So it looks like that, according to reports, Travelocity will follow Expedia's lead and scrap booking fees for air tickets.
At last week's PhoCusWright event in Berlin, president and CEO Philip Wolf did a quick straw poll of delegates during one of the debates, asking if Expedia's decision was a good thing or not.
From where I was sitting the result appeared reasonably even.
The pros:
1) Consumers get cheaper airfares [The Giving-Something-Back Theory]
2) Simplifies booking process in terms of displaying fares (one price) [The UE Theory]
3) Competitive advantage [The Smug Theory]
The cons:
1) OTA loses money [The Hugely Risky Theory]
2) Other OTAs will do the same [The MAD Theory]
3) Pressure on other areas of the business to take up the slack [The Blind Optimism Theory]
Now for Expedia there are a heap of reasons why it can get away with something like this, not least because it can shore up some of the decline in booking fee revenues with the launch of Tripadvisor's new meta search tool.
[Although during an interview with Wolf later in the day, Tripadvisor managing director Marc Charron denied the two were linked.
But what about Travelocity? It doesn't have the luxury of a meta search product of the anticipated scale of Tripadvisor to fall back on.
[But it might soon - you heard it hear first]
Anyway, there are plenty of people with strong opinions about what this latest move says about the OTA sector - so what do we think?
[Here is what the folks at PhoCusWright make of it]
That would be very interesting if Travelocity were to launch its own metasearch engine. The logical vehicle for that would be its iGoUgo unit, which already has a RateFinder tool featuring the search engines of American Express, Orbitz, Hotels.com etc. -- and Travelocity's of course.
It would be a gigantic turnaround of attitude for Travelocity if it got into full-fledged metasearch because it has been so opposed to it -- citing the commoditization of travel and brand dilution because of the acute focus on price -- over the years. Then again, Travelocity, like all of the OTAs feels the media business is where it's at, so a Travelocity metasearch product would be a logical move.
And why should Travelocity follows what Expedia is doing with TripAdvisor?
Don't understand this at all.
You have to remember that Travelocity is in a bigger complex environment than Expedia Inc. Travelocity is part of Sabre who is owned by private equity funds Silver Lake and Texas Pacific Group. Many acquisitions have been made by Sabre in the past 5 years, so maybe the focus is on profitabilility about what you have rather than creating new websites or be a copycat of what existing out there (Kayak & co)