Amazing to think that TripAdvisor launched the test version of its flight metasearch in the US 21 months ago, with the UK following ten months later.
Plenty has happened in the intervening period, not least Travelzoo dipping its toes in the metasearch waters with Fly.com and the small matter of Google’s proposed acquisition of ITA Software.
Back in January 2010, when TripAdvisor celebrated 12 months of its flight meta by disclosing it had “millions” of users of the product, the future looked good.
But perhaps that has changed.
European managing director Marc Charron moved to Singapore in July 2010 to spearheard TripAdvisor’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region with a dedicated base for operations.
He appeared at this week’s WebinTravel conference and Tnooz asked about the progress – or otherwise – of the flight metasearch product.
Charron would not comment specifically on whether he thought it was a success or not, saying “it’s a great product” and it fills a requirement to provide another travel service to users.
However, he did confirm “there are no plans to launch it elsewhere”, leaving just users in the UK and the US to play with it.
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About Kevin May
[...] on the question of success or not by Tnooz’s Kevin May, he said “too early to tell” (also non-committal about TA’s flight search). This can be code for “not working as well as we hoped”. For more on TripFriends, see [...]