People seem to like how Bing Travel puts you on the fast track from a search to a plane ticket.

Yesterday I shared my first impressions of Microsoft’s new search site Bing and the important role of Bing Travel within that site. Today, I’m looking at other people’s reactions.

Because I have a short attention span, I started with Twitter. Reactions there are pithy, thanks to the 140-character limit. I saw a lot of generally positive comments about Bing Travel, and the one thing mentioned most was the fare predictor.

“I am sold on BING – totally sweet. Especially the travel predictor. It tells you whether to buy or wait,” tweets Scott Harvey of Columbus, Ohio.

That’s the word from the masses. What do the experts think?

Reviewer Ryan Singel of Wired.com cited travel as one of the “gems” of Bing. Like the masses on Twitter, he likes the fare predictor. He also likes the fact that the travel tab “puts you in a full-service reservation system.” Jane Engel, assistant travel editor at the Los Angeles Times, notes that Bing Travel will also have high-quality original content on its blog, from travel guru Pauline Frommer and FareCast “fareologist” Joel Grus.

“One of the things that we really enjoy about Microsoft Bing is the Travel tool,” writes James Anderson, of Tech Fragments, who said the new site’s fare search is actually better than Expedia or other travel search sites. Anderson particularly likes the ability to change travel dates using the slide bar.

And yes, Anderson, too, said the price predictor was his favorite feature of Bing Travel. He enjoyed the ability to easily browse fare history using this service.

In general it appears that reactions to Bing in general are mixed, but Bing Travel is widely seen as one of the best features. Within Bing Travel, the price predictor has the most “wow” factor, which is kind of funny since the price predictor was available under its original name of FareCaster long before Bing debuted.

Photo by tacvbo, used via Creative Commons license.

Cupertino, CA based Voyij (www.voyij.com/) is a new travel site which offers a vast collection of deals, special offers and sales. Voyij’s founders are all former members of the Sidestep team. Sidestep was acquired by Kayak in 2007 for almost $200 million.

Voyij

In their own words – Voyij allows you to discover travel deals and sales you didn’t know existed or search for the best deals by the criteria you choose – all in one place. If you’re an open-ended price conscious consumer poking around at various sites and looking for the best deals offered up by multiple destinations and travel providers, Voyij wants you to come check them all out in one place.

The way Voyij works is that you start off with where you are, and from there on, it’s a process of discovery and drilling down to exactly what you want. Typing in your departure airport will trigger a listing of all kinds of deals for all kinds of destinations, dates (from immediate to upto 3 months off), and travel providers.

From there on, it’s a matter of filtering the results into something you’re interested in. And the set of filters Voyij offers does seem pretty useful. Choose one of either flight, hotel or vacation - and the results get filtered, and you also get a second set of filters, which include price, travel dates, top destinations, duration of stay, hotel star ratings, etc.

The home page also offers other ways to start the search for deals, including destination specific deal pages and themed vacation experiences (beach vacations, fishing vacation deals, etc.).

But the Voyij from discovery to deal isn’t exactly a smooth ride, as of now. There’s lots they can do to improve. For instance, one of the things that drove me batty was that everytime I touched one of the check-boxes in the second filter set mentioned above, the whole thing would start reloading again based on that one choice. That’s ‘forcing’ me to discover, even if I want to check all the boxes and go straight to the final choices.

And if you look at Voyij from a travel industry point of view, that opens a whole new can of worms – there’s the history with SideStep and Kayak and meta-search, the funding (or lack thereof – as yet), and the process for aggregating all these thousands of deals in one place.

Dennis Schaal’s articles about Voyij in Travelweekly and his blog clearly spotlight these shortcomings. Dennis quotes Voyij CEO Brent Stewart as saying that “Voyij had to launch to build up traffic so it could gain credibility with travel suppliers, and only now is beginning to reach out to them to discuss partnerships.”  

Tim Hughes pushes hard on the timelines and acceptability of Sidestep execs wading back into meta-search so soon – Kayak acquired Sidestep in Dec 2007. Voyij was founded in Jan 2008, and work on the product started in March 2008. 

And it’s not like they’re doing something trail-blazing. There’s plenty of established players like Travelzoo and start-ups like Dealbase already aggregating deals. Dealbase, which was launched in Nov 2008, also crawls the web to create a database of hotel deals, special offers and packages.

And funnily enough, Dealbase founder Sam Shank sold his previous startup (Travelpost) to Sidestep, which was then acquired by Kayak. The point here is that these two companies are on parallel tracks, and Dealbase seems to be chugging along pretty well. In fact, Dealbase just landed $1 million in Series A funding last month.

Which brings us to the question of Voyij’s non-existent funding. If I hadn’t known their Sidestep pedigree, I’d have said that Voyij is being run by a bunch of geeks who haven’t paid too much attention to the other aspects. But we do know, and they have a proven track record of massive success.

Faced with this contradiction, I poked around some more, and here’s what seems to have happened – Brent Stewart (Sidestep Co-founder) is currently listed as the co-Founder, President and the “biz dev guy” at Voyij, according to their About page. Paul Kim (Sidestep UI Engineering Manager) is simply listed as Co-founder, and so is Nick Atkins (Sidestep Software Architect). But a July 2008 funding pitch in the San Jose Business Journal lists Paul Kim as the CEO and Nick Atkins as the co-founder, with no mention of Stewart.

Brent Stewart, Nick Atkins & Paul Kim

What I’m leading upto is that Kim and Atkins did a great job with the site even without funding - and Brent Stewart was then brought in late to bolster the management side. Stewart is now talking to venture capitalists about first round financing, reaching out to travel partners, and the launch publicity and hype was pitch-perfect.

I got an email from their publicist on May 13th, which said that this unnamed site - with Sidestep alumni, $200 million, thousands of deals… was about to launch the next day, and did I want to know more about it? It was intriguing enough that I had to bite, and so apparently, did a lot of others. Like I said, great launch.

So maybe it would be all right to cut them some slack, and give them some time to deliver on the promise and potential that Voyij offers.

On May 21, 2009, in the case of Keck v. Graham Hotel Sys., Inc., the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling which could go a long way to eliminating racial prejudices and practices in hotels.

Racism

The Court ruled that a racism lawsuit filed by Devon and Alfreda Keck against the Kensington Court Hotel (formerly Crowne Plaza) in Ann Arbor, MI, could proceed, reversing a ruling by a District Court which had thrown out the lawsuit.

It’s a long story, but the summary of it is that Alfreda and Devon Keck were set to be married on Oct 8, 2005, and they were looking for wedding reception venues in 2004. After choosing the Kensington Court Hotel, they were given a run-around for 3 months – seven walk-in visits to the Hotel, left numerous telephone messages, filled out two Inquiry forms, and two holds on their desired reception date – and finally had to give up without getting to meet the hotel’s wedding specialist.

So they filed a complaint with the Fair Housing Center of Southeastern Michigan. As part of their investigation, the Center sent four ‘pairs’ of testers over a period of a few months to the hotel. Each pair was alike, except for race – one being Caucasian and the other African-American. So, if the hotel was free of racism, they would ideally have either have accepted or rejected each pair.

In 3 out of the 4 tests, the hotel gave a brush-off to the African-American tester, and tried to book the Caucasian tester. But the District Court threw out the lawsuit on grounds that the Kecks were not able to prove that they were treated differently from other couples during the same period. That was because the hotel refused to hand over records of all wedding contracts entered into during the period in question.

The District Court ignored the tests, and the fact that the hotel was refusing to clarify the matter by handing over its records. Instead, they accepted the hotel’s explanation of ‘corporate transition’. And now, when the Appeals Court asked for the documents, the hotel is saying they don’t have any records.

It’s pretty clear and apparent the Hotel is trying to pull a fast one here, and the Appeals Court thinks so to, which is why they greenlighted the trial, and the hotel now has to convince a jury. And this long-delayed trial sets a precedent for suing hotels which still harbor racist prejudices, but until now have been able to get away with it.

Microsoft wants its new search portal to be your on-ramp to travel.

Here on UpTake’s blogs, we like to think that the world revolves around travel.

Turns out, Microsoft thinks so too. If not, why would Travel be the only real topic search on the front page of Microsoft’s new search site, Bing? The Bing preview site starts with a text search window, just like someone whose name Microsoft surely wouldn’t mention but which rhymes with “Boogle.” Then you can choose from vertical searches of images, videos, shopping, news and maps — all the typical Web portal stuff. But right at the bottom of the list, there it is: Travel.

Wow. I knew that planning travel was one of the top reasons to go online — that’s why I blog for UpTake, with opinions and information about 775,000 hotel and attractions on its site. But I’m surprised that Microsoft takes travel as seriously.

Dennis Schaal, who blogs at Online Travel Riffs and Notes, speculates that Microsoft makes travel such a big part of its new portal because searching for flights is one area where Google or Yahoo have NOT established deeply entrenched leads, and where Microsoft has the goods to really present a better user experience than anything out there.

“There is just much more meat on the bone in travel searches using Bing in contrast to Google and Yahoo, largely because of Microsoft’s acquisition of Farecast in April 2008,” writes Schaal, who also serves as Travel Weekly’s tech editor.

As I wrote last week, one thing that Microsoft has in travel that Yahoo and Google don’t is Farecast, a travel search company it acquired last year. And the one thing Farecast has that others don’t is that nifty “fare predictor” — when I search Bing Travel for flights from Chicago to San Francisco, it tells me right away that fares are likely to stay steady or sink, so I might as well wait.

Aside from the fare predictor, searching for flights on Bing Travel doesn’t seem that different from searching on the big Microsoft competitors, except that it just might be a little better. Bing will send you to a variety of outside booking companies, depending on which is cheapest — the results I got were either Orbitz or the individual airline Web site. The same search on Yahoo and Google sent me to one specific partner for booking — Yahoo to Travelocity, Google to Expedia. When I searched for ORD-SFO flights, Bing found much cheaper ones, because it included airlines not listed in Expedia and Travelocity. Bing started out at $247 on AirTran, while $308 was the lowest fare found by both Yahoo/Travelocity (on US Airways) and Google/Expedia (American, Alaska or Continental).

So maybe Bing Travel is a little better than Yahoo Travel or Google’s travel search functionality. The problem is, I don’t know anyone who goes to Yahoo, Microsoft OR Google to search for flights. They go straight to Hotwire, Travelocity, Kayak.com, Hotwire or the airline Web sites.

Is Microsoft’s new offering compelling enough to get people to change that behavior? Well, the Bing.com entry point starts out with a very nice photo that changes each day, making the site much more visually appealing than minimalist Google or overly-cluttered everything else. And I CAN see hitting Bing Travel just for the Fare Predictor, and then staying around to search for my flight because, what the heck, I’m there already. The first few times I try it, I would do my own searching around at some of the travel sites I mentioned above, to make sure that Microsoft isn’t missing a better deal. If they CONSISTENTLY find the best one, well, that would be a motivating factor to change my behavior.

And consumers DO change their Web habits. After all, a few years ago I would have typed in MapQuest every time I wanted online directions, even though I knew Google had maps too. Nowadays, like so many people, my habit has shifted to just using Google maps.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at what other folks’ reactions have been to Bing and Bing Travel.

Photo by -Sundance Kid-, used via Creative Commons license.