Travel Start-Ups

Taking a break

2008-05-11T19:09:00.000-07:00

Obviously my posts are less and less frequent. It's time to take a, more extended, break from the blog. Thanks for stopping by and all the best in your travel start-up endeavours.

Summer Airfares Video

2008-03-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

John Rauser of Farecast created this cool Summer Airfare Strategies Video, which provides tips on when to travel to Europe and domestically this summer. Got me thinking about which other travel websites are publishing useful video content these days. Will do some digging...

(Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Travel Site Rankings

2008-02-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

Took another look at the Quantcast travel site rankings again and noticed some big gainers and losers since August. Kayak and Farecast have increased their ranking by 30%, while Yapta and SideStep have dropped by over 200%. Not sure how Quantcast rankings for these companies compares to Compete, Alexa and others but interesting to see the movement.

Update: Peter Daams over at TravellersPoint pinged me with their ranking... 17,118, which puts them just behind Mobissimo.

Update II: Some have understandably argued that the data is flawed. It is hard to compare sites with the free tools out there. In fact, to get a sense of the challenges, check out Marcelo's Seattle Start-Up Index that combines Alexa and Compete - you can see some rank higher on Alexa and lower on Compete than other companies. One way to improve Quantcast's accuracy is to get quantified.

(Disclosure: I work for Farecast.)

Kayak World's 5th Largest Travel Site

2007-12-28T10:45:00.000-08:00

Big announcement last Thursday afternoon, Mike Arrington broke the news, that Kayak has raised $196 million, from multiple sources including Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, and acquired SideStep.

The companies reported that the combined traffic and revenue will create the "world's fifth largest travel site." The combined entity have reported gross bookings/sales of $3.5 billion and revenues of $85 million. More at search engine land.

Kayak has reported that the "merger will bump the number of searches on its sites to 33 million in January, more than double the 16 million in January 2007." In a redherring story, Paul English says "Kayak is taking aim at Expedia, the No. 1 web site based on travel searches per month... At the same time, Kayak partners with Expedia by referring searchers to that site, which serves as a ticket-selling agency... [similar to] shopping search engine like shopping.com and a retailer like BestBuy."

Greg Saks of Compete pulled together an excellent analysis of the Kayak/SideStep merger. Definitely worth reading. Thought it would be interesting to look at Farecast and Mobissimo, the number two and number three travel search player, relative to Kayak. (Granted that with the acquisition of SideStep, this gap increase substantially.)

John Cook at Seattle PI weighed in on how this deal impacts Farecast.

GigaOm testing Mobissimo and Farecast against the rest and scored them both higher.

This is a big deal and sets us up for another exciting year for online travel in 2008.

(Disclosure: I work for Farecast.)

Embracing the Media Model

2007-11-27T01:26:00.000-08:00

Will be interesting to see if other OTAs follow Expedia's lead and enter into creative hybrid transaction/media models with top suppliers. (Talking about within the core Expedia.com search paths. Obviously Expedia has embraced the media model as a whole - they bought TripAdvisor, SmarterTravel, etc.)

This is a smart move, as more and more consumers leverage OTAs as search platforms and book directly with suppliers, this is a way to monetize the search activity and create a value-added relationship with their supplier partners.

Read more about the Expedia/IHG agreement here or over at Diane Clarkson's blog.

Kango and LeisureLogix

2007-10-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

These two, new travel start-up companies launched last week by two ex-portal guys, Yen Lee (Yahoo Travel) and Jeff DeKorte (AOL Travel).

About Kango
"Personalized travel planning for family vacations and more. Our mission is to help people plan vacations that they absolutely love." More on Kango from TechCrunch.

Given how competitive it is in Silicon Valley for talent, TechCrunch points out what a solid team Kango has put together and I agree, "CEO Yen Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives."

About LeisureLogix
"Eighty-eight percent? That's the percentage of travelers in the U.S. who use their cars for vacations. And despite the overwhelming size of this market, there is nothing online that offers personalized, integrated road trip and route planning with reservation capabilities and extensive travel information and activities.LeisureLogix is working to change that."

Farecast Hotels in NYT

2007-09-09T22:47:00.001-07:00

New York Times published a great piece today called "Finding Bargin Rooms at a Glance" that described the value of Farecast's new (in beta) hotel search product and specifically the Hotel Rate Key. Here is a small excerpt:

"Farecast, known for predicting domestic ticket prices for air travelers, is testing a new feature designed to pull the veil back on hotel prices and let consumers know, at a glance, whether the rate listed for a hotel is actually a good deal or not."

Farecast Hotels was also covered in Boston Globe, LATimes, TechCrunch, Reuters, CNET, SeattleTimes and many others.

[Disclosure: I work at Farecast.]

Quantcast Travel Site Rankings

2007-08-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

Meet the TSEs

2007-07-29T20:22:00.001-07:00

Meet the Travel Search Engines was the name of the panel I was on at the Search Engine Strategies Travel conference in Seattle last week. This was their first event focused on travel and the most in-depth I've attended on the travel search category specifically. Lots of good stats on the growth of TSEs, which I hope to share once the power point presentations become avaialble. Speakers on the panel were:

Pablo O'Brien, Director, Product Development, Yahoo! Travel
Drew Patterson, VP of Marketing, Kayak.com
John Robison, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Technology, SideStep.com
Beatrice Tarka, CEO and Co-Founder, Mobissimo
Mike Fridgen, VP Marketing & Product, Farecast
Rick Seaney, CEO, FareCompare.com

Farecast on MSN Travel

2007-07-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

Farecast's unique airfare predictions and planning tools are now available on MSN Travel. This marks the first major distribution deal for Farecast and an opportunity for the company to generate awareness on a broader consumer scale.

Here is a quote from Jeff Dossett, executive producer and general manager at MSN: “Integrating Farecast’s unique airfare predictions and tools is part of our overall strategy to build out a rich set of innovative and differentiated content and services in travel and across all channels on the MSN media network.”

(Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Yapta, SideStep & TripHub

2007-07-10T23:19:00.000-07:00

Lots of online travel start-up news recently.

Yapta raised $2.3M from First Round Capital, Bay Partners and other investors. Read more here. Yapta is the new travel start-up that provides a browser add-on that lets users “bookmark” and track fares that they find on major travel sites.

SideStep reports to TechCrunch on the value of their Facebook app. and their acqusition of TripUp (formerly TripMates). Here's an excerpt from the Facebook app. interview by Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, "SideStep sees Facebook as a customer acquisition vehicle... the company had already had over 1,000 solid leads from their two Facebook apps, and expect this figure to rise rapidly as they improve their cross promotion strategies." I was surprised they have only have ~1,000 solid leads with over 150,000 Facebook users.

TripHub group travel collaboration tools are now available on Orbitz. More from Mashable. This deal is TripHub's third and most significant private label relationship and is consistent with their strategy of partnering with a select group of market leaders. Orbitz is the only major online travel agency to exclusively feature and promote TripHub's planning and community tools. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to TripHub.)

here or there?

2007-06-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

I was psyched to receive an email from Hugo Burge, of Cheapflights fame, recently regarding his new endeavor here or there? This social travel site enters a competitive arena, but the newly minted beta site scores well on user experience.

Here is what Hugo had to say about it:
"The site is for people who love travel and want to share travel experience. The initial launch offers a simple way to publish travel experiences (text, background, photos, embedded video, audio) and has tools to measure the popularity of these with the community. We have used YouTube like tools (rating, views, comments, tags) so that we can help surface the most interesting travel experiences to the front of the site."

"It is early days but I passionately believe in trying to solve the conundrum of travel inspiration, which i don't think is resolved or done well anywhere. In many ways it is the ultimate challenge and the web should do it well. Right now we ask friends, watch TV programs, browse the web etc but I want to evolve a personalised travel inspiration search."

Check it out and good luck Hugo.

Searchnomics

2007-06-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

Brian Smith of SingleFeed and ComparisonEngines moderated a Travel Search panel, including me (representing Farecast), Drew Patterson of Kayak and Sam Shank of SideStep, at the Searchnomics Conference today. (Brian is a fantastic moderator by the way.) He asked the question: "Why have travel search engines grown so significantly as of late?" Curious what you think? There are likely multiple factors, perhaps including:

1) Users increased likelihood of shopping with aggregators and booking directly with supplier websites (travel search model supports this behavior)
2) Supplier support of the channel (in the form of referral compensation)
3) Strong online advertising budgets of travel companies (spending on TSEs)
4) Higher travel search monetization levels (fuels paid traffic growth at postive contribution)

Puddle Jumper TerraPass

2007-06-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

Former Expedia CEO, and Farecast investor/board member, Erik Blachford recently joined TerraPass as CEO. If you haven't heard of them, TerraPass is an environmental start up that sells carbon offsets to counterbalance the carbon dioxide we all spew into the environment. Read more about them here.

There is a travel tie-in here. TerraPass has this nifty flight calculator that shows how much CO2 your flying puts in the air. For example, my flight to San Diego this weekend is 2,101 miles roundtrip and emits 945 lbs. of CO2 (per person). I'll be flying with a clear conscience though - just bought a Puddle Jumper TerraPass for $9.95 that reduces 2,500 lbs of CO2, covering me and my family.

Roundup

2007-05-09T21:37:00.000-07:00

Farecast.com wins Web 2.0 Travel Award
Farecast.com beats out Kayak and Real Travel to take SEOmoz Web 2.0 Travel award. What makes it an honor is that many recognizable bloggers, including Pete Cashmore and Danny Sullivan, were the judges. (Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Evite finally teams up with Hotels.com
For several years, Evite and Hotels.com were both owned by Interactive Corp. but not until now, after Hotels/Expedia were spun out, have they teamed up to combine hotel planning and booking within the evite platform. Read more about it here.

Unmanaged Roadwarriors

2007-05-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting stat while reading Diane Clarkson's blog, "39 percent of travelers who take 10 or more business trips per year do not have a managed travel provider. And this number doesn’t include those business travelers who take between 1 – 9 business trips per year." This is based on the Jupiter Research Frequent Travelers' survey.

Seems to me this segment is best served by meta-search players today, Kayak, SideStep, Farecast, etc., not the OTAs due to the great filtering functionality that helps unmanaged business travelers filter down to the right times, stops, airlines, etc. However, Orbitz recently built out a microsite, Tools For The Road Warrior, dedicated to highlighting features and providing relevent content to these important customers.

TripWiser Launch

2007-04-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

I heard from David Reichman, founder and CEO of TripWiser.com last week regarding their official launch. Here is what David had to say about the site "Our goal was to build a web site that will help family travelers plan their trips with ease... Not just with the location, hotel, car, and flights, but with your daily itinerary mapped out, filled to the brim with activity descriptions, notes/tips/photos from other users, all of which can be printed out, complete with driving directions!"

I'm planning a family trip to Southern California and found the trip filters (i.e. family vs. couples, luxury vs. budget) quite useful in narrowing down TripWiser itineraries that match my personal preferences and the activity (i.e. SeaWorld) detail pages give a good high-level overview and relevant links. Also, the design is very clean and intuitive and they have a ton of inventory for having just launched. Kudos to David and team.

Roundup

2007-03-31T16:58:00.000-07:00

Kayak is now powering flight results on WAYN (where are you know?). WAYN has some good mo and could be considered the U.K. leader in the crowed social travel space. Run a search from the WAYN "flights" tab off the home page to check it out. Appears that there was a fair amount of custom work done by the WAYN team - filters live about the results and look and feel clearly not Kayak. Read more about the Kayak & WAYN partnership at Internet Travel News.

Wall Street Journal and Henry Harteveldt call-out TripHub as one of the best group travel sites. Check out the WSJ video. Here's what some leading analysts had to say about the group travel space:
"It's no wonder entrepreneurs are interested [in group travel]. Spending on group leisure travel -- including air, car and hotel, among other expenses, but excluding meals -- will total $51.3 billion in the U.S. in 2008." - Lorraine Sileo, an analyst at PhoCusWright
"The industry is waking up to the opportunity that smaller groups represent" - Henry Harteveldt, vice president and principal analyst for travel research at Forrester

Expodition - travel guides you can download and store on your iPod. The site allows you to download free guides to popular places, attractions and events (such as theme parks, exhibitions, concerts, etc). Check out this recently added guide of Disney's Animal Kingdom.

eMarketer came out with an article recently titled Online Travel Path May Get Bumpy. Although "eMarketer estimates that in the US market, online consumer travel sales were $79 billion last year and will grow at a 17% annual rate to reach $146 billion in 2010", they believe growth has not only slowed, but that "In this dynamic environment, current industry players must stay alert or risk being blindsided by new competitors that fall under their radar screens." Jeffrey Grau, Senior Analyst then goes on to mention "recent offerings from Farecast and FareCompare help consumers determine when the best time is to book airline tickets" - perhaps indicating these companies have the potential to blindside the establishment.

Disclosure: I'm an advisor to TripHub and work at Farecast.

TripHub's Shared Maps

2007-03-26T22:55:00.000-07:00

Check out TripHub's new shared maps feature.

Here are some reasons John Pope, VP Marketing over at TripHub, listed for using Virtual Earth over Google Maps:

- Intelligent automatic zoom level when geocoding
- Better worldwide map coverage (30% of our customers are planning trips outside the US)
- VE's bird's eye view provides "sizzle" and is helpful for research
- Driving directions were very easy to leverage (from a development perspective)

The folks at Virtual Earth found it interesting too and posted about it here.

The power of the combined features (e.g. maps, blogging, invite functionality) is clear when you see a fully baked trip.

(Disclosure: I'm an advisor to TripHub.)

Expedia Mafia

2007-03-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

John Cook wrote a post today, Expedia mafia strikes again with Megabuzz, that lists Seattle area start-ups backed by former Expedia execs. The start-ups he listed:

Zillow.com - real estate - Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink
Mpire.com - shopping/coupons - Matt Hulett
Avvo.com - legal - Mark Britton
Megabuzz.com - community - Ashish Pandey and Joe Wild

He also notes that Erik Blachford, former Expedia CEO, sits on the board of Zillow and has made angel investments in Farecast, ImageKind, and Megabuzz.

Others not mentioned:
TripHub.com - group travel - Josh Herst
Escapia.com - vacation rentals - Steve Murch

Let me know if we're missing any.

UPDATE: Neil MacLean, over at thetravelprblog, reminded me that former Expedia exec Greg Slyngstad is a board member at Kayak. Thanks and good catch.

Orbitz IPO

2007-03-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Travelport Limited (Blackstone Group) is selling a portion of it's interest in Orbitz to the public. The transaction is to be completed Q3 2007. See the full press release here.

More on Travelport:
Travelport is one of the world's largest travel conglomerates. It operates 20 leading brands including Galileo, a global distribution system(GDS); Orbitz, an on-line travel agent; and Gulliver's Travel Associates, awholesaler of travel content. The Company has 8,000 employees and operatesin 130 countries. Travelport is a private company owned by The BlackstoneGroup of New York, Technology Crossover Ventures of Palo Alto, California and One Equity Partners of New York.

The T-List

2007-03-05T08:49:00.000-08:00

Kevin May, Editor of the Travelution Blog has a great idea to build more exposure for travel industry bloggers.

"In theory, by the end of the exercise, we should have a decent list of the best travel and tourism-related blogs on the web. There are some excellent blogs out there and they deserve to have more coverage."

For those of you who want to participate, here are the instructions:
1. Write a post.
2. Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
Make sure the links are active and correct. If your blog is on the list, remove it. This is not a self-promotion post.
3, Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it
4. Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
5. Publish the post.

Here is the list, plus my additions:
Diane Clarkson Blog (Jupiter)
M-Travel Blog
Hotel Blogs
Radar
Social Media on the Fly
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel Blog
Travel Rants
Travel Weekly Blog
BootBlog
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
The Travel PR Blog
Boot - Business of Online Travel

Update: Actually, although I found the post at Travelution, the idea originated with Mathieu's radaron post. Great idea, Mathieu.

Quick Reviews

2007-01-25T21:05:00.000-08:00

Travellerspoint.com
Eric over at Travellerspoint reached out recently to let me know Travellerspoint launched travel maps. Which is valuable because "besides showing where you've travelled, your travel map will show any photos you took for a given leg of your trip, as well as any blog entries you wrote while you were there." Great reason for the 78K members to enhance their experience, or for new folks to sign up. Interesting to see you can insert Travelistic videos into blog entries.

geobeats.com
Vishesh brought my attention to geobeats, a company "that produces and distributes short online travel videos." The examples he provided were very informative and useful - check out the Burano Island in Venice video.

TailoredTours.com
I heard from Lisa from TailoredTours about their new release: "TailoredTours.com lets users browse and buy self-guided walking tours online for as little as $2 each." You can receive these tours via emial or download them to your mobile phone. Lisa sent me a tour of Central Park to Rockefeller Center in NYC via email. Clean and simple layout. Seems like you would want to target the big online agencies as distribution outlets - over the past 3-5 years they have been more aggressive about selling "destination services" or add-ons.

Roundup

2007-01-15T16:53:00.000-08:00

Lots of stuff going on in the world of online travel. For starters, just an observation, but Kayak just passed Priceline on Alexa. Impressive.

Also in the news lately, AA pulled international, business and first class fares originating out of the U.S. from Expedia. More on the story from Travelution Blog or check out the AA press release. Expedia is an expensive distribution channel relative to selling directly at aa.com and other channels. This move tells me Expedia was not willing to get fees to a place where AA could be channel agnostic.

Did you see this story on Virgin America's troubles with the U.S. Government. Here is the first sentance from The Independant article: "Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group has accused the US government of "pure protectionism" for denying permission for the launch of its planned low-cost airline, Virgin America." Kind of flew under the radar late last month. Full story here.

PhoCusWright just released a report titled "Groups and Meetings: Market Opportunity Redefined," released today that indicates that the group travel market will grow to $175 billion in 2008. You can learn more at the PCW site.

Back from CES

2007-01-11T21:12:00.000-08:00

I headed out to CES on Monday on Farecast's behalf to meet with press contacts and pick up some hardware - Farecast won product innovation awards from PC World and Popular Science. What an event. Completely over the top. Nice recap of the top 5 CES trends by Katie over at Gigaom. As you've probably heard, the show was overshadowed by Job's iPhone announcement at MacWorld. Thoughts on how the iPhone pushes travel into mobile from Travelution blog.

As I moved throughout South and Central Hall, I scanned the floor for anything online travel related and low and behold PriceGrabber.com was present with an excellent display in a prime location. Even more impressive, when I asked the marketing rep what was new at PriceGrabber these days, the first thing out of her mouth was "we're doing some new stuff in the travel category".