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.
Recently in Expedia Category
Potentially interesting link up from TripAdvisor
January 16, 2009
Expedia enjoying Barack Obama victory
November 05, 2008
You have to hand it to Expedia - they never miss a trick.
Barack Obama-mania is about to kick in across the US and Expedia is seizing on the inevitable desire to see the senator from Illinois take the oath of office in January.
Within hours of Democrat Obama's victory overnight in the US, Expedia had an Inauguration 2009 landing page ready with information about Washington DC's hotels, airports and details of the parade on January 20.
Users can also book a hotel, flight etc from a widget on the left hand side of the page (shame they've used dates for November as the default rather than late-January, but we'll forgive them).
Expect other OTAs to follow...
We suspect Expedia is quietly relieved at the outcome of the election.
An inauguration for Senator John McCain - as his campaign rallies and concession speech have shown - would probably not have had the same pulling power as the Obama one will undoubtedly have in ten weeks time.
In the meantime, some good exposure for the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago, where Obama, family and close advisors were holed up last night as the results came in. [See Barack Obama in Chicago...But where is he staying? for more]
Hey Presto it's Pronto - or something
October 21, 2008
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?
Tripadvisor launches officially in India, quietly in Japan
August 21, 2008
As we revealed in May, Tripadvisor is setting its sights on the Far East and the Indian subcontinent.
A few months earlier than expected, but the world's biggest hotel review site has unveiled its Indian site today, tripadvisor.in.
A good move for the Expedia-owned site, of course, although one wonders why India was chosen first rather than China, given the enormous attention the 2008 Olympic host is currently getting.
Anyway, Tripadvisor.cn still blank.
But check out the flags at the bottom of a number of the Tripadvisor country site homepages and you'll notice that Tripadvisor Japan is also up and running in Beta.
Global domination beckons...
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
Technorati tags: tripadvisor expedia india china beijing olympic games 2008
Dramatic scenes this afternoon on the TV at Travolution Towers (i.e. our BBC iPlayer!) of the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
But it has emerged this week, courtesy of data from hotels.com, that there is apparently a bargain to be had for last-minute travellers.
The reason for this is that the anticpated stream of visitors has not materialised. In fact, it is expected there will be just a maximum of an extra 30,000 tourists in the city in August this year, compared to the same month in 2007.
Another interesting fact is that in April this year the average price of a room in the Chinese capital during the Games was close to £400. This was slashed to £144 in July.
So unless you have desire to protest on behalf of the Free Tibet movement, now is a rather good time to visit the Smoggy City.
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
Technorati tags:
The Superbrands thing [Sigh]
July 21, 2008
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
Booking with the Beeb
July 15, 2008
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
Travo Question Time - September. A cosmic panel!
July 10, 2008
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
More on the Expedia-Tripadvisor referral saga
July 09, 2008
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
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
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