Travel Industry

Video created by Elliott Ng.
During the next few months, UpTake will be presenting short takes with travel industry leaders, influencers and innovators. Our first video interview is with Kevin Fliess, CEO of TravelMuse. Kevin’s background is well suited to launching an online travel sites:

“His work and family life have taken him all over the world: from Tahiti to India and Canada to Mexico; Amsterdam to Turkey and the northern California coast to South Carolina islands. Prior to starting TravelMuse, Kevin spent 15 years as a leader in various high tech companies, most recently as VP of product marketing and product management for emerging solutions at SAP. He’s also held strategic positions at Synopsys, Icarian and Siemens. A serial innovator, Kevin co-invented the first composite application at SAP and has one patent granted with seven applications on file.”

We hope you enjoy his positive take on where the opportunities exist for online travel in this turbulent economy:

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Gregg Brockway, TripIt, Video Interview
  
• Sam Shank, Dealbase, Video Interview
• Travelcom 2009: TripAdvisor, “Going Here, There & Everywhere“
• Travelcom Keynote-There’s No Room for Maybe

UpTake launched our blog network in November. We work with a team of 35 bloggers to deliver up-to-date information about attractions, beaches, hotels, lodging, restaurants and vacations. Our bloggers deliver local, expert advice on the U.S.A’s most popular and beloved things to do and places to stay.

After six months of blog posting on UpTake, we decided to salute them for their hard work on our behalf. They are knowledgable, funny, honest and great communicators. Their blogs offer insights on travel, family, parenting and much more. Enjoy this video tour of our bloggers’ personal blogs.

A week after TravelPost’s PR claims, our peeved rebuttal and counter-claims, we wanted to leave the PR hyperbole behind and say that Kayak’s TravelPost entrance into hotel review metasearch is a good milestone for the industry and for UpTake.  We’ll share our take, and then we’d like to hear your take:  What do you like about TravelPost and what advice do you have for their team?

Two strengths and two “areas of improvement”

First of all, we wanted to recognize two strengths that we see in TravelPost.  We’ve got a lot of respect for Ross Weber (who is a Virtual Tourist and OneTime.com veteran) and the TravelPost team and honestly have to say its a great version 1.0 for Travel Metasearch.  We also want to share two “areas of improvement” that would make TravelPost an even stronger product.

Strength 1: Smart strategic move because hotels are a natural extension for Kayak.

Hotels are a logical extension because most of the profitability for online travel sites is driven by hotels, not air.  And with the recent cut in air booking fees by the agencies, Kayak’s primary source of revenue is now under threat. The extension into hotels is also logical because hotel information metasearch allows Kayak to tap into the same competencies that drove their success in flight metasearch – a search paradigm driven by a simple, easy-to-use interface and the ability for consumers to buy direct.

There are additional benefits to Kayak.  Sam Shank (@dealbase), original founder of TravelPost and now founder/CEO of DealBase.com, has two theories. Either Kayak is really trying to beat TripAdvisor in the hotel review market, or “TravelPost is a head fake meant to pull TripAdvisor into a defensive posture to protect its core business instead of invest in metasearch.” TripAdvisor’s metasearch product received an exceptional review at Brett Synder’s (@crankyflier) CrankyFlier.com, which states that “TripAdvisor has done a lot of things right here.”  Sam highlights five strengths that make this market a good fit for Kayak:

1. World-class product team, led by Paul English
2. Proven abilities.  Sam: “In 2006, Steve Hafner told me that he started Kayak with the goal of “building a better Sidestep, and we succeeded in 12 months.” Two years later, he bought SideStep outright.”
3. SEO Foundation.  Kayak’s age, authority, ranking, and theming already supports an SEO-based strategy.
4. Demographic reviewer data.  TravelPosts own reviews allow for demographic filtering (see Strength 2 below)
5. Competency in aggregating data.

Our perspective is that flight price metasearch is getting increasingly commoditized and its only natural that Kayak extend into hotel metasearch (beyond price comparison).  Tim Hughes (@timothychughes) notes that Yahoo!’s killing of FareChase deals another blow to the metasearch model, an issue that we’ve posted on before.

So how can Kayak play the game differently?  Dennis Schaal (@denschaal) offers some suggestions on how TravelPost can change the game by highlighting review policies of the various sites they feature. And Bart LePoole (@bartlepoole in comments on Sam Shank’s post) offers some thoughts (which I invite him to explain further) on how TravelPost can provide an OpenAPI to hotels to change the game on TripAdvisor.

Strength 2: Consumer-friendly shopping experience

From a consumer user experience standpoint, the re-launch of TravelPost looks excellent. Besides photos, basic refinement controls and the increasingly mandatory Google maps, some of the most compelling features are:

• As with Kayak, TravelPost has an easy-to-use search interface.
• True to their search and ‘buy direct’ mantras, TravelPost prominently displays the hotel web site and phone number. In search enabling direct access to the business is now common because it’s a core consumer need. But this is not common in travel because it is expensive for travel sites because it costs them leads they could otherwise sell.  TripAdvisor doesn’t offer direct access for hotels and Yahoo only offers it for hotels where they don’t sell specific, relevant leads.  This feature might seem esoteric, but it is generally accepted as one of the key consumer features that enabled Google to crush the early search engines like Alta Vista and Inktomi.

TravelPost Direct Access example

• Interestingly TravelPost does make price the visual ‘hero’ like Kayak does, which leads to a more balanced consumer interface where the other features of the hotel are more prominent
• Kayak promised pages uncluttered by ads, and TravelPost delivers, with ads largely constrained to the right hand column.
• Finally, for partners providing reviews, the way TravelPost displays reviews strongly suggests that the review partners will get their fair share of free leads when consumers click through to read the entire review.

Sean O’Neill (@budtravel) of Budget Travel posted on some of the strengths of the new TravelPost:

TravelPost’s most impressive trick: Users can filter for reviews to only read those written by persons like themselves. Only want to see the opinions of travelers aged 45 to 60? Click a link, and that’s what you’ll get. Only want to hear from budget-conscious businesswomen? Filter the search results accordingly. Don’t trust the reviews of a particular website? Just blacklist it, and that site’s user-generated reviews will be banished from your personal search results. Other hotel metasearch sites [referring to UpTake!] can’t do that.

Sean, good use case on “blacklisting” particular Websites.  But don’t you think that risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater for most review sites?  Nevertheless, this demonstrates that TravelPost provides excellent filtering options.

Opportunity For Improvement 1:  Limited Comprehensiveness due to rivalry with Expedia/TripAdvisor Family

Kayak has the right idea, a strong starting position, the competencies required and a talented, proven team with new blood like Brian Harniman and Ross Weber, but we believe their approach could be fundamentally flawed.  These two opportunities for improvement relate to comprehensiveness and to their approach to filtering.

The first opportunity for improvement is that Kayak is not complementary and they are therefore not playing with some of the other hotel players in the eco-system – including the biggest players like Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity and TripAdvisor. Consumers want comprehensive information in one place – the explosion of social media had increased information fragmentation, and consumers currently do 10-12 searches and visit 20+ sites before they book!  To demonstrate comprehensiveness, at UpTake, we pull information from 5,000 sites against TravelPost’s 200. As a result, using the W Hotel in San Francisco as an example, UpTake has more than 460 reviews and 23 photos from seven sources against TravelPost’s 117 reviews and 13 photos from four sources.

UpTake example of comprehensive reviews

Guillaume Thevenot (@hotelblogs but sometimes he doesn’t like The Twitter) noted that Kayak is not the first company to go up “against the almighty TripAdvisor” (list of 5 others on his post) and “Let’s not forget that TripAdvisor has more than 20M reviews with a daily traffic that a lot of online travel start ups would die for. Let’s see how long it will take for TravelPost to come this kind of mass usage and recognition.”  Ric Garrido (@loyaltytraveler) goes further with a quantitative analysis of the rate of hotel review growth at various sites sampling 1 hotel.

Opportunity For Improvement 2: Filtering based on lifestyle and trip type, not just demographics

Second, TravelPost haven’t *yet* done the hard work to help consumers choose relevant reviews or to recommend the right hotel.  Filtering hotels by age and gender is as helpful as filtering by who you are traveling with and why you’re traveling.  For example, if you are a 30-something mother traveling with your kids, reviews written by other family travelers regardless of age and gender are likely to have a lot more relevance then reviews from a 30-something woman traveling with her boyfriend and Airedale terrier.

UpTake’s patented technology allows the consumers to ask for hotels recommendations based on who they are traveling with, or what they want to do rather than simply demographics. For example, even if a review doesn’t say family-friendly, we can tell its family friendly because a mom talks about her 3 year old loved the pool and how the large rooms made it easy with the kids. Similarly if a review uses terms like charming or cozy it would suggest a romantic hotel.

We think UpTake’s technology could be complementary to what TravelPost already can do.  TravelPost could syndicate UpTake’s theme- and trip-type based ratings to help TravelPost users go beyond demographics to filter through hotels based on their specific trip-type.  Scott Hyden (@scotthyden) of STA Travel highlights the opportunity to tackle a myriad niche markets via the metasearch of the future.  TravelPost, UpTake, and even TripAdvisor have a long way to go!

Summary

In summary, Kayak’s relaunch of TravelPost is a smart strategic response to TripAdvisor’s incursion into flight, price metasearch.  It’s consumer experience is good and obviously leverages the core strengths of Kayak.  However, TravelPost’s lack of Expedia/TripAdvisor Group reviews may be a fundamental flaw as it hinders its ability to provide the comprehensiveness it needs to address customer needs.  Finally, as nice as the filtering options are, TravelPost hasn’t done the hard work to enable people to filter based on their specific trip-needs and lifestyle-based preferences.

Your turn!  What do you like about TravelPost?  What advice would you give them? and us?

Related Posts (guest contributor posts are in bold):

• Travel Metasearch Players Are Missing an Opportunity in Niche Markets by Scott Hyden, STA Travel
• A Brief-ish Thing About Metasearch in the UK. by Kevin May, Travolution
• Tripadvisor vs. Kayak Paid Reviews, by Dennis Schall, Travel Industry Media Expert
  
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market, by Sam Shank, Dealbase
  
• Travel Metasearch is done! Long Live TravelMetasearch! by Yen Lee, UpTake
  
• Travel Metasearch is done, by Yen Lee, UpTake
• Review of hotel review metasearch sites by Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• Evolution of Travel Metasearch, by Yen Lee and Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us by Gene McKenna, UpTake
  

UpTake invited a group of industry leaders to participate in a series about the current and future state of metasearch in online travel.  This post was was contributed by Scott Hyden, President of STA Travel.

STA Travel serves a niche market that metasearch sites often underserve.

It goes without saying that the topic generating the most excitement in our business over the past few weeks relates to metasearch. It is certainly interesting, educational, and at times fun to watch the personalities we all know go back and forth with provocative commentary from their perspective. We all owe a collective ‘thank you’ to Kayak, Tripadvisor and UpTake for seeding a conversation that has added some spice to our normally boring and tranquil business. If nothing else, the topic drove more and more industry leaders to open a Twitter account (or to use their previously dormant one) to follow the action. To me, the commentary has accurately captured the slippery slope faced when a brand pays for user review content. However, the other parts of the discussions are internally focused trade-based arguments – I haven’t seen an end-customer comment included in any of the banter that shows they ‘want to see content aggregated from the most 3rd party websites’, or ‘need content from the semantic web to make their purchase decisions’. Of course consumers want comprehensive, unbiased content, but the mechanism used behind the scenes to pull the content is not what drives them to determine that the content is meaningful. They need it to be extremely relevant. If one site’s mechanism is better at doing that, then they have the advantage and that is how the conversation should be framed.

Opportunities exist to capitalize on student travelers' flexibilty

This brings me to my specific point – there are many niche markets out there that are not getting the most relevant content delivered to them. Selfishly, one of those niches is the student market. STA Travel has been in business for 30 years, developing products and services to serve the millions of students generally between the ages of 18-26 years old. Over this history we have shown airlines that we have the ability to move share and fill demand troughs, and as a result we receive unique products to offer to our customers. Speaking specifically to airfares, we can offer students deeply discounted prices, as well as additional flexibility for their tickets (longer maximum stays, cheaper changes, relaxed advance purchase requirements, etc.). While we have these great products, we have had limited success in working with most of the metasearch players for one critical reason – they can’t or won’t work with us to qualify the clicks we would receive.

Student travelers can help fill empty seats

While a couple of sites have worked with us to integrate our fares with content that clarifies our product as ‘for-students-only’, most of the bigger players have been unable or unwilling to do so. Sometimes this relates to the limitations of their user interface, but more often it seems to relate to their focus on other priorities. Whether our participation is in the core search results, in the path that allows the customer to click on a brand or brands and then opens browsers for each, or in a student-specific ‘channel’ tab, we feel the student customer of the metasearch site would benefit. At a time when price spreads across travel sites are shrinking, niche-specific unpublished fares such as ours do in fact provide substantial pricing differentiation. We just can’t justify participating when our clicks come from the likes of 38 year old lawyers who aren’t eligible for our products.

Perhaps the conversation will broaden.

Scott Hyden
President
STA Travel

Related Posts (guest contributor posts are in bold):

• A Brief-ish Thing About Metasearch in the UK. by Kevin May, Travolution
• Tripadvisor vs. Kayak Paid Reviews, by Dennis Schall, Travel Industry Media Expert
  
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market, by Sam Shank, Dealbase
  
• Travel Metasearch is done! Long Live TravelMetasearch! by Yen Lee, UpTake
  
• Travel Metasearch is done, by Yen Lee, UpTake
• Review of hotel review metasearch sites by Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• Evolution of Travel Metasearch, by Yen Lee and Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us by Gene McKenna, UpTake
  

Mark S. Mahaney, Citi’s Director of Internet Research, wrote an excellent summary of Expedia’s rebound and brighter prospects since eliminating the booking fee. A couple of his key points:

1. Cutting the booking fee will cost Expedia about 10% of their profits, but will stop market share losses against Priceline and suppliers, while likely taking share away from Orbitz (where booking fees make up ~60% of profits) and Travelocity if those two agencies don’t match or continue to match Expedia’s move.
2. Unlike other agencies, Expedia has a HUGE advertising/lead generation business in the TripAdvisor media group that generated $280M in revenue in 2008 with margins of ~60%. That constitutes 10% of Expedia’s revenue and 20% of their profit. In a recession, this media business is likely to do very well because suppliers will be looking to buy qualified leads to fill rooms and seats. Also the TripAdvisor team is expanding their offering to give suppliers more options.
3. Interestingly, Mark also points out that online agency share of online travel is stabilizing due to demographic and economic factors. In addition, travelers will continue to migrate their research and buying online (per PhoCusWright), and as a global agency, Expedia should benefit from both trends.

I think there is another important implication of the cut in booking fees and the global economic meltdown. Despite big investments and good progress by the other agencies, Expedia arguably still has the best hotel and packaging platforms. That enables Expedia to treat flights as a loss leader because they can cross-sell hotels or use their market share and packing technology to create great deals for travelers while protecting supplier brands. Expedia’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said as much at the Goldman Sach’s Internet conference (yes, I know I’m mixing banks now – I think that’s a faux pas of some kind) when he said that leisure travel was the only short term option to drive growth, consumers were responding to price reductions, and that Expedia expected ADRs (average daily room rates) to go down – but that Expedia expects to gain hotel share.

Travel ‘happy meals’-- would you like milk or fries with that flight, hotel or car rental?

Hard to argue with the short term results from the financial markets – Expedia stock is up ~$3 to ~$9.5.

The market likes Expedia's elimination of booking fees

It will be interesting to see the longer term implications. Will Expedia force Orbitz into a merger with Travelocity – does Expedia benefit from that? Sure the combined entity will have significant cost savings but it will likely be burdened with debt and integrating two global platforms will likely keep both sides internally focused. Time will tell, but congratulations to Dara & the Expedia team – the booking fee cut was a bold move to take the initiative back.

Related posts:
Expedia’s Booking Fees: The Trigger Point

Travel Metasearch is done! Long live Travel Metasearch!

The following post, written by Kevin May, first appeared on Travolution. We requested he and other travel industry influencers and leaders discuss the future of metasearch.

Metasearch Scene in the UK--A Brief-ish Thing

In the UK the metasearch scene was, until relatively recently, trundling along quite nicely, thank you very much.

Established players such as market leader Travelsupermarket, Skyscanner and a few others had carved out a reasonable but still not earth-shattering corner for themselves in the congested online travel arena.

Others, such as white label providers like Global Travel Market, were also doing well, securing a number of decent partnerships including

Sidestep and then Kayak came along a few years ago and won plenty of plaudits for their noticeably different and, some say, improved functionality and user experience.

Kayak, following the purchase of its closest rival in the US, decided on a different strategy to that in the homeland and closed Sidestep.co.uk quicker than you could say “Ajax-driven sliders”.

Jokes aside, Kayak’s addition to the market caused a reasonable stir, but whereas in the US it had a strong brand and reasonably dominant position, here in the UK it had some big contenders ahead of it.

So this is where we were, let’s say, early-2008.

Bubbling away in the background was a new economy...

However, bubbling away in the background, there were also a number of things in play that would ultimately shape how meta- search is likely to evolve in the UK.

The first was the realization that the economy was going to start bombing from the middle of 2008 onwards.

Whereas just 18 months ago most travel companies were forever talking about the “value” of a product being the determining factor in a purchase, privately many executives started reverting back to the classic “price, price, price” adage.

This, in theory, plays straight into the hands of the metasearch players, for very obvious reasons.

The noises coming from most of the UK players are that business is pretty good. In addition, the affiliate advertising networks are “loving the aggregators”, as one said to me recently.

For airlines and hoteliers, desperate to fill seats and rooms, metasearch is a “quick and dirty route to market”, another executive on the air side told me.

So, given that the economy is boosting the ability of the metasearch engines to raise their profile – and revenues, they would hope – one would assume that the market in the UK would begin to mature.

This is the classic web cycle. New (ish) idea finds its legs, starts running, hopes it’s a marathon rather than a sprint.

Fast forward to late-2010 and the metasearch market in the UK would most likely still be in a similar position as to now (albeit with far higher awareness amongst consumers as a concept).

Future of UK Metasearch in 2010

Travelsupermarket would probably remain the market leader; Skyscanner would be pushing hard behind it with its neat technology and vastly improved interface; and Kayak would be matching the often amusing (and unusual) bravado of its CEO and be snapping away at the heels of those above.

[Kayak has loftier intentions, but without a major branding campaign, some argue it will fall short of reaching the heady heights of the likes of Travelsupermarket within the next 18 months]

Unfortunately, while the economy began falling off a cliff, some folk in Massachusetts decided to develop a metasearch product of their own.

Now most people are saying, retrospectively, that Tripadvisor’s decision to launch a flight meta search engine was always going to happen, it was just a question of when.

Needless to say, now that the service is up and running in the US, and will be in the UK within six months, it would be fair to say that the two/three-year strategies of most meta search engines are now being re-examined.

In other words, the addition of Tripadvisor as potentially a major player in the meta search market will have triggered a fair amount of soul-searching for a number of reasons – some obvious, some less so.

First of all its existing position in the purchase funnel is fundamentally different from the other meta players – and adding flight search spreads its presence into new areas of the food chain.

To be getting consumer eyeballs when they are reading hotel reviews as well as when they are considering how to get to the hotel in the first place means puts Tripadvisor in a very strong position.

This isn’t rocket science

Although the relaunch of Kayak’s Travelpost brand is being labeled in some quarters as a “Tripadvisor killer”, it will have some way to go.

This is primarily – and simply – due to Tripadvisor’s eye-watering traffic volumes. If it can channel just a fair portion of those visitors into playing around with its flight meta search tools then it will immediately have stolen a march on some of the players in the UK.

This actually puts Tripadvisor into the unique position of being the disrupter to the UK meta search arena – the place where, ideally, Kayak wants to be – rather than, with its user review hat on, constantly looking out for disruptors to its existing business.

This is not hyperbole but the addition of Tripadvisor to the meta search arena is probably the most significant moment in the sector’s recent history.

The company will certainly have its own challenges in the UK, not least when it negotiates with airlines which are already in the Expedia OTA stable (bundle deals, anyone?), or coming up with a marketing strategy that, frankly, will need to go beyond buying keywords.

[The latter point is, in fact, the same challenge Kayak has in the UK]

Needless to say, metasearch in the UK has felt like it is on the crest of a wave for a year or two.

But the economy and the addition of a significant new entrant in the guise of Tripadvisor has give the market the jolt it probably needed to go mainstream.

And the encouraging signs for those already in the space is that for the time being there is probably enough room for healthy growth all round.

We are just not quite sure in what order they will line up by the time we get to mid-2010.

Photo Credit:Bubble by fdecomite

Related Posts:

• Travel Metasearch is Done! Long Live Travel Metasearch! by Yen Lee, President, UpTake
• How Kayak can Beat TripAdviosr in the Hotel Review Market, by Sam Shank, CEO of Dealbase.com
• Travel Metasearch-Frenzy or Finale, by Dennis Schaal, Travel News Reporter

UpTake reaches 1 million and launches new home page

This is the release we just posted on the news wire discussing our growth in the past ten months:

In less than a year since its public beta launch in May, 2008, UpTake’s travel and hotel review metasearch site, providing the travel industry’s deepest and broadest database of hotels and attractions, now has more than one million visits per month. It also surpasses all other online travel sites with 5,000 sources, 775,000 hotels and attractions and 20 million opinions and reviews about U.S.travel.

Largest Travel and Hotel Review & Information Site

During the past ten months, UpTake has established itself as the most comprehensive travel & hotel metasearch site, going well beyond hotels to include other lodging such as the most B&Bs, campgrounds and motels, as well as providing the largest database of attractions. UpTake’s database of 5,000 sources is nearly 10 times greater than other travel websites and includes information from sites like TravelPost, Expedia, Orbitz, Fodors, Travelocity, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Yahoo! Travel. In addition, UpTake delivers significantly more information than any other travel site about U.S. travel including 600,000 U.S. attractions and 175,000 U.S. accommodations. With analysis of more than 20 million opinions about U.S. travel from other travelers across the Web, no other travel site comes close to the breadth of opinions offered by UpTake.

Complementary to Other Travel Review Sites

Founded by Yen Lee, former General Manager of Yahoo! Travel, UpTake helps its partners and their products get discovered by travelers. “We’ve been successful in aggregating over 5,000 travel sources because we are committed to being complementary,” said Lee. For review websites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, UpTake does not compete by offering its own travel review community, but instead delivers free organic search traffic to those sites. For other travel metasearch sites like TravelPost, UpTake offers content syndication programs to help them provide richer content to their customers.

About UpTake

Founded in 2006, UpTake has collected and organized more than 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, blogs and articles from across the web about U.S. travel to help travelers to make better decisions about where to go, where to stay and what to do. UpTake uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers’ facts and feelings for many categories of content including hotels, motels, camping, beaches, spas, golf courses, attractions and restaurants etc. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto. More information can be found at www.uptake.com.

Kayak just relaunched TravelPost as a new hotel metasearch site.  Congrats to the TravelPost team.  We know from first hand experience how hard it is to launch a site like this!  We have a lot of respect for the developers, product managers, business development people that made it happen.

However, it seems that their CEO, Steve Hafner, has learned a few lessons from Helicopter Ben Bernanke: writing checks that don’t cash!

After reading their press release, I find it interesting how they’ve decided to launch with:

• Unsubstantiated claim of “most comprehensive”: They claim to be the “most comprehensive hotel information site on the Web.”  Let me indulge in a little “mine is bigger than yours” action for a moment.  How is your 140,000 Worldwide hotels and 200 Websites searched, more comprehensive than UpTake’s 175,000 U.S. accommodations, 600,000 U.S. attractions, from over 5000 Websites?  Check your facts pleez.
• Gratuitous bashing TripAdvisor and other review sites: From the press release: “Consumers and hoteliers are woefully underserved by websites like TripAdvisor.com, who appear to care more about their bottom lines than providing relevant content and a seamless experience.”  Last I checked, hotel review metasearch means aggregating reviews from other sites.  So how does bashing other sites help you get access to the most reviews?  Apparently Steve Hafner, CEO of Kayak, values the PR buzz from throwing TripAdvisor under the bus rather than asking TripAdvisor to syndicate their reviews.  By the way, did you know that TripAdvisor is about 3X larger than any other review site and represents over 30% of the total travel review universe?  Disclosure:  UpTake is a licensee of TripAdvisor’s content.
• Unsubstantiated claim of uniqueness. Uniqueness.The release continues: “TravelPost is the only hotel site to aggregate rates, availability, content and reviews from more than 200 travel sites.”  Wrong!  Looks like TravelPost now has reviews from: Yahoo! Travel, IgoUgo, Perfect Escape, Epinions, Bed&Breakfast.com, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Hilton Hotels, Best Western, and Morgans Hotel Group.  That’s a nice beginning.  But hardly the “most comprehensive” or “the only hotel site to aggregate reviews”.  In fact, we think we already have the same review sources as TravelPost, with the exception of the 547 reviews they’ve crawled from Perfect Escape.
• Some questions for TravelPost. Of the 200 travel sites, how many do you actually crawl reviews from?  Of the review sites you crawl, how many can you actually do your age/gender/reviewer filtering on?
• Time to fire your PR firm.  Oh, you already did. According to PRWeek, Kayak fired their old agency Edelman and issued an RFP for a new one.  PR professionals, it looks like they are looking for an agency for $10k per month to save them from press releases like this one!

OK, UpTake. Stop whining and tell me what you’ve got!

Let me offer some numbers to back up my point here.

Totals:

• 175,000 U.S. accomodations (vs. TravelPost’s 140,000 Worldwide)
• 600,000 U.S. attractions
• 20 mm opinions across all sources (we include ratings, opinions and reviews vs. TravelPost’s 512,323 reviews only)
• 5000+ sources (websites, books, other)

Here’s a small smattering of the 5000+ websites included in UpTake:

• TripAdvisor
• Yahoo
• MyTravelGuide
• Expedia
• VirtualTourist
• Orbitz
• GoCityKids
• Golf.com
• GoSki
• Citysearch
• Hotels.com
• BedAndBreakfast.Com
• Fodors
• Epinions
• OpenList
• Yelp
• SpaFinder
• USA Today
• Many, many more magazines, hotels, and CVBs

I’m not going to make TravelPost’s life too easy by listing the full 5000+ list!   But it appears that we have all the same review sources and many more, with the exception of the 547 reviews on Perfect Escape. We will contact them today to see if they want to join our party here at UpTake!

Again TravelPost, congrats on a great product entry!  And Steve, lets discuss how we can work together to move online travel forward instead of bashing each other to get press!

Given the volume and passion of feedback and questions following my intentionally provocative Travel Metasearch is dead post and collaboration with Dennis Schaal on a similar story, here’s a summary of the feedback and clarification of my hypothesis.

First, I believe “traditional” price-focused flight metasearch in the U.S. is in for a rough time. The price arbitrage opportunities were largely negotiated away during the last few years and online agencies ability to pay the metasearch guys is much lower without booking fees. Not much argument about this.

Second, travel metasearch is going to be much more than about price-based flight metasearch. Or even more then ‘just’ flight metasearch. But there are a number of “traditional” flight metasearch fans who don’t believe that the definition of “travel metasearch” should include products like hotels or hotel reviews.

Third, while price-focused flight metasearch is done, there is room for LOADS of opportunities in flight metasearch – they just aren’t about price arbitrage in the U.S.:

1. Better shopping experiences. Metasearch that delivers a better search experience than supplier sites and agencies, e.g. Kayak will continue to do very well (given the feedback I got to our posts directly and indirectly, I would say that there is pretty strong agreement that – to quote one executive “most of the folks who love Kayak seem to defend them on the basis of UI (user interface), not the actual utility of the results – e.g. getting a better price -which I think bolsters your argument” – Kayak’s search paradigm and singular focus on air – as opposed to cross-selling etc on agency sites – has clearly helped them win share. The initial UIs at TripAdvisor and Fly.com suggest that they understand this well.Better search and shopping experiences will be especially powerful given the complexity of delivering #2.

Fly.com offers three different view and sorting by cabin type

2. Including a la carte options. Clearly one of the biggest trends coming in flight metasearch is that airlines will offer ‘value-added’ options for a fee. Bag check-in, Ryanair’s designed-for-PR charge-for-the-loo, booze, economy plus etc. are the tip of the iceberg but there are more coming – fees for window seats, reserving the seat beside you, extra reward miles etc.  ITA’s new reservation system for Air Canada will accelerate this trend.  Flight metasearch sites who can integrate these options in and still deliver an uncluttered, intuitive search experience will win share as online agencies have older technology and confuse the user interface by cross-selling hotels and packages.  Rick Seaney of FareCompare, “Ala Carte is where air travel purchasing is heading and it will be a challenge for all of us to figure out how to…provide an interface that will allow consumers to shop and compare apples to apples” and Susan Black “As the GDS’s morph into GMSs (Global Merchandising Systems), and can show unbundled product (checked bags, selected preferred coach seating, etc…) it will be interesting to see how this affects metasearch.”

Estimate your fees before you fly

Note: TripAdvisor already has a rudimentary “fees estimator” option

3.International flights. Still a lot of price arbitrage there!

Are there price-based opportunities in the U.S.? Yes, some for the companies that invest in the deep technology to go into the airline reservations systems and dig into itinerary-based, multi-carrier options to find real price differences (e.g. ITA, FareCompare), there will be arbitrage around more complex origin-destination flights (e.g. no matter how deep their technology goes, on direct flights like SFO-LAX or JFK-BOS, there isn’t much to uncover).

Fourth, let’s separate price arbitrage from the search for better value and lower prices. Clearly this frightful global economic meltdown is driving consumers to search for more deals, discounts and value. So consumer price searching will undoubtedly grow even as our overall travel sector declines – after all “only” 18% of consumers currently use travel metasearch engines. So the search for value should be good for the price metasearch engines and deal aggregators like DealBase, ShermansTravel, SmarterTravel, Travelzoo, Voyij etc.

But those who want to survive and thrive are going to need capital – and one or more differentiators beyond lowest price – to stay in the game and to win. Don’t count some of the smaller players out; some of them have nontraditional investor profiles – like Mobissimo and FareCompare – have flexible capital structures, strong organic growth and are profitable.

Finally, travel metasearch is in its infancy and will evolve past being just about flights. Its future will include “cracking the code” on price opacity on packages, deals and complex products; sorting through the parameters and choices on hotels; and deciphering the folksonomy used in the explosion of reviews and blogs – especially around hotels.

Related Posts:

• Travel Metasearch is done
  
• Review of hotel review metasearch sites
• Evolution of Travel Metasearch
• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market

We Westerners like a shower after climbing a mountain with 10,000 of our closest friends.

One day in China my husband and I climbed a mountain with thousands of other vacationers and learned how very different we Americans are from people in developing countries.

At the end of the warm October day, when we had climbed step after step cheek-by-jowl up Tai Shan with so many strangers, we wanted nothing more than a shower. We were crestfallen to find out that none of the mountaintop inns had showers. Instead we were lent a red plastic basin and showed to an outdoor faucet; the only running water for all the establishment’s clientele.

With the help of our Chinese friends, I politely asked the other occupants of our dormitory if we could have a few minutes alone to wash. Obliging but perplexed, the other climbers left the room, as our Chinese friend told them, “Americans take a shower every day.”

This was obviously a curious fact for him and his audience. Curious to me was that none of the other folks there wanted to freshen up after climbing a mountain in the sun. In fact, our Chinese friends who accompanied us on the trip didn’t bring a change of clothes for the whole weekend.

I thought of this cultural gap today when I read that Responsibletravel.com is urging people to think about how tourism impacts the water supply in developing nation destinations. The UN’s World Water Day is Sunday, March 22. Given my China experience, I have no trouble believing that traveling Westerners do use several times as much water as a local person would in many countries. What I have trouble with is figuring out how to narrow that gap to avoid decimating the environment of countries we visit.

It’s not just daily showers. There are the huge, grassy golf courses I saw going up in the deserts of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, not to mention the swimming pools and water parks we so love.

So what to do? Water and vacation seem to go hand in hand, and I find myself having a hard time getting excited about a dry holiday.

Justin Francis, Responsibletravel.com’s managing director, is quoted on BreakingTravelNews.com suggesting hotel pricing that rewards clients for using less water. But there must be more that could be done.

And do we only have to be conservative when visiting areas that already have water shortages? Later this spring I’ll be visiting one of the Wisconsin Dells’ famously huge water parks, right on the currently re-hydrating Lake Delton. Wisconsin is teeming with water resources, so is it ok to splash away? Not to mention following the stern advice we’re sure to see about showering before we get in the water?

Photo by clgregor, used via Creative Commons license.