Recently in travelocity Category

Okay, this is an industry first, of sorts.

Or maybe that's just because of its confusing title.

The pink'uns have created a blog on the blogspot platform to run alongside the Lastminute.com Twitter activity and, one suspects, a whole host of other Web 2.0-esque marketing activities.

The Lastminute.com Social Media Press Office is - by the looks of things - another outlet for offers - but perhaps we'll see some commentary, too, on industry issues, seeing as it's a blog and all that.

[Thankfully the background is not as garish as its Twitter page!]

Maybe this will go some way to appeasing the recent moans and groans from Travel Rants to have more involvement from travel companies in blogging.

Probably not.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Arriving back at Travolution Towers after some time away, and wading through the snail mail.


Not going to publish the name and company of the sender, although if they know something I don't... please get in touch.

In the meantime, hello Travelocity!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: fail failblog

So last Friday we revealed how lastminute.com and a string of sister sites had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

It actually turned out to be a pretty serious problem, as our story today indicates.

The sites - including Medhotels, Holiday Autos and Travelocity.co.uk, as well as the Tesco.com white label - remained offline until 2am on Saturday morning, over ten hours after the "power outage" at IT supplier Colt took place.

We have only limited information about the circumstances surrounding the problem but questions will certainly be asked of Colt, no doubt about it.

Some might translate "we're working with our provider Colt to ensure this doesn't happen again", to actually be code for "we're going tear strips off these guys after our sites went dark for over 10 hours on one of the busiest days of the year!" - but probably not.

Anyway, it's a tricky area to analyse as it is completely impossible to monitor every travel site on the web to gauge how often something like this happens.

It was only good fortune that we saw the dead LM last Friday afternoon and stuck around until the wee hours of the following morning to see when it returned. We actually gave up at 1am and went to bed!

So, how common is the problem? What do travel companies do in a situation like this? Apart from panic.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

...would you associate Travelocity with baked beans? Well, groovy marketing people in Australia seem to think so after pushing the Zuji-Travelocity brand onto tins of baked beans.

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

Forbes.com runs a revealing if frustrating interview with Travelocity CEO Michelle Peluso.

Revealing, because it charts the early career of one of the sector’s most important figures. Taking a risk, taking time, going against conventional wisdom, recognising when a business model ‘is in the tank’...familiar themes for any aspiring entrepreneurs.

Frustrating, because the interview stops before 2005 when Peluso oversaw Travelocity’s takeover of lastminute.com. Buying a business for more than a billion dollars - less familiar...

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Steve Hafner, CEO and co-founder of kayak.com, talks to Philip Wolf, giving a level of insight into his business which would have the corporate PRs of a listed company looking nervously at their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance notes.

Kayak is on the verge of launching a travel-specific vertical ad network, giving Google a run for its money. Hafner suggested this would happen 'within 45 days'.

Kayak bought Sidestep for $175m, essentially to get the audience. But Sidestep's travelpost.com will become Kayak's user review site, giving tripadvisor a run for its money.

Kayak will get the range of European hotel inventory through agency partners, supplier partners and, interestingly, 'hooking into a GDS', giving the bedbanks a run for their money.

Kayak employs 58 people - 32 in technology, the balance in the commercial teams. Travelocity has 10,000. Hafner says: 'We're all web sites, so that's where we all should be innovating, but they haven't changed theirs much in the past ten years, despite their massive human capital.'

Metasearch will work in Europe because of online penetration levels and supplier fragmentation. While there are more metasearch in Europe than the US, Hafner 'isn't too impressed with their technology'.

Kayak is the suppliers' friend - it can offer better conversions than Google, while its ad network will be cheaper than Google.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

PhoCusWright CEO Philip Wolf introduced a new metric at the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit in Berlin this morning - clout per headcount.

He pointed out that Sabre employs c5000 people; the combined kayak/sidestep operations have 52.

Soundbite aside, the point made is that these 5K people are a cost that the OTAs have to factor in any pricing to suppliers. Metasearch can provide suppliers with a more qualified lead from a lower cost base.

Perhaps.

So, it seems 2008 is the year for Travelocity to move to a common technology platform for its online brands - lastminute, travelocity, reisefeber....

The company says it has set itself milestones over the coming months to achieve the migration.

We bet it has!

Orbitz Worldwide had many a false-start last year when it was going through a similar project with its ebookers brand.

They could send the handbook over to Sabre although somehow we think that's unlikely.

Besides, Sabre chief innovator, Dr Ben Vinod, tells us it is all going well and 'rapidly.'

He talks about the potential for exploiting 'synergies', which in this case means enabling all of the brands to use the same solutions such as Travelocity's 'experience finder.'

Whatever angle you look at it from - it makes for exciting times ahead!

Linda Fox, lead reporter. Travolution

PING! Email arrives from Yellow Pages in the US, which is going down the meta search route.

A new site, Yellowpages.travel [remember dot-travel?], searches across Travelocity, Hotwire, Kayak, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelzoo and a few others for flights, hotels, cars and packages.

What seems like a nice idea actually then throws up a rather odd interface - perhaps it's just us? - where the source brands are displayed across a horizontal and the user then clicks on each to get results, or sent off to the website.


Thoughts?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yellow pages expedia kayak orbitz travelocity