Hotel and Travel Deals Blog

Our fearless leader, Sam Shank, presented at the Travel Distribution Summit 2009, North America, this week on a panel discussing travel comparison sites. View his slides on what’s broken in the model today, and what needs to be done to fix it.
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I had a chance to talk with the companies that were on the TravelCom panel with me last week in Atlanta and ask them their predictions for the travel industry in the next 12 months:

Thanks to Gregg at TripIt, Kevin at TravelMuse and Elliott at UpTake. We’ll check back in 12 months and see how we all did!

UpTake’s Elliott Ng interviewed our CEO, Sam Shank, at the TravelCom 2009 conference. Check out Elliott’s handiwork!

Sam Shank – CEO/Founder of DealBase.com from UpTake Networks on Vimeo.

With new flight metasearch engines from TripAdvisor and Travelzoo, and some great discussions about travel metasearch on UpTake and Dennis Schaal’s blog, there’s a consensus emerging that the future of travel metasearch is providing a user experience that simplifies a la carte pricing (baggage fees, drink fees, etc). These same people and many of my industry friends are convinced that flight metasearch’s revenue per visit is set to decline dramatically, as OTAs are not charging booking fees and thus cannot pass this revenue upstream in the form of lucrative CPC payments.

I thought a lot about flight metasearch monetization strategies when I was at SideStep, especially how to make money if OTAs were no longer the cash cow. I surmised that metasearch revenue must ultimately come from the entity at the end of the food chain – the airlines themselves. But the challenge is that major airlines feel entitled to the bookings originating from metasearch engines (as evidenced by the AA/Kayak dispute last year). Worse, airlines are not profitable, so getting them to write checks is no small feat.

My proposed solution is for flight metasearch engines to deliver airlines incremental revenue, not just fill seats. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing my discussion from my last post about the challenges Kayak will face in competing against TripAdvisor in the hotel review category.

In summary, the challenge for Kayak will be building up enough originally-posted reviews to be perceived as a credible resource. Given the network effect and brand that TripAdvisor enjoys, this will be exceedingly difficult. Here’s why:

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There’s been a lot of news recently about the competition between Kayak and TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor recently launched an air metasearch product, directly threatening Kayak’s core business. In classic Steve Hafner style (and borrowing from The Art of War), Kayak is responding with a counterattack by playing up the long-in-progress relaunch of their hotel review site TravelPost, and taking more than a few pot-shots at TripAdvisor in the process.

For context and background, before I started the hotel deals and packages site DealBase.com, I founded and was CEO of TravelPost.com. I was fortunate to work with a great group of people (many of whom are joining me on DealBase.com). We were successful with TravelPost.com, reaching over 700k unique visitors, becoming profitable and building the second-largest hotel reviews site. I like to call TravelPost.com the “RC Cola of hotel reviews sites” – profitable with a loyal fan base, but small compared to the total market which is dominated by TripAdvisor (who, to continue the metaphor, is both Coke and Pepsi.)
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Over on the BNET Travel Industry blog, The Cranky Flier’s Brett Snyder shares insights from his years working for the airlines. Guess what, he’s also at the 2008 Travel Innovation Summit and shares his initial thoughts on DealBase.com.:

“The difference is that they’re trying to give you more filtering and comparison options so that the consumer can try to figure out what is actually a deal and what isn’t.”

What I always appreciate when I read Brett’s articles is that he understands both the business perspective, from having been in the industry, as well as the consumer viewpoint. He has some additional observations about what this means for the travel suppliers, as well.

DealBase.com will be presenting at the Travel Innovation Summit on November 17, 2008 in Hollywood, CA. (If you still need a hotel, here are some hotel deals and specials for West Hollywood.) We’ll have a lot of new things to show off, so come by our demo and vote for us to be one of the six finalists. We’ll be in good company as I’m looking forward to seeing demos from Josh, Yen and other friends who have great products as well. We’ll be at the PhoCusWright show all week, so please drop us a line if you’d like to connect.