Online Travel Reboots – Eight companies from bosses coming back for more
Hollywood is having a do-over decade. The rewrite, reboot and redo seems to be the safest bet for a production company.
Planet of the Apes, Friday the 13th, Halloween, the Clash of the Titans, the Crazies, the Omen, Amityville Horror etc, the list of movie do overs in the last ten years is endless.
In online travel too it has been a period of comebacks and do overs.
Where execs from the booms of the nineties and early naughties are running new business in online travel.
Here are a eight of the higher profile online travel reboots (in no particular order).
Triporati
A discovery and inspiration engine built by online travel “founding parents” Jim Hornthal (chairman) and Sharlene Wang (chief product officer). Hornthal and Wang sold Preview Travel to Travelocity in March 2000 – arguably the first major online travel corporate transaction. Through Triporati they are trying to reboot the travel inspiration process with a combination or editorial smarts, travel genomics and customer data collection.
NB: More background in this post and an interview with Hornthal here.
Tripit
In September 2003 Gregg Brockway sold Hotwire to Expedia – adding opaque inventory for Expedia to combine with Travelscape + Hotels.com/HRN hotel selling machine. He’s rebooting with a Sabre, Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech backed travel organisation and networking tool Tripit.com. They just raised another $7million – making $13.1 million in total. I am a Tripit fan. I do more than 250,000 km a year in travel and Tripit makes it easier. I find more value in the travel organisational side of the product than the networking and community side but that does not amount to a negative. They are also nice people – having forgiven me for screwing up a timezone and breaking a press release embargo.
NB: product review here
NewTravelCo
The band is back to together. As reported in Tnooz, ex-Expedia biggies Rich Barton (former CEO), Simon Breakwell (former Euro boss) Greg Slyngstad (former hotel and packaging boss), Sunil Shah (former VP Engineering) and now Stuart MacDonald (former boss of Expedia Canada) are rebooting with a mysterious new travel product (aptly named NewTravelCo) and a cool $9.8mm in funds. We don’t know what they have planned for NTC. They are not saying. I heard a rumour that they are looking to build a TripAdvisor killer – focusing on content, information and discovery rather than booking – but we will just have to wait and see.
NB: Dennis Schaal’s interview with Breakwell here.
Getaroom
Selling HRN/Hotels.com to Expedia made Robert Diener and Dave Litman rich and online travel famous. Pioneers of booking hotels via a computer, Diener and Litman are trying to re-book the way hotel bookings are made over the phone. I am not convinced the model will work for this reboot but betting against Diener and Litman is hard to do.
Vojij
Kayak bought Sidestep in 2007, consolidating metasearch 1 and 2 and confirming that first mover advantage is not a guarantee of success. Former Sidesteppers Brent Stewart (co-founder), Nick Atkins (software architect) and UI engineer Paul Ki announced an attempt to reboot the metasearch space with the launch Voyij (pronounced Voyage) in May 2009. Coming back for a direct challenge to their former competitor then owner now competitor again.
Hotelscombined
HotelClub was bought by Cendant in April 2004 and is now part of Orbitz Worldwide. In 2006 former HotelClub search and technology leads Yury Shar and Michael Doubinski rebooted with the launch of hotel metasearch engine Hotelscombined. While Hotelscombined continue to operate below the radar – well below compared to Kayak – Shar claimed last week that they company was now a serious player generating six million visitors a month. Here are a couple of posts I have done on Hotelscombined in the past – one on a presentation from Shar at TRAVEltech in 2008 and one on my first impressions of Hotelscombined in 2007.
[Disclosure: as my linkedin profile shows, I work for HotelClub]
Wego
Craig Hewett (now chief marketing officer and co-founder of Wego) launched IHG into the online world in the mid naughties. Martin Symes (CEO of Wego) was one of the first of Zuji’s employees in Asia. They rebootted in form of the launch and growth of Asian based metasearch company Wego.com. Initially called Bezurk, Wego has grown through high profile affiliate deals and an investment from the Australian arm of News Corp. The market is much less open and more competitive for Wego that it was when they first launched in 2005 but they have a good product and deep experience in the market.
NB: Zuji is now a wholly owned Travelocity brand in Asia. But at the time it was part-owned by Travelocity and part-owned by major Asian carriers.
Any other high profile reboots you can think of? The perfect end to this blog post by predicting which of these reboots will be the Star Trek (ie successful) and which will be the horror of Land of the Lost. Who do you think we burn cash be due a Razzie award and who will be up for a Tnooz Oscar in 2011/12?
Hollywood is having a do-over decade. The rewrite, reboot and redo seems to be the safest bet for a production company.
Planet of the Apes, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Clash of the Titans, The Crazies, The Omen, Amityville Horror etc, the list of movie do overs in the last ten years is endless.
In online travel too it has been a period of comebacks and do overs, where execs from the booms of the nineties and early naughties are running new business in online travel.
Here are a seven of the higher profile online travel reboots (in no particular order).
- A discovery and inspiration engine built by online travel “founding parents” Jim Hornthal (chairman) and Sharlene Wang (chief product officer). Hornthal and Wang sold Preview Travel to Travelocity in March 2000 – arguably the first major online travel corporate transaction. Through Triporati they are trying to reboot the travel inspiration process with a combination of editorial smarts, travel genomics and customer data collection.
- In September 2003 Gregg Brockway sold Hotwire to Expedia – adding opaque inventory for Expedia to combine with Travelscape + Hotels.com/HRN hotel selling machine. He’s rebooting with a Sabre, Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech backed travel organisation and networking tool Tripit.com. They just raised another $7million – making $13.1 million in total. I am a Tripit fan. I do more than 250,000 km a year in travel and Tripit makes it easier. I find more value in the travel organisational side of the product than the networking and community side but that does not amount to a negative. They are also nice people – having forgiven me for screwing up a timezone and breaking a press release embargo.
NB: Product review.
- The band is back to together. As reported, ex-Expedia biggies Rich Barton (former CEO), Simon Breakwell (former Euro boss) Greg Slyngstad (former hotel and packaging boss) and Sunil Shah (former VP Engineering) are rebooting with a mysterious new travel product (aptly named NewTravelCo) and a cool $9.8 million in funds. We don’t know what they have planned for NTC. They are not saying. I heard a rumour that they are looking to build a TripAdvisor killer – focusing on content, information and discovery rather than booking – but we will just have to wait and see.
- Selling HRN/Hotels.com to Expedia made Robert Diener and Dave Litman rich and online travel famous. Pioneers of booking hotels via a computer, Diener and Litman are trying to re-book the way hotel bookings are made over the phone. I am not convinced the model will work for this reboot but betting against Diener and Litman is hard to do.
NB: Company critique.
- Kayak bought Sidestep in 2007, consolidating metasearch 1 and 2 and confirming that first mover advantage is not a guarantee of success. Former Sidesteppers Brent Stewart (co-founder), Nick Atkins (software architect) and UI engineer Paul Ki announced an attempt to reboot the metasearch space with the launch of Voyij (pronounced “voyage”) in May 2009. Coming back for a direct challenge to their former competitor then owner now competitor again.
- HotelClub was bought by Cendant in April 2004 and is now part of Orbitz Worldwide. In 2006 former HotelClub search and technology leads Yury Shar and Michael Doubinski rebooted with the launch of hotel metasearch engine Hotelscombined. While Hotelscombined continue to operate below the radar – well below compared to Kayak – Shar claimed last week that they company was now a serious player generating six million visitors a month.
NB: Post regarding a presentation from Shar at TRAVEltech in 2008 and first impressions of Hotelscombined in 2007.
Disclosure: I work for HotelClub.
- Craig Hewett (now chief marketing officer and co-founder of Wego) launched IHG into the online world in the mid naughties. Martin Symes (CEO of Wego) was one of the first of Zuji’s employees in Asia. They rebootted in form of the launch and growth of Asian based metasearch company Wego.com. Initially called Bezurk, Wego has grown through high profile affiliate deals and an investment from the Australian arm of News Corp. The market is much less open and more competitive for Wego that it was when they first launched in 2005 but they have a good product and deep experience in the market.
NB: Zuji is now a wholly owned Travelocity brand in Asia. But at the time it was part-owned by Travelocity and part-owned by major Asian carriers.
More?
Any other high profile reboots you can think of?
Perhaps the perfect end to this post is by predicting which of these reboots will be the Star Trek (ie successful) and which will be the horror of Land of the Lost.
Who do you think be due a Razzie award and who will be up for a Tnooz Oscar in 2011/12?
Editor’s note: There are no current plans for Tnooz Oscars. 
About Tim Hughes
Interesting to note that 3 out of the 7 are metasearch engines.
Hotelscombined seems to be quite successful with their affiliate program, you see them on many websites these days.
I personally prefer wego’s service but it looks like HC is marketing their site more aggrssively.
I think that Hotelscombined is the best within the list.
Hotelscombined are doing very well in both the product aspects (very fast, reliable results, quite comprehensive list of partners) and the traffic aspects (If you take their affiliate traffic into account, they are on way to surpass Kayak within a year and that’s with a hotels product only).
As for Tripit, They are doing better than what I first had in mind, but I’m surprised on why they have not partnered with the likes of Kayak instead of waiting for their competition which was long coming (I even wrote about it on 2007 – http://bit.ly/bGEuLz)
I think that the Getaroom model does not have enough potential – Priceline’s model is so much stronger than any other bidding model out there and this one has so many flaws in it, I can’t imagine that the same customer base who knows Priceline and Hotwire would be attracted to it. Some chance it would work on less advanced markets, but I doubt it.
The other sites all has something in them, but I don’t see a home-runner there. Maybe in Newtraveleco, but since we’ve seen no product yet – only time will tell.
Great angle Tim. You forgot the remake of Gilligan’s Island which will hopefully do for the three-hour tour what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand. Speaking of Gilligan, former VP of marketing at KAYAK Drew Patterson (there’s a resemblance) is founder and CEO of
Jetsetter, the site that started the private sale trend.
http://www.jetsetter.com. Jetsetter was so well executed (if we do
say so ourselves) that Drew’s former employer plus a bunch of other travel companies got into the game. Does that make Hafner the Skipper or the Professor? http://tims-boot.blogspot.com/2010/03/drew-patterson-interview-jetsetter-ceo.html
A TNooz Oscars and Razzies – that is a cool idea