As Dara Khosrowshahi hinted at last week, Expedia Inc is looking at meta search to expand its media business.
He hinted at pressure on Tripadvisor's CPC rates.
So it makes perfect sense this morning to discover that - lo and behold - Tripadvisor (the US version) has unveiled a fully fledged flight meta search engine.
[No news as yet if there's a version for the UK]
[No plans for hotel meta search]
Flight searches are carried out, the site says, on "the world's leading travel sources" including Sabre, Amadeus, Travelocity and, of course, Expedia and Hotwire.
As we said in our post yesterday about Travelsupermarket's revenue per conversion (CPC) rate, for the big players (and we can now include Tripadvisor) the market is ripe for meta search as price is driving everything.
The smaller players in the sector HAVE to differentiate now in a major way.
Excuse the hyperbole, but the addition of Tripadvisor to the arena is about as pivotal moment in the history of meta search as you are going to find.
Lest we forget Tripadvisor's absolutely terrifyingly high levels of traffic and stranglehold on hotel reviews.
It has now, quite simply, positioned itself in yet another part of the consumer purchase funnel.
Which must be delighting Dara...
UPDATE:
Reaction coming in via email:
Senior player in the meta search space: "It's a logical and inevitable move for them given the parent company. Early days with limited product - one assumes that will grow overtime, shame they didn't integrate destination reviews and Seatguru. What does the future now hold for Expedia?"
Good on you Expedia inc!
This is just another good example of Expedia making sure that it's business moves with the online market and stays ahead.
Dara did say at the PhoCusWright conference in Hollywood late last year that they were going to cool down their acquisition machine, guess this time they have done it themselves.
The only thing is that they probably want to include more suppliers than their own brands in the Meta search as it just won't be too long before the consumer picking up on Trip Advisor not being an independent consumer champion :-)
SeatGuru indeed is integrated, although it may not have been enabled in the early hours of the launch. But it will be there. I highly suspect that a UK and other international versions of this are on the drawing board. TripAdvisor told me they are a global company that thinks globally.
Please don't quote me on this, but I think I remember @SeatGuru mentioning on Twitter that one of the developments (requests) is to integrate flight search within it's site.
It makes sense.
I think it'll be only a matter of time before that happens.
You are correct, Darren and Dennis. SeatGuru's seat reviews are integrated in TripAdvisor's meta flight search!
Once on the search results page, click on "show details" in the bottom right hand corner of the box for your desired flight, and you will see a link to SeatGuru Reviews for that aircraft.
Ah! I nailed this one when you guys posted about TripAdvisor's link up with ITA:
http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/01/potentially-interesting-link-u.php#comment-1339440
correct me if i'm wrong, but i think the met search disappeared from their site.