebook put together.

The #phocus08 tag I started during the PhoCusWright conference in November was one of the top searched terms on Twitter on one particular day as hacks, bloggers and others all chimed with their 'Tweets'.

Anyway, Matt Parsons is collecting the list of travel companies on Twitter.

But any travel business still unsure as to whether Twitter is a channel they should be engaging with should probably take a look at this graph of Twitter's growth in the past six months (NB: traffic leap so far this month).



The point to make here is that Twitter is not only a fascinating communication tool, but it is - once again, like blogs and forums were two or three years ago - proving to be a place to find out what people are saying about a particular subject, such as your company!

It would be difficult to point to any particular site for its coverage of the Island Reef dream job over the past few days.

Needless to say, BBC, CNN and Techcrunch (you don't often here those in the same breath) and hundreds of other media outlets all picked up on what is probably one of the best travel PR campaigns of the past few years - oh, and a thing about a new job on a paradise island.

Anyway, we have some figures from Hitwise showing the impact online since the campaign launched at the weekend.

Traffic to islandreefjob.com increased 25-fold between Sunday and Monday as the campaign kicked in.

Upstream data shows exactly how good their PR offensive was given that six of the top ten are mainstream media sources.

Traffic to experiencequeensland.com trebled just on Monday.

In other words: job done.

One of the travel industry's key demands when dealing with regulators and governments is for "a level playing field".

Tour operators moan about scheduled airlines not having to pay for consumer protection; European airlines moan about their US rivals ability to use Chapter 11 when it all gets too much; the interminable GDS deregulation debate is all about maintaining the level playing field; it's why the OFT wants transparent pricing.

So there must have been some raised eyebrows and furrowed brows when Management.Travel reported that "the US Department of Treasury this month plans to infuse American Express with $3.39 billion of new capital as part of the $700 billion financial bailout program".

The bailout also covers American Express Business Travel - the largest travel management company in the world. It has nearly 12,000 clients who spend more than $26bn on travel and related services. Its online solution, AXIOM, has access to 137,000 suppliers

At the risk of simplifying an 86-page 8-K Filing, is this the first travel company bailout of the current slowdown?

Clearly, Amex isn't going to spend $3bn-plus on an SEO budget for its social networking sites, but there are lots of its suppliers around the globe - digital agencies and advisers as well as product suppliers - who will sleep a little easier knowing the company is now effectively government-backed. Amadeus, Galileo and Sabre will also be pleased.

Which is all well and good for the above, but what about the other business travel agents out there who are having to struggle on with a helping hand? It must be particularly galling for Expedia Inc; it has been carefully building up its stand-alone travel management company Egencia to the point where it is the fifth largest business travel agent in the world.

The announcement is unlikely to knock Egencia off course, but when the market leader in any sector  gets a boost, it's tough on its rivals. Particularly when that boost comes via a funding injection in a market where funding injections are hard to come by.

New York-based Hudson Crossing has released its 2009 Trends in Travel Investment, predicting that "significant travel industry restructuring [is] both necessary and inevitable in 2009".

It says: "The space for Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) has become crowded and a widely anticipated downturn in consumer spending on travel will force one major OTA into a change of ownership."

A change of ownership is one thing, significant restructuring is something else. There would need to be a buy-out between the major OTAs for the latter to occur.

The Thomson/First Choice and Thomas Cook/MyTravel mergers made commercial sense on a number of levels, few of which had anything specifically to do with online. And whether even this double-deal has significantly restructured the UK/European market is debatable.

The tour op tie-up took place before the current slowdown: a merger/buyout  of the big OTAs seems unlikely in the current funding climate, even if such a deal could work financially, which is also debatable.

Last December Hudson Crossing predicted that "the Big Four of online travel (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Priceline) will be challenged by a new very well-funded major player in 2008." The big four did face a few challenges during the year; a cash rich new entrant wasn't one of them.

Microsoft did pay $75 million for Farecast in 2008, which is about as close as we got to "a new very well funded major player" in the online travel sector, although we've given up waiting for Microsoft do something, significant or otherwise, with it.

No-one's mentioned Troogle for a while.

Changes of ownership are always a possibility, but it would need to be something quite spectacular, if not a bit left-field, to significantly restructure the online travel space.

... you could've made a cup of tea and still used less electricity.

Apparently.

Google denies it, predictably.

UPDATE: A load of rubbish.

Last week's post about bedbank consolidation is probably the best and without doubt the spikiest debate we've had on the blog for quite some time. [Thanks!]

And now - for the geeks amongst us - you can visualise the content as a word cloud, courtesy of Wordle.


Wordle hat-tip: Matt Parsons

PING! This just in...

Coastal communities cash in on lucrative love medicine

8 January 2008

A remote fishing village in southern Madagascar has sold its first batch of locally farmed sea cucumbers - believed to be a potent love medicine in southeast Asia - and is hoping to cash in on the lucrative market for unusual aphrodisiacs in advance of Chinese New Year next month.

Etc, etc, etc.


Crikey.....

Hitwise is scaring the hell out of the everyone today with data from the week ending 5 January 2009 showing that flight searches in hte UK were down 42.4% on the same week 12 months before.

Searches to the US and Eurozone countries have falled significantly (USA down 52.2%, Eurozone (down 44.8%) while their non-Euro counterparts fair slightly better (RoW down 34.4%, UK domestic down 32.7%).

Within an hour or so of one particular article in FT earlier today, one of the companies who would be less than impressed with such a slump was on the phone suggesting that the figures should be given more thought.

This is their analysis:

The most recent week ending 5 January had only one proper day when people would be back at work from the Christmas break and browsing the web, Monday 5 January.

In contrast the week ending 5 January 2008 had arguably three days when the majority of people had returned to work and resumed normal behaviour, Wednesday 2 to Friday 4 January.

It is a valid point.

Various surveys show that many consumers use their lunch breaks at work and at other idle times (Is this right?!? Ed) to conduct searches for travel, before booking later in the evening.

During the Christmas break, however, users were either at home or out and about visiting friends and family, or spending their way through the New Year retail sales.

This might go some way to explaining the slump, but surely this can't account for such dramatic falls in searches?


If You Read This, Tweet This to your Followers:

      Context needed over flight plummet stories http://tinyurl.com/86wvcn

There is no question that Lonely Planet has come a very long way since its days as a publisher of dog-eared guidebooks for overlanders from Kathmandu to Istanbul.

The Thorn Tree forum, online destination guides and white labelled meta search engines via Kayak and Global Travel Market have given it a decent presence on the web.

But forgetting for a moment the controversy about the company selling out to joining the media beast that is the BBC, questions remain for many as to where Lonely Planet as a brand goes next.

Some indication might come in the form of its new CEO, unveiled earlier this week as Matthew Goldberg, a man some are calling a "digital heavyweight" who joins from his position as web guru at Dow Jones.

The next few years will certainly be a fascinating period in the history of Lonely Planet as it looks to maintain the strength of the brand in the face of increasingly sophisticated trip planning and content websites in the form of Triporati, Nileguide, PlanetEye, Yapta et al.

Any ideas on what Lonely Planet should do with its online offering?

The most frustrating on-off deal of the latter part of last year was finally completed yesterday when the Thomas Cook Group bought lastminute.com's MedHotels for an undisclosed fee.

Rumours first circulated at The Travel Convention in Gran Canaria in October, when - in keeping with the annual ABTA shindig - cocktail-fuelled delegates started gossiping into the early hours of a deal to buy the bedbank.

Lastminute.com's press team on the ground running its tenth birthday party made valiant attempts to quash the titter tatter about Thomas Cook..

Executives from Medhotels looked visibly shaken whenever any of the press pack mentioned it - understandable given that there were dozens of staff back in the UK who had no idea of what was going on.

Almost on a weekly basis after the event there would be a new rumour along the lines of: "You know the Med deal is happening this week, right?

And then December arrived and, well, nobody buys an accommodation-only business for Christmas do they? A Wii Bedbank maybe?!

Anyway, with the deal now finally in place what else is there to say? Well, probably quite a lot, but here are some initial points:

* The consolidation in the bedbank continues apace, as predicted by anyone with a passing knowledge of how operators need to get hold of stock and how bedbanks need a wider distribution spread.

* Sources say the currently undisclosed deal is likely to be in the region of £20 million. Thomas Cook's previous bedbank acquisition, Hotels4u.com last February, was far more open and tabled at around £21.8 million.

* Observers will now turn their attention to TUI Travel, which if speculation is true, has been pipped by its arch rival twice in the space of a year. Does it need to be more aggressive with its buying?

* It is worth remembering that despite the high profile coverage in the trade media of the two most recent deals (a reflection on the personalities involved, one might argue), TUI has been quietly building a strong portfolio of accommodation-only providers of its own over the past few years - Hotelopia and Laterooms are decent businesses, lest we forget.

* It is no surprise at all that LowcostBeds has been quietly growing and most interestingly expanding in recent months, buying IdealCruising and recently its deal with Resorthoppa.

* Where does this all leave the trade media's omnipresent Youtravel.com and other, smaller bedbanks? Most insiders believe that Youtravel founder John Kent (who, ironically, created Medhotels before selling to lastminute.com) was looking at a three to four-year exit plan for the business. Is this still a likely scenario given how the market has developed and the economic climate?

* Finally and most importantly, it is believed by some - even rival bedbank bosses - that the latest deal will actually be good for everyone (except consumers, of course). Last year saw a pretty grim price war in the sector and some reckon rates were driven down by almost 40% - but this is unlikely to continue and prices could return to a more sustainable level. In other words: higher.

So while it is doubtful that the bedbank sector will ever be as sexy as the airline or hotel ends of the industry, it is certainly one of the most interesting, dynamic and, thankfully, provides us hacks with endless material to write about.

What do we all think?

There probably hasn't been a day like it before - when the global CEOs from two of the biggest online travel agencies on the planet quit within hours of one another.

Steve Barnhart (Orbitz) and Michelle Peluso (Travelocity) may even have worked it out together over a glass of mulled wine at Christmas?!?

Anyway, a friendly mole within the Travelocity empire kindly sent us Peluso's emotional farewell note to some of her staff.

Hi all,
By now you may have heard the news that I'm leaving Travelocity in early February. First of all, as you can imagine, it was an incredibly hard decision to make.

I could and did think of a thousand reasons to stay  - not the least of which is how much I've enjoyed working with the Travelocity team and with so many of you in the industry -  but in the end, there is one big reason to leave, and that's my family.

Being CEO of Travelocity Global is the greatest honor I've had, and I've never given it less than my all.

Giving it my all means a great deal of travel, and now with Auden, our new daughter, I just don't feel I can do that anymore and be the kind of mom for her I want to be.

And so, I came to the decision that it's better for me to find a new challenge closer to our home in New York. 

But the most important thing I want to express is thank you for such a wonderful almost 10 years running Site59 and Travelocity.

Despite the challenges we occasionally face, this is an extraordinary industry - one that makes it possible for people to realize their dreams - be that to see their grandchild born or to see the night sky on the other side of the world. 

I've always been profoundly conscious of what a privilege it is to have had the opportunity to help shape our industry and to work with so many extraordinary, inspiring people in all of you along the way.  I thank you enormously for these terrific years, and I know we will keep in touch.

And, finally, Hugh Jones has been chosen by Sam and me to take over the CEO job, and I'm very excited about that.  Hugh will be a terrific leader of Travelocity and along with our stellar leadership team - and such a talented group across the company - the future is exciting. I'll remain a committed investor and a devoted fan even as I move on to new things.

Hugh and I will be working on the transition over the next month, and I look forward to introducing him to those of you who are our partners who don't yet know him.  You will find him as smart and talented as I do. 

Once again, thank you - it's been an incredible joy and privilege.

Michelle


Having met Peluso a couple of times over the past three years, she certainly had an incredibly genuine and pleasant way about her.

A colleague told me tonight that Peluso's departure is "a big loss" to Sabre.

Buried, understandably, at the bottom of the Orbitz announcement this morning about its new CEO, Barney Harford, are a very worrying few lines for anyone who works at any of the Orbitz brands.

"In addition to its leadership transition, Orbitz Worldwide today announced that it will take further measures to lower its operating costs.

"In combination with the expense and workforce reductions announced in November 2008, these latest measures are designed to position Orbitz Worldwide for success in the face of the challenging economic prospects for the global travel industry.

"Over the next several weeks, Orbitz Worldwide will implement measures designed to lower its cost structure by an estimated additional $20- 25 million annually, in addition to the $20 million of annual cost reductions announced in November 2008."

Read it again. Orbitz is looking to lower costs by up to $45 million annually, if you add the two together.

Anyone who thought the global economic situation would not hit the OTAs too hard will be re-examining their predictions.

Which? magazine, via the Telegraph, says the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing show is so popular that it has fuelled a rise in dancing holidays.

Now for some of us the idea of going on holiday to learn the quickstep sounds about as enticing as a Saturday night in with the X-Factor boxset, but don't underestimate how influential TV concepts can be.

For example, parents of toddlers in the UK will be more than aware of the Balamory series on CBeebies. The VisitScotland website has optimised a page specifically for holidays to the island of Mull, where the programme was filmed a few years back.

Of course, the TV-inspired holiday or travel product has been around for years. Just the place where the exterior shots were filmed for the bar in Cheers, the seminal US sitcom of the 1980s, has fuelled a mini-industry in itself for the city of Boston.

So another thing to add to the off-kilter marketing plan, especially online where clever SEO can play a big part, is to recognise consumer trends and popular culture.

* Michael Palin does a jaunt around the Amazon - create a landing page on your site showing trips available to South America and editorial content with images about some of the destinations featured in the series. [The BBC will love the publicity].

* Think political. The Davos shindig comes around once a year, and it's held in an incredibly beautiful part of Switzerland, so ensure you have Davos and other Swiss destinations up front on your homepage over the duration of the event.

Any more examples?

So our Predictions 2009 article was a rather nice collection of views from across the travel sector (thanks to those who contributed).

Now, as one would expect, we had a fair bit of correspondence and conversations following its publication which contained predictions which people would rather not put their name to.

One emailer suggested that the user review site realholidayreports.com site would be ripe for a takeover a la Holidaywatchdog and Holidaysuncovered.

Our correspondent said:

"It ranks very well like Holidaysuncovered did, and looks just as hideous prior to TUI purchasing it."

Quite.

After asking around it appears that Tripadivsor would feature in many people's list of likely buyers for the site.

We also got into a conversation with the founder of a new trip planning site which launches this year. He kindly sent us the business plan and - hey presto - the exit strategy has none other than Tripadvisor named as one of the companies it hopes would be interested in buying it.

So which sites do we think are likely takeover targets in 2009?

.......well, at least when it comes to our news coverage.

Four of the top ten most popular stories on the Travolution website in 2008 were about Ryanair and the screen-scrape debacle over the summer.

Also good to see that eight out of the ten were exclusive stories to Travolution, gathered by our journalistic endeavour rather than regurgitated press releases (our policy also seems to be working).

By way of comparison, here are Travel Weekly's top ten stories of 2008.

Woolworths is probably the highest profile UK High Street store to go out of business as a result of the worsening economy.

Deloitte is handling the winding down process for the business (expected to be completed by Saturday 3 January) and will be selling off stores situated in some of the best retail spots in the UK. [Hello, Tesco, et al?]

In the midst of the collapse of one of the oldest retailers in the UK, Travolution readers will no doubt remember how Woolies entered the world of online travel almost two years ago to the day.

The Woolies website created its own travel channel, provided as a white label by Wefly, containing the usual array of facilities for booking flights, hotels, package holidays and car hire.

This white label will be no more as the Woolies website was pulled on the day Deloitte stepped in as administrators.

A call into Deloitte earlier this week, who by their nature and the role they are playing are frsutratingly matter of fact about absolutely everything, revealed only a few nuggets:

* The trading relationship between Woolies and Wefly ended the moment the administrators stepped in and the site closed down.

* Any cross-promotion credits - such as store credit vouchers given as a result of buying travel products online - will be null and void once retail outletts close and therefore consumers should claim any monies from the adminitrators.

Now some might wonder how much Wefly has lost out as a result of the collapse of Woolies?

Most would probably say not that much - Woolies was hardly a giant of the High Steet with regards to its online presence and therefore the white label was probably not the biggest revenue driver. Wefly, let us remember, also powers the Asda travel channel.

However, it is worth looking at how many of the UK High Street and online retailers have online travel channels and who is providing the functionality for them.

This sample is based in part on those appearing in the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops list for November 2008 and a number of other retail lists.

* Tesco Travel (provided by lastminute.com)
* John Lewis's Greenbee (Expedia and Cox & Kings)
* Asda Travel  (Wefly)
* Orange Shop (Kayak)
* Waitrose's Greenbee (Expedia and Cox & Kings)
* Aldi Travel (On Holiday Group)
* The Co-Op (Co-Operative Travel)
* WH Smith Travel Store (Wefly)
* The Disney Store (Traveltainment)

Rumours abound that Sainsbury's is also developing an online travel service.