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TravelName Your Own Price Travel? No, Thanks.My comment on Toughts on Kayak's New PPC Tool @ SearchViews is either in a pre-moderation deep freeze, or it went where naughty comments go to die. I don't remember my exact rebuttal, but it was along these lines: Surely there is a limit to the % of customers and situations that warrant the "opaque" travel offers of Priceline, et all? With all this talk of "opaque" offers and brand equity, what about the desire of customers for "transparency" and control?
Name Your Own Price Travel? No, Thanks.
Still Searching... For All-In-One Travel ShoppingBusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy finds out the hard way that there is no perfect travel search site. Not news, but I love to see specific examples of breakdowns in the shopping-search process.
Still Searching... For All-In-One Travel Shopping
Yahoo FareChase Hotel Beta - First GlanceYahoo! FareChase Launches Beta for Hotels I do not have time to dig into this shootout-style, but the new FareChase hotel search looks as satisfying as the old FareChase hotel search was frustrating. Also, I think the forward-moving design of FareChase is clearly superior to the back-tracking design of AOL's PinPoint Travel. http://farechase.yahoo.com/hotelsearch/ The only funny part is the ads on the right side. On the left, you have tools to go far beyond the limits of keyword search. In the center, a wealth of structured shopping information that can be as detailed as you want it to be. Then, on the right, a long list of keyword-based advertisements that are blissfully unaware of additional pre-qualification activity. Hmmm...
Yahoo FareChase Hotel Beta - First Glance
Online Travel Aggregators beat Airline Web Sitesvia ClickZ: "Greater selection is a major inherent advantage for online travel agencies," said Dr. Bonny Brown, Keynote's director of research and public services. "But online agencies are also creating a better overall online experience for customers..." Let's see... the middlemen who live or die by adding value, they actually add value! Who would have guessed?
Online Travel Aggregators beat Airline Web Sites
Online Travel: Just The Facts, Ma'amITFacts.biz - quick facts, cool site! 02/14/04 - 79.3% of those who shop online buy travel online (BURST!) 11/15/04 - 23% of all travel sold online in 2004 (JupiterResearch) 11/06/04 - Travel agents get 16% of online traffic, travel search engines - only 0.42% (Forrester Research) see also: E-commerce
Online Travel: Just The Facts, Ma'am
Kayak.com Officially Launches: The HighlightsKayak.com removed the "beta" from their logo and officially launched their travel search site on February 7th. Highlights: * partners: 100+ online travel sites provide access to 550+ airlines and 85,000+ hotels. USATODAY.com is the newest distribution partner, which will feature a co-branded travel price comparison tool. * personalization: uses can create profiles that automatically filter travel options by personal preferences, including number of stops and travelers, preferred airlines, airports and home airport. * promotion: all during February, users who register on Kayak.com will be entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win a Winter Getaway to The Bahamas. * pay-per-click: Kayak.com launched an bidding tool for hotel marketers who want to appear higher in the search results. * plans: "Today we have [25,000] to 30,000 unique visitors a day," said Paul English, cofounder and CTO of Kayak. "Our goal is to take that number to well over 10 million visitors a month."
Kayak.com Officially Launches: The Highlights
Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?Here is a real-world travel search problem in need of an elegant solution: I recently won a little poker tournament that included a trip to Las Vegas. Now, if you have won any of these types of trips, you are familiar with the old saying, "what the big print giveth, the fine print taketh away." Specifically, the big print said, WIN A TRIP TO LAS VEGAS! Meanwhile, the fine print said something about no travel on weekends or "really fun days" (my words) and a voucher for up to $400. Technically, $400 is not a trip to Vegas. For two people flying from St. Louis, it is only a fraction of a trip. Unless, of course, I want my lady's first memory of sin city to be a stay at Circus Circus. But she is not fond of clowns. They are a little creepy, come to think of it. But I digress. The point here is that I can travel virtually any week in the next eight months. I've got a free frequent-flyer ticket that we can use, so $400 starts to look a little more do-able, or at least within the realm of possiblity. If I can find a sweet spot on the calendar when the price is right, maybe we can get lucky and upgrade from the outhouse to the penthouse. So... with all the travel search engines thumping their chests and proclaiming to be The Greatest, who is going to provide the complete solution to my situation? I'll try to make things easier by limited the search to one month, February. Flexible-Date Airfare = Yay! Several sites provide airfare-search options for flexible-date travel. It is a good thing, too, because even among the lowest daily fares, 3-day roundtrip airfare to Vegas in February ranged from $203 to $358, depending on the departure date (see chart below). Note: I don't remember the exact date of these searches, it was sometime late last month when I had planned to post this piece, probably January 22nd-ish. Expedia.com: Flexible-Date Flights Orbitz.com: Flexible-Stays: Options #3 Flexible-Date Hotels = Nay? Now for the bad news. I could not find a similar tool for search hotel deals. The closest thing was doing a 30-day search on Hotels.com and scanning their detailed results layout for large price dips. This might be the best method for now, but it leaves much to be desired. First, there is no way to scan the page as quickly or as accurately as a computer could do. Also, hotels which do not have availability for all days are excluded, so while you will find the best rate on some hotels, you might miss the best rate on other hotels. Here is the data from researching this post:
Wishful Thinking, Part I - with so many new travel search engines, it would be swell if they all aspired to do more than simply aggregate a bunch of prices. Every time I need to fire up a spreadsheet for comparison shopping, someone is missing an opportunity to make their e-com site an indispensable destination. Does any travel site want to scoop up this very targetted traffic? It sure beats having to compete with the big boys on the generic searches. Heck, you can still register flexibledatetravel.com. Wishful Thinking, Part II - for now, it would be helpful if Hotels.com had an option to highlight every result that was less than "x" amount of dollars. Even better would be if the "Find" bar at the bottom of Firefox had an option to evaluate numerically. Instead of simply matching text strings, you could highlight values on a page that were great than or less than than a certain number. Optionally, you could specify a currency to restrict the numeric search as currency-only. It might look something like this:
Flexible-Date Travel: Airfare = Yay! Hotels = Nay?
Update to the Hotel Comparison: NexTagSeveral fine folks at NexTag informed me that they are not exactly chopped liver when it comes to travel search. Indeed, although it is probably too late for an "apples vs. apples" pricing comparison, an initial search of hotels at NexTag returned 22 of the 30 targetted Las Vegas hotels, and I did even better -- 28 hotels -- in a subsequent search. (Apparently, Vegas.com was not included as a source in the initial search). Score one for the all-around shopping engines. I'll be sure to include NexTag in the upcoming airfare shootout. One neat thing about NexTag is how they cluster results while maintaining transparency. In other words, they only show one listing per hotel on the main search results page, which keeps things uncluttered. Yet, they display prices from several providers at the bottom of each listing, if applicable, and a one-off page displays details from all providers. Compare that to other travel search engines such as Mobissimo, which does not cluster, and SideStep, which uses "blind" re-directs, and NexTag might be on to something here, at least in terms of price comparison.
Update to the Hotel Comparison: NexTag
Travel Search Engine Shootout - Las Vegas HotelsTravel search engines sure have been noisy lately. Kayak.com assembled a "Dream Team" of Internet travel. Mobissimo launched the "Ultimate" online travel resource. SideStep claimed over seven million downloads. Seven million downloads? Where was I? Admittedly, I had spent more time on the general shopping engines than the travel search engines in 2004, and I did not want to start researching travel until I had the time to do it right. But the growing list of recent news (right) tells me the time for excuses is over, and the time for nitty-gritty analysis is upon us. Sounds like a great opportunity to research a trip to Las Vegas... Travel Search Engine Shootout - Las Vegas Strip Hotels I started with this map of the Las Vegas strip at Vegas.com, subtracted a few clunky sites, and ended up with a list of thirty hotels. Next, I searched for these hotels on eight travel aggregators, plus each of the official hotel sites. Finally, I took all of the rates (before additional tax & fee line-items) and summarized them in the table below, using all sorts of icons, explained in the legend below. The purpose is not to say that one travel search engine is better than the rest, merely to get an overview of the travel search landscape. Are the new travel search engines more comprehensive than the existing travel aggregator sites? Do the official sites always offer the best rates? And what does this all mean in terms of the actual process used to book a hotel? The results:
A Brief Summary of the Hotel Search Engines In this test, SideStep was far more comprehensive than newcomers Kayak.com and Mobissimo. The former only included incomplete listings from Orbitz, and the latter included incomplete listings from Lodging.com, plus a few other listings. Granted, Kayak.com is still in beta, and Mobissimo still has a "new" tag by the hotel search, so I'll have to keep tabs on them for future developments. Most of the established travel aggregators returned enough results to be practically interchangeable. After all, what good is another listing or two if they are not remarkable in some way? What is interesting is how the leading travel sites are so different in the amenities availalable for advanced searching. I have documented these differences on the Does This Change The Way I Shop For Hotels? Like I tell people who spend to much time looking at logfiles, avoid analysis unless it is likely to be actionable. Along those lines, I have clarified, and in one case refined, my process for searching hotels, as detailed below: (1) Planning: Define what I am looking for in a hotel: location, amenities, price range. I prefer to define the goals upfront, then look for the right tool(s) for the job, instead of pre-selecting one tool and letting its limitation define my expectations. (2) Searching: Go to the (3) Reviewing: Use these site(s) to arrive at a short list of candidates. Scan a few sites that aggregate hotel reviews to confirm my choice or raise red flags. Further refine my list to one candidate, or a small handful of hotels that are essentially interchangeable. (4) Pricing: Check the prices at the official hotel site(s), and at least one aggregator, probably SideStep and maybe Expedia or Orbitz. Many hotels offer the best rates on their own sites, but sometimes you will find the best rate at the aggregators. Bottom line, no one site has the best price every time. Future Travel Search Shootouts and Upgrades I'm planning to do more types of travel shopping comparisons in the near future, including some commodity-driven searches (i.e. airfare) that could have narrowly-defined objectives and a single winner. I'll also be looking to upgrade the travel-related pages at Organized Shopping in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. As always, if you know of a uniquely useful shopping resource, or in this case a uniquely useful travel resource, please let me know. Thanks!
Travel Search Engine Shootout - Las Vegas Hotels
FareChase Still Not Supporting FirefoxFireFox 1.0 vs. FareChase beta "Browser Not Supported To be fair, the problem likely existed before Yahoo bought FareChase. Still, Yahoo has a habit of breaking stuff for "other" browsers, so I'm not optimistic about browser compatibility being a top priority. Yo, Yahoo: * Your beloved Internet Explorer is owned by Microsoft, a company that is ditching your search results in favor of their own search engine. For this and other reasons, you might want to consider them a competitor, and start getting cozy with their competitors. * Another funny thing about this Internet Explorer. After installing the SideStep toolbar, it open a sidebar whenever I do a search at FareChase. Surely, SideStep is a competitor, with their seven million downloads? Hint: their toolbar is only a threat on IE. Is FareChase doing anything special on Explorer that any of the other travel search engines have not been able to do on Firefox? To the untrained eye, it looks like all they are doing is throwing away market share in an ultra-competitive market. added: I just received an email from Yahoo, which included this clarification: "Currently Yahoo! FareChase hotel and car search supports Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher." (emphasis mine) Flights work with Firefox. I should have caught the last sentence of the FareChase FAQ.
FareChase Still Not Supporting Firefox
PriceGrabber Travel Search EnginePriceGrabber has made public the flights-only piece of their upcoming travel search engine. Accorded to the Financial Times, PriceGrabber plans to add hotels and car rentals in the near future. I'll be looking into this more in-depth as part of the upcoming Travel Search Engine Shootout. If it has any remarkable features, I'll add it to the Airfare page of the Organized Shopping project. via the award-winning Search Engine Lowdown
PriceGrabber Travel Search Engine
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