Orbitz Worldwide is focused on two missions: building its hotel and media businesses.
In a bow to its media goals, Orbitz launched AdventureFinder, a business that enables tour operators to advertise their trips and take bookings on their own websites.
In so doing, Orbitz retired its GorpTravel.com brand, which used a similar business model for tour operators, and made AdventureFinder the principal brand within OWW’s Away Network focused on escorted adventure tours and resorts.
As Orbitz gets ready to drive traffic to tour operator listings on AdventureFinder, it found there was too much confusion between the now-displaced GorpTravel.com and sister website Gorp.com, a trip-planning site for adventurous souls.
The launch of AdventureFinder follows Orbitz’s resurrection last year of two dormant domains, Trip.com and Lodging.com, and their transformation into media businesses.
AdventureFinder offers a directory for tour operators which is priced on a PPC basis.
In one, new upcoming twist, Orbitz says consumers will be able to use AdventureFinder’s Trip Profile pages to directly question tour operators about their trips before actually booking them.
Orbitz says AdventureFinder — when compared with GorpTravel.com — provides “a sleek user interface and refined search and sort tools (which) make it easy for travelers to quickly find the active adventures that best suit their needs.”
AdventureFinder tells potential advertisers that the benefits of its Traveler Direct Marketing Program include qualified leads, performance-based pricing, and access to sponsored emails and banner campaigns.
Interesting… Trip seems to have taken off, not so with Lodging. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/trip.com+lodging.com/
Yay – someone big and sensible is following the model I have been suggesting for years! Specialist tour operators don’t want distributed sales but are very happy with distributed marketing.
Exactly right Alex
Alex: Vindication, at last:)
Alex: Apparently Orbitz has been following this model for some time with GorpTravel.com, but now they have gone for a rebranding and likely will be pouring some marketing into it.
Alex, when you say tour operators don’t want distributed sales, are you referring to sales via channels such as AdventureLink that offer the choice of direct booking or referral? Or sales via more commodity channels like Expedia, etc? Just interested in clarifying…thx
Adventure Link is an interesting question – they take such a large % in terms of revenue (and an agreement that a supplier won’t undercut directly) that the supplier has to decide whether to up their prices (normally devised around direct selling) and hope for higher volume from the larger players – or keep their prices locally competitive and go direct.
I cover this point in tip #2 of my tour operator travel ecommerce tips book
http://www.tourcms.com/company/travel_ecommerce_tips.php
This is great news for tour operators because the customers will be owned by the operator and not the reseller. This is also a much easier model to manage from a customer service and delivery standpoint. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that operators don’t want distributed sales, but distributed marketing is certainly easier to handle especially for operators who sell F.I.T. or complex travel products. This is good news and I’m sure we’ll here more from the Adventure Travel Trade Association about this in the near future.
I am thinking about the same strategy in my state ( Washington )- adventure travel directory for local tour operators. Not sure whether commission or PCC based.
Anybody has any suggestions (I mean ” how-to ” part )?
Hasn’t Gorp always been pay per click (maybe they used to have a listing fee, I’m not sure?). @ Alex you are right, some tour operators may say they prefer distributed marketing, but most we work with are delighted to get bookings delivered straight to them.
The problem distributed sales has is that no-one has really cracked the formula for such a specialist product set (we are working on it…). I also believe there is benefit for customers who like being able to speak to someone who can help them choose what, where and with whom. From a customer point of view what does a media model like adventurefinder deliver that Google can’t? Would be interesting to compare the comparative economics of iexplore (distributed sales) to adventurefinder (distributed marketing).
Ben: just checked out Tourdust… nice. I like the activity/destination control on the home page. Lots of sites try to make that type of search obvious, but fail. You’r works well I think.
Alex: love the ebook. I’m not a tour operator, but found it an interesting read anyway.