Travel Industry

In June 2009, New York based Oyster Hotel Reviews launch was announced, backed with $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures. Oyster’s plan: to provide professional hotel reviews for consumers, written by mainstream travel journalists after in-person visits to the property.

Oyster Hotel Reviews

They promptly hired 20 reporters and at least three editors, who were sent out to stay in and review hotels with all-expenses paid trips.

In September, Bain agreed to an extended $4 million Series A round, bringing the total to $10.4 million.

But $10 million doesn’t get you what it used to. As the year draws to a close, Oyster has dramatically changed its trajectory, with 17 staffers being laid off, including over half the reporters. Elie Seidman, Oyster CEO and co-founder, says the layoffs are part of a plan to focus on “winning in the markets we’ve already covered” and slow down the rate of new market coverage.

Fact remains that slow growth wasn’t part of the announced plans in September. This chapter in the Oyster story is one we have seen before: failure of travel editorial based exclusively on a direct-to-consumer model. Examples of prior failed editorial efforts: Gorp (now owned by Orbitz) and most recently in the rise and fall of Professional Travel Guide (formerly – owned by travel content giant Northstar Travel Media).  The issue isn’t whether a travel editorial site can create a compelling experience. They can. It’s that a direct-to-consumer (only) business model can’t support the editorial costs.

And perhaps direct-to-consumer (only) can’t even support the operating costs of a site when they get the content free. Despite getting “free” content from Northstar. Professional Travel Guide was unsuccessful.

Let’s clearly separate editorial-for-consumers-only businesses from other successful travel editorial businesses that are doing well.  NorthStar’s core business model is solid. They, and others like Frommers and Fodors have built lasting brands and profitable business models based on licensing and book sales. Others like 10Best and wcities are profitable solely licensing their content.  Supplier licensing drives the business model of other editorial companies like VFM Leonardo and Tripfilms.

As Oyster starts its search for additional funding and embarks on the path to profitability, it will rekindle the debate over user generated content vs. professional/editorial content (see Dennis Schaal, Troy Thompson, Pauline Frommer, Robert Flynn).

Oyster Hotel Reviews was differentiating itself from TripAdvisor as a source of authentic hotel reviews.

Oyster vs Tripadvisor

Professional Travel Guide’s failure and Oyster’s slowdown will likely tilt the favor in favor of the UGC proponents {disclosure: as a semantic search engine that searches over 5,000 sites including editorial sites like Frommers and Fodors as well as consumer UGC sites like Yahoo! Travel, TripAdvisor, we are agnostic in this debate – other then knowing different consumers want both types of content at different times but generally most want the ‘gestalt’ necessary to make a confident decision}.

The blogosphere hasn’t been kind to Oyster, but Oyster’s reviews are of very high quality and we hope Oyster is able to raise additional funding and create a viable business.

What do you think? Can standalone consumer-only travel editorial sites create a viable business? Or does new travel largely come from consumers in the future?

This is Part III of the Travel Trend posts we’re doing on holiday hotel booking trends in major metro areas, based on UpTake hotel data for room rates and availability. Part I was focused on San Francisco and Part II on New York. In this post, we’re looking at Chicago.

Hyatt Regency Chicago

The first test data sample was taken on June 19, with successive samples all the way upto Aug 30. We’ll be looking at the holiday booking patterns in Chicago for the 4th of July and Labor Day weekends.

All hotels included in the test are 3 or 4 star hotels in Chicago, or in locations suitable for drives out of the Windy City, like Lake Geneva and Wisconsin Dells.

As of June 19, Chicago was still asleep, in so far as it concerns rushing to book hotels for the 4th of July. Room rates for non-holiday weekends booked 4 weeks in advance were higher than the rates for the 4th of July. 

Rate Checks

The Hyatt Regency Chicago was offering a weekend rate of $203/night and $189/night for the 4th of July. For the Omni Chicago, it was $249/$199. For the Hilton Chicago on Michigan Avenue, it was $269/$161. 

It was the same for Lake Geneva and Wisconsin Dells. The Bella Vista Suites in Lake Geneva was offering weekend rates of $349/night as compared to $192 for the 4th of July.  At the Antiques & Lace Inn in Wisconsin Dells, it was $140/$120.

Sold Out by June 26th for the 4th of July

The next sample on June 26 showed Chicago hotels sold out straight. Unlike San Francisco and New York, there is no in-between period in Chicago where rates go up over a period of time before the hotels end up booked solid for the holiday.

So if you’re looking to book Chicago for the 4th of July, do it in the week leading upto but not later than June 19, and you’re still going to get the best rate, as far as timing is concerned.

Labor Day rates remain steady without increase until late August

Moving on to Labor Day, we have data samples from seven rate checks taken in between the 4th of July and Aug 30. In six out of seven samples, rates in Chicago hotels were rock steady – absolutely no movement upwards.

Even in the sample taken on Aug 18, the Hyatt Regency, Omni and Hilton were offering rates of $119, $157 and $134 respectively for Labor Day – all much lower than the non-holiday weekend booking rates. And it was about the same in Wisconsin Dells and Lake Geneva.

The bookings finally started picking up in between Aug 20-30, with hotels in Wisconsin Dells and Lake Geneva jacking up Labor Day rates over the weekend booking rates, which showed Chicago natives booking late for a Labor Day weekend outside the city.

The Bella Vista Suites in Lake Geneva set a $251 rate for Labor Day, in comparison to weekend rates of $193, and for the Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells, it was $190/$170. 

All in all, Chicago hotel bookings for the 4th of July have a cut-off date of June 19, beyond which you’ll be seeing sold out signs, and Labor Day isn’t that big a deal for the hotels. It does pick up a bit for the surrounding getaway drive locations, but only after Aug 18. So if you’re looking at a Labor Day in Chicago, then last minute reservations won’t cost anything extra.

Photo courtesy Hyatt Hotels Corp.

This post is part II of a series we’re doing on detecting travel trends and holiday weekend hotel booking patterns, based on an analysis of data collected by UpTake. In Part I, we saw the trends and patterns in the San Francisco market. In this post, we’ll be looking at the New York area data, which shows significant differences as compared to San Francisco.

W New York Union Square

The first data sample was taken on June 19, and the results of successive rate checks were noted down all the way through the 4th of July weekend and onwards to-date, leading up to Labor Day. The hotels included are all 3 or 4 star hotels in New York City, and spots ideal for drives out of New York City, like the Hudson Valley and Cape May, NJ.

Rates for the 4th of July weekend at hotels in New York City start creeping up surprisingly late. As of June 19, the 4th of July weekend rates at the W New York Union Square and The Benjamin Hotel were actually less than the weekend rates offered for bookings 4 weeks on. At the Sofitel New York, both the weekend rates and the 4th of July rates were exactly the same.

The same thing happened again, in the next sample taken on June 26. What does this mean? To make sense out of this, you have to look at the data for the rest of the New York region. In samples taken for both Cape May, NJ and hotels in the Hudson Valley, most units were completely sold out - as of June 19 – for 4th of July stays, which made the June 26 sample redundant.

In places perfect for getaways from the City – where bookings were still available as of June 19, such as the The Bell House in Hillsdale, rates were at a premium  -$175 for 4th of July bookings, as compared to $150 for weekend bookings 4 weeks on. 

This heavy demand in areas surrounding New York City, taken in conjunction with the lack of demand in New York City itself, suggests that during the 4th of July weekend, more people actually leave the City, than come in to visit. Mayor Bloomberg might want to dispute this notion, but numbers don’t lie.

Moving on to the Labor Day bookings, the trends are much brighter – and faster – for New York City. In the previous post, we saw that the cutoff date for Labor Day bookings in the San Francisco market is August 6 – beyond which the prices start going up beyond standard rates.

For New York, the cut-off date starts much earlier. In five successive rate checks conducted between June 19 and July 20, the Labor Day weekend rates for New York hotels held steady at rates less than advance booking rates for non-holiday weekends. But in the sample taken on July 26, the Labor Day rates for all sampled hotels in New York City shot up. 

The W New York Union Square offered $249 nightly weekend rates and $344/night for the Labor Day weekend. For the Sofitel New York, it was $225/$265.

Rates outside the City – in the Hudson Valley and in Cape May, NJ – did not go up for Labor Day. On the contrary, Labor Day rates at NYC getaway hotspots like the Albert Steven Inn in Cape May actually dropped to $165  in comparison to weekend rates of $210. Rates at the aforementioned Bell House in Hillsdale remained the same ($150) as weekend rates.

This means that less New Yorkers go out of the City for Labor Day, as compared to the 4th of July. The overall inference here is that New York City’s hotel booking patterns depend not only on incoming visitors to the City, but also heavily depend on the vacation patterns of NYC residents. Why this is so a matter we’ll discuss in a forthcoming post.

Photo courtesy Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

UpTake delivers hotel reviews and information from across the web

UpTake is an enormous warehouse bursting at the seams with hotel information.

But we wondered, as travelers’, what is going on with room rates ? We decided to painstakingly create a snapshot of  hotel rates in the U.S.  to determine when a traveler must stop procrastinating and book a room to get the best rate and to have a selection of places to stay during popular three day weekends.

How did we define our snapshot?  It  includes hotels with a 3 or 4 star rating (as defined by Expedia)  in major metro areas and hotels within driving trips to popular destinations from each city. It does not include deals or packages and the hotels had to have their own site for ease in rate checking. We then looked at travel booking scenarios.

We wondered, should we book three months out? A week before stay? What about the impact of destination choice? Is the East Coast more difficult than the West Coast versus the Midwest?

What about a combination of factors – location+holiday weekend+booking window? For example – Which is more difficult for a last minute booking – New York for the 4th of July or Napa Valley for Labor Day?

First we chose the cities and drive destinations:

Monterey Plaza Hotel offers a great hotel experience

1. San Francisco with driving trips to
• Lake Tahoe
• Napa
• Monterey

2. Manhattan with driving trips to
• Hudson Valley
• Cape May
• Atlantic City, New Jersey
• Mystic, Connecticut

3. Chicago with driving trips to
• Wisconsin Dells
• Lake Geneva

4. San Diego
• Anaheim (Disneyland)

This snapshot is, of course, just a sampling of what’s available in the market for consumers, but we  our data provides  insight into the hotel rate market in the US,  where it seems everyone is suddenly on a budget or looking for value.

Let’s start with San Francisco, and each day this week, we’ll provide a rate-check review for another market.
We started the test on June 19th, when all rooms were available in San Francisco and surrounding destinations- except for Harrah’s in Tahoe – for the 4th of July weekend. Rates were significantly jacked up in Monterey for the 4th of July weekend, but not as much in San Francisco and Napa Valley. For example, on June 19th, the first week we officially began tracking, we compared rates four weeks out versus the 4th of  July weekend.  In the three hotels in Monterey, the price differences were startling:

• Intercontinental,  The Clement Monterey: four weeks from June 19th it was $270 per night, July 4th it soared to an incredible $499
• Monterey Plaza Hotel and Spa: at 4 weeks, a room night was $220, on July 4th weekend it peaked at $555
• Portola Hotel & Spa:  4 weeks a room night was $209, on July 4th weekend a room night flew to a high of $339.

At these rates, we recommend you stay home, light some sparklers and go a few weeks later.

The continued sampling of room rates, all the way up to Aug 30, proved to be much more interesting with reference to bookings for the Labor Day weekend.

Booking rates for the Labor Day weekend held steady during seven separate rate checks taken in between June 19 and Aug 6. The samples taken in between Aug 6 – 30, however, showed rates increasing  as we neared Labor Day. For example;

On June 26th, if you booked through the hotel site, the rates were:

• Marriott Timber Lodge , the room rates was $189 per night
• Harrah’s Lake Tahoe the lowest room rates was  $149  on Friday, but skyrocketed to $459 on the Saturday
• Harvey’s Tahoe the room rates varied from $119 on Friday and then up to $329 on Saturday

On August 18:

• Marriott Timber Lodge was still available but at $269, an $80 increase
• Harrah’s Lake Tahoe was  sold out for the entire weekend, but had isolated nights available from $149 to $359
• Harvey’s Tahoe had rooms varying in price, depending on the night from $ 119 to a high rate of $469, which is slightly higher than when we looked in June’s for Labor Day rates.

But 0n August 30, 2009, the week before Labor Day weekend, rooms were sold-out in two of the Tahoe hotels, except the Marriott, which held steady  at $269 per night.

Also during the same period (Aug 6-18), the sold-out signs started popping up all over the place, led by hotels in Tahoe. Tahoe is also the first to start hiking prices, followed by Napa Valley, Monterey and then San Francisco.

Based on this data, you can put off booking for the Labor Day weekend in and around San Francisco until the first week of August without having to pay a premium, but not beyond Aug 6. You are officially too late.

Next up, we’ll take a look at the data for the New York market.

Photo by Brian Solis via flickr.

Sometimes start-ups fail because they can’t raise enough capital, but it’s usually because they either don’t execute or because demand and competition materializes (or doesn’t) differently than expected. Sometimes it’s because of an investor-management disconnect that leads to failure despite good execution.

As outsiders, we don’t know why PTG will soon be closing their doors.

We don’t have any proprietary or insider information, but we do think they have (we are always a little slow and too optimistic, so we’re going use present tense :

• a compelling vision of providing professional content (but not bookings) to help consumers who want unbiased help,
• an accomplished management team,
• a beautiful and easy-to-use site,
• unique content,
• and most important of all – traction on consumer acquisition.

According to Compete.com, PTG has more than twice the traffic of the much more well-known Tripit, Travelmuse or Nileguide. And the new professional review service that launched with much ado – oyster.com is just getting started.

According to Compete.com, PTG has twice the traffic of better known sites

So, with better growth than other travel start-ups of the 2007 vintage (unfair to compare oyster.com to those sites) and easily monetized hotel traffic, why is PTG shutting down? An attorney for PTG and it’s management team, Edmund Novotny, told Tomio Geron at VentureWire, “The impending shutdown of the company is a result of the economy…Everyone wants the company to succeed…Simple market forces forced it down.”

Why is Edmund Novotny involved? Because, according to Tomio Geron at VentureWire, some of the minority investors are suing the company’s management and Boston Ventures for $20 million, alleging fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty and a number of other charges.

We clearly are not in a position to comment on the legal situation. We are surprised that given PTG’s growth, attractive market niche, and Peter Nicas’s (PTG’s CEO) accomplished past that PTG couldn’t raise more capital, but given the large number of travel start-ups fund-raising, perhaps it’s a sign of tough times ahead.

We want to congratulate Peter, Sheila and the rest of the PTG team on building a great product, and we are disappointed that PTG will not continue to address the needs of the consumer segments that want professional content.

BTW, I hope take a moment to see the site that the PTG team built, but if not, to save you a trip to what may soon be the internet archives:

Professional Travel Guide's beautiful home page

And a detail page, all sites can envy:

PTG's Miami shopping detail page for bookstores

They created an intuitive hotel page:

Professional Travel Guide's hotel well designed hotel page

Geron also confirmed with Nicas that PTG  ”is seeking a buyer and may shut down at the end of August.”  (Looks like they missed that deadline.) We hope they find that elusive buyer and the site continues to keep their doors wide open.

PhoCusWright

PhoCusWright has published the Top 10 Travel Technology Trends for 2009. Every year, PhoCusWright takes a fresh look at the technologies and innovations that have the potential to drive change in the travel, tourism and hospitality in this annual publication.Each of the 10 trends from this report, listed below, has been weighed by PhoCusWright experts for its business value and potential to change the face of travel.

Bob Offutt, senior technology analyst and editorial director, Technology Edition, explained that “Innovation is at the very heart of the travel industry-from the beginnings of air travel and global hotel brands to GDSs and OTAs. These ten technology trends will reshape the way consumers search shop and buy travel.”

1. Despite Market Woes, Pockets of Investment Still Exist
2. The Entire Trip Experience Will Be “Informationized”
3. Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing and Open Source Spawn a New Flock of Innovators
4. Suppliers (Finally!) Provide Personalized Shopping/Booking Tools
5. Technologies Will Continue to Converge
6. A Flood of New Mobile Travel and Location-Based Applications Come to Market
7. Advertising Technology Transforms Travel Distribution
8. Still Searching…for Better Search
9. Democratization of Supply Levels the Playing Field
10. Business Intelligence and Analytics Move to the Forefront

The complete article, with technology overviews, in-depth strategic implications and examples of each trend, is available here (purchase required), but I’ll give you a sneak peek at the kind of stuff you’ll find inside.

The first trend, about investment, points out that 23% of private equity companies, 5% of venture capitalists and 25% of other investors are actually planning to increase investment in the travel sector in 2009. According to their survey results, investors still believe there is plenty of room for innovation, considering the large gap between Travel 1.0 and Travel 2.0 functionality.

Examples cited for this trend include the funds raised by AdventureLink, TVtrip, Uptake and Tripwolf (when I started writing this post, I had no idea Uptake was mentioned in the report). Summary of it is that if you have the confidence in your innovation/product, now is the time to hit the road, so to speak.

The second trend, about the trip experience being informationized, details the improvements and opportunities in local information access tools and content, which have enabled service providers to hang on to travelers even mid-trip, for things like local transport, restaurant reservations, trip changes or cancellations, etc. Leveraging existing content with GPS, tools from Google and the abilities of devices like Apple’s iPhone has resulted in the opening up of a huge local content market, and provides more opportunities for offering services from the time you leave home on a trip until you return.

And this area of development is also benefiting from additional trends that are improving the ability to rapidly deploy new capabilities, like Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing and acceptance of Open Source in production applications.

We’re on to trend three here, and if I go on, PhoCusWright won’t take kindly to my considering all their hard work as open source, so… if you want to read the rest, you can get the full report here – http://www.phocuswright.com/report/09techtrend

Matt Gross is going to have a lot more company (and readers) soon, because recession chic is in and it is now fashionable to be a frugal traveler. Sure, companies are getting tight-fisted about travel expenses, but the key driver for the explosive growth of budget travel is the McCarthyist public condemnation of those flaunting corporate largesse.

Budget Terminal

Mary Ann Akers, Sleuth for the Washington Post, reports that Obama administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice are flying coach instead of first class.

And the ripple effect of the AIG and Wells Fargo junkets has spread as far as the Retirement Fund Board in Contra Costa, CA. The Contra Costa Times reports that even as the fund lost an estimated $1.3 billion in the first 10 months of 2008, the board was busy jetting around the state and country for a total of 90 trips at locations ranging from Lake Tahoe to New Orleans, often at swank hotels with golfing excursions and other activities. Even worse, the article ends by listing all the junkets planned by the board in the near future.

Luxury retreats on public or corporate funded junkets are so unfashionable that even the travel expenditure of a small retirement board in a corner in California has become a major national story. If these conference attendees had been staying at some small motels in Palm Springs instead of a luxury resort in Lake Tahoe, they wouldn’t be in so much hot water now.

My point here is that even if you have the money to spend on traveling in style, you can’t do it nowadays. Which is why luxury hotels are in panic mode while budget hotels and motel chains are gearing up for an expanded presence.

Late last month, there was a Best Western Business Travel Summit in Toronto, and participants high-lighted how their respective companies are adjusting to the changed scenario. Dorothy Dowling, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Best Western International, said that “Best Western requires its hoteliers to provide complimentary Internet and local phone calls, and many are choosing to offer free breakfast and parking, too. This positions us very favorably with travel managers who are cutting costs in an aggressive way.”

And always first on the draw, the New York Times turns necessity into trendy fashion, with an article about recessionistas – a word which, according to the NYT’s Natasha Singer “reflects the efforts of fashion and beauty publicists to spin the economic downturn as an attractive retail trend.”

Daniel Levine, who analyzes social trends at the Avant-Guide Institute, told Reuters at the recently concluded New York Times Travel Show that “It’s not about hedonism any more.” And he added that destinations which offer “experiences that speak to ‘recession chic’ values are going to do well.”

The recession chic trend, for better or for worse, has now been ’spun’ out from New York’s fashion world to the entire travel industry.

Photo by StarvingFox via flickr (creative commons).