Zugu is the strange name of the new metasearch engine from price comparison firm Cheapflight, unveiled in public beta today after months of development and testing.
Three months after Cheapflights revealed it was intending on launching a metasearch product, ironically after fiercely defending the deals publishing model for years, executives have outlined Zugu’s strategy for the first time.
The engine is being touted as a “next generation” metasearch product which chief executive Chris Cuddy says has been created after watching and learning from what the existing meta players have developed over the years.
Central to the system, Cuddy and chairman Hugo Burge outlined in a briefing today, is a simpler design, user interface (“we have ruthlessly cut out the clutter”) and complete transparency of pricing from airlines and online travel agency partners.
The launch of Zugu will begin in the UK in beta and be rolled out worldwide in phases. Cheapflights is already resident in the UK, Canada, US, France, Italy, Germany, Australia and Spain.
Cuddy says the site will have more fare partners than any other meta player in the coming months with a mixture of direct-connects to airlines and agreements with OTAs.
Some of the filter tools developed for the system include the ability to group and filter by price and airline, departure and return time, and journey duration.
The highly sought-after Ryanair product line is included at launch as well as agreements with Expedia, Lastminute.com, Opodo and Ebookers.
Zugu’s emergence as a major new element to the business coincides with the formation of a new name, Cheapflights Media, as the umbrella organisation over the existing Cheapflights brand and the new meta product.
The intention is to make Cheapflights Media one of the top three travel media brands in the worldwide “within a few years”, going up against the likes of Travelzoo  and TripAdvisor on the global stage, Kayak, Farecompare and Bing in the US and Skyscanner and TravelSupermarket in the UK initially.
Cuddy says the decision to launch Zugu follows thorough examination of how people used the Cheapflights system when looking for deals and how – through other meta brands – consumers wanted to obtain fares on specific dates.
Burge admits that the long-standing ties established with major OTAs and airlines for deals have helped launch the Zugu product.
“We are going to leverage the relationships we already had through Cheapflights,” he says.
The technology behind the engine was created in-house and overall development of the project supported financially by the Cheapflights business.
There is no significant marketing strategy planned for the beta phase of Zugu apart from social media seeding through Twitter and Facebook and a competition to encourage users to guess the origin of the name.
The site has been live for at least seven weeks but, as Burge admits, this has been done discreetly in order to carry out quiet user testing.
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- TripAdvisor flight metasearch – one year on, ‘millions’ using it
- TravelFusion building point-to-point tools, start of a giant leap for metasearch
- TripAdvisor adds flight metasearch to UK site
i like the name. four letters and double “u” not easy to come by. plus very memorable.
sure it doesn’t roll off the tongue like kayak or wego, but still should work providing that the product innovations get cut through.
here is a review of wotif.com’s new flight tool wotflight.com. not meta search given it connects to API and is airline direct only. very innovative but needs a couple of tweaks. http://bit.ly/cKOF7v
Hey Steve – nice review of wotflight!
To be honest, I’m much more excited with wotflight’s launch than zugu’s. Scraping prices from airline’s websites and smashing the results together is not a new thing, and I don’t believe the model can be improved on. What the industry really needs is a real-time approach to fare price discovery…
I admire wotflight for breaking the mould at least and offering a fresh take on navigating the results (although there is room for improvement). Fare search needs a re-think in terms of price discovery (ie: scraping, APIs) as well as the user interface which seems to be stuck a decade in the past. It’s good to see startups like Adioso.com taking on the challenges and offering something new for consumers.
@ian – re. one small point on Zugu.
Burge and Cuddy insisted during a briefing this week that they are not scraping any airline/OTA sites.
@Kevin – hmm.. that’s interesting. I just did a search from Heathrow to Cologne and while I waited for the results a big popup said “We’re scouring the web for the cheapest fares…”…
??
- Ian
@Ian C Good point on the wording. I confirm we are not spidering, as Kevin says. Hopefully we can rustle up some excitement for you down the road as we unleash more features!
@steve glad you like the name. It grew on us, hope it does so with you too. Interested to hear your thoughts on its derivation
@both I also like the new WotFlight product, nice move to compliment their other products. Will watch with interest. Great to see innovation and improvement in flight searching, with everyone not just taking the same solutions. Loads more to do. We are just in beta with plenty more stuff we are excited about up our sleeve.
@hugo – i had to look up derivation..
hmmm, now that i think about it, doesn’t zugu come from a plant called Cini da zugu (Hausa language- africa), the plant is used to make more efficient bio-fuels that airlines are starting to use.
Therefore internet users will use Zugu to efficiently fuel their flight searches!
You can donate my prize to sustainable development organisation of your choice
Zugu looks great and is extremely simple and easy to use.
However, I’m still not entirely sure how it improves on the current meta search model.
Meta search engines have the tendency to return different prices (sometimes drastically) due to numerous reasons. More often than not this boils down to the variance in the sources searched and inefficiences in the flight aggregating methods employed.
A quick search on Zugu for a flight from London all to ABQ Albuquerque from 18th March 2010 – 25th March 2010 returned a price of £443, flying with United Airlines found on Lastminute.com.
Both Momondo and Kelkoo managed to pick a cheaper flight on the same dates with Travelpack for the price of £410.80 also with United.
This quick example just highlights the cureent inability of one particular engine to find the best deal on every single occasion and on every single route.
I suggest the future for the time being lies in comparing multiple aggregators in a direct manner. At least until a more stable method of aggregating prices comes into existence.
An interesting site is http://www.cheapflightsfinder.com which allows users to compare up to 16 leading aggregators without having to tediously enter the same details in different sites over and over again. It’s by no means perfect but goes some way in providing a level of ‘comfort’ that you have actually located a great deal online.