If you merely enter “JFK to LA” into the Bing search box, then Bing’s auto-suggest feature produces its own Bing Travel result as the first suggested query, like this:

And, if you select that first link, as many users would, it takes you directly to Bing Travel — and thus it bypasses all other sponsored and organic results on the traditional Bing search results page.

Even Google, which has been lambasted by critics, including some US Senators, for the preferential and self-serving way it handles flight search, doesn’t go as far as Bing does in skewing flight results in its own favor.

If you enter “JFK to LAX” into the Google search box, Google Instant immediately produces Google Flight Search results above all organic results, but at least Google also shows organic results on the first screen from Kayak and Expedia, for example. Google handles the flight query like this:

If Bing users ignore the auto-suggestion of navigating directly to Bing Travel and select the “JFK to LAX” query, then Bing displays Bing Travel results as an Instant Answer (as it does for shopping, local, movies, weather and stock quotes) above all other organic results.

Bing’s Instant Answer for flights is similar in some ways to Google’s Flight Search results on their respective search results pages, although Google’s offering is tilted much heavier toward airline websites than is the Bing Travel solution.

Bing Travel flights, which is powered by Kayak, offers results from online travel agencies and airlines while Google Flight Search has shut out OTAs and other metasearch companies, such as Kayak.

Still, Bing, with its auto-suggestion of Bing Travel as the first query, is taking the biasing of flight search results to new levels — even one-upping Google in this regard. With Bing you can bypass the search results page altogether and navigate directly to Bing Travel while Google at least delivers users to a Google search results page, where they can view other companies’ results, too.

Still, Bing has escaped much criticism for the preferential way it treats flight — and other — search results, probably because of Bing’s relatively low search-market share.

And, FairSearch, which has led the protest against Google’s search engine practices, is quick to criticize Google’s practices and its “monopoly power,” but doesn’t seem to be particularly incensed over how Bing processes flight-search results.

Fair or unfair?

It should be pointed out that Microsoft, which operates Bing, is a key member of FairSearch.

On the Bing issue, FairSearch states:

Only Google has the monopoly power in search to tilt the market in an unfair way by steering consumers to its own services and away from all alternative, competing providers, depriving consumers of the benefits that flow from a truly competitive market.

It’s a well established principle of antitrust law that some tactics that are illegal when employed by a dominant power in a market are not when employed by a company that lacks that power in a market controlled by another party. If Google was not the dominant power in search and search advertising, and already found to have monopoly power by authorities who enforce antitrust law, it would not be the subject of scrutiny and investigations around the world.

What’s at stake in online travel is whether Google will be allowed to use its monopoly power in search and search advertising to unfairly get a leg up in that space rather than compete on the merits and give its own search engine users the choice between what Google has to offer and what sites like Kayak, Expedia and Travelocity have to offer.

Consumers win when they get to pick winners and losers, not Google.

And, when pressed again about its silence about Bing’s practices, FairSearch adds: “FairSearch has been focused on the threat to consumers and a well-functioning free market from Google’s abuse of its monopoly power in search and search advertising since day one. If Google lacked monopoly power, it would not have the ability to unfairly distort the market in ways that limit consumer choice and deprive them of the benefits that a free market brings.”

However, despite Bing’s Teflon (nonstick) status so far, the way Bing positions flight search queries and results certainly wouldn’t escape the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Google’s practices.

Despite Bing’s relatively weak sway in the market, it’s only a matter of time before things heat up for Bing, as well.

Google declined to comment on the issue, and Microsoft didn’t  immediately respond to a request for comments.

Available only on Google Maps on Android-operated mobile devices, the idea is to give users better understanding of what is actually inside an airport rather than just seeing the block of a terminal building on its existing maps.

Launched for a string of US and Japanese airports (and shopping zones) initially, users can find their check-in areas, boarding gates, shops and other amenities.

It is, essentially, what startups such as Point Inside have been working on for a few years.

Missing in the Google version (but not in Bing’s) at the moment is any link to live schedules for flights, clearly the most handy piece of information anybody visiting an airport inevitably needs.

But it doesn’t take too much imagination to work out where this might head in the future.

Throw in flight search and schedules, maybe some airport hotel search and car hire (as Google has said is likely to come in its assault on the travel sectora, alongside things to do in a location, perhaps), and Google has quite an interesting travel app on its hands.

Well, fancy that.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of mainstays in digital advertising of almost every industry vertical, but especially travel.

For travel agents, suppliers, other intermediaries that to sell or engage online, paid search is still arguably the most important tool at their disposal.

In the most simple terms, SEM is about producing compelling advertising that makes an online consumer click on the link within the advert.

The more relevant an advert is to the search terms used, the more likely this is to elicit a click-through.
If an advertiser can successfully match the holiday a customer is looking for at the price and dates they want, this usually results in a stronger lead to a sale.

Still sounds easy, right? It is, unfortunately, still one of the hardest nuts to crack.

Where product data feeds fit in to search

If a consumer uses holiday keywords in their search query, a search marketing company can then use product data feeds to deliver a dynamic solution and decide on the bid terms to ensure that the dynamic advert is placed accordingly.

There are, therefore, efficiencies for both consumers and advertisers through using product feeds.

The advent of Google Instant means that a consumer can literally refine their keyword search as paid adverts appear, and obviously the most relevant adverts will attract the most clickthroughs.

The benefit of this approach is that it takes the online consumer directly to the relevant holiday package.

This ensures a search to basket process with as few steps as possible, increasing the chances of the customer successfully completing the transaction.

Online travel merchants interested in optimising their paid search should work closely with their search partners on the way their data feeds are built.

The best data feeds will be able to include numerous relevant keywords for each holiday package, helping to enhance the search results, and cut out wasted click-throughs, as well as ensuring that keyword expansion includes the most relevant terms possible.

Furthermore, they can ensure that meta-descriptions of the holidays match the search terms a consumer uses and that the consumer then clicks through to the landing page for that particular deal.

People are using multiple online channels and devices to research holidays and compare prices before buying. Once they’ve found the holiday, it is then often further comparison around price, availability, flights and dates that will decide whether a holiday is purchased.

Of course, online marketing is a multi-channel, multi-device discipline now. Research performed on a laptop at work that cannot be turned into a purchase on the same site via iPhone later on is the equivalent of a lost sale.

Product feeds can apply business logic and ensure that all keyword terms within a meta-description are matched to a search. This is compelling when trying to first engage a consumer with the initial clickthrough.

By including details such as price, discounts, current weather and reviews, tour operators also ensure a strong position with which to convert those carrying out research into purchasers using long tail search terms.

There is also a great deal of competitive advantage to gain through this. Long tail terms typically don’t attract high bid prices because they contain four to five keywords, for example five nights/Spain/August/all-inclusive, which aren’t in great demand across travel agent advertising bids.

Because product feeds can extract data directly from the front-end of a travel e-commerce site, they maintain keyword terms even if they change on the site, or if new holidays are added.

This cuts out a considerable amounts of administration time as you then already have product-optimised search terms.

By automating PPC activity there is little requirement to A/B Test meta-descriptions as people are being directed towards products that have more precise search terms.

Looking forward

In the future, Aaron Goldman, CMO at Kenshoo, believes search engines will integrate search and transaction functionality so the search to basket process described earlier will be potentially reduced to a one-click process.

The results page on a search engine will be the landing page, populated with rich dynamic content from operators.

Consumers will be able to identify the holiday they are looking for through deep listings and comparison features and then purchase it directly from the travel agent, without leaving the search results page.

Online travel agents need to start considering now how they can take advantage of the opportunities these new search engines will present for online transactions in the future.

Search automation tools will enable the delivery and optimisation of these listings based on the tour operators’ promotions and margin requirements, but product data feeds will be key to ensuring the holidays are included in the search results pages.

NB: This is a guest article by Lina Patel, travel account director at FusePump.

The July 16, 2001, Seattle Post-Intelligencer story noted that Microsoft planned to sell its controlling $1.83 billion stake in Expedia to Barry Diller’s USA Networks.

That was great news for Erik Blachford, then Expedia vice president of marketing, who went on the become Expedia CEO.

“My struggles over the years have been about getting more money from Microsoft,” the 2001 story quoted Blachford as saying. “This adds the money and exposure we need to turbocharge our brand.”

Well, the Expedia brand certainly got turbocharged into one of the largest travel brands in the world.

USA Networks, which became IAC, did the Expedia deal with Microsoft in 2001, and four years later IAC turned around and spun off Expedia into a public company. Microsoft had created Expedia as a division in 1996.

It is interesting to see how corporate strategy gets turned on its head as time goes by and events intervene.

At the time of Microsoft’s sale of Expedia to USA Networks, Microsoft was saying that it wanted to get out of the business of creating content because it didn’t want to compete with partners in various verticals.

And, in 2008, seven years after Microsoft sold Expedia to get out of content creation and the travel vertical, Microsoft acquired Farecast to get back into content creation and the travel vertical.

Microsoft eventually turned Farecast into Bing Travel, a brand which some would argue could use some turbocharging.

But, turbocharging the Bing Travel brand is not part of Microsoft’s strategy as it promotes Bing as an all-encompassing search brand and has bigger fish to fry.

That is, of course, until today’s corporate strategy gets turned on its head again.

Its initial “Decision Engine” advertisements have evolved into “Bing and Decide,” and Microsoft is performing a “deep-dive” to consider how to reposition the Bing brand, Ad Age says.

Speaking of decisions, in the more than three years since Microsoft acquired Farecast to create it, Bing Travel has pretty much lost its identity and gotten swallowed up in the whole Bing thing.

When Microsoft launched Bing in 2009, Travel was a featured link on the Bing homepage.

Bing’s homepage today has a Travel link at the very top of the page, although it was much more prominent when Bing launched.

These days Bing Travel doesn’t show up in Experian Hitwise Top 10 lists of US travel sites.

Bing Travel — or should one say Bing — handed over flight search duties to Kayak  in March and it wouldn’t surprising to see Kayak handling Bing’s hotel search sometime soon.

In its day, Farecast was known for its data-mining innovation in the form of its “Know When to Buy” flight and hotel price predictions.

They still exist, but the emphasis on new features and functionality starts with the broader Bing.

Today at Microsoft, any online innovations, such as autosuggest flight prices  or visual search for destinations, trickles down from Bing to Bing Travel, with the latter seeming to be almost an after-thought.

If you want to contact the leader of Bing Travel, then good luck in finding him or her because the duties are likely split up among several Microsoft executives.

Bing Travel’s absorption into Bing/Microsoft isn’t an uncommon tale — lots of brands have their issues when swallowed up by big companies.

It wasn’t too long ago when you could hear people saying that Google would want to buy ITA Software or a big online travel agency because Google was concerned about Microsoft’s travel inroads with Farecast.

You don’t see that sentiment being expressed too often these days.

Focusing on hotel search, World Independent Hotels Promotion looked at 10,000 bookings on the web to track what path the user had used before seeing or after leaving the hotel’s website.

Here is a handy illustration:

As WIHP notes, search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are clearly doing what they intend to: finding websites.

But it seems, based on the data, social media sites along the lines of TripAdvisor and Facebook alongside blogs and media, are used as a source of discovering new information.

The data poses an interesting conundrum for hotels as they look to reach potential guests: where best to put their advertising spend, through keyword buying and going the enhanced SEO route, or on potentially lower volume sites but with audiences with different motivations for being there.

WIHP says:

“Hotel marketers should find ways to advertise on Tripadvisor and social media sites to reach new guests while using tools such as Google’s Remarketing and adwords to reach guests that are still shopping for hotels through search engines.”

Tnooz-TripAdvisor webinar: VIDEO for Reputation management and beyond – webinar on which these article was based.

NB: This is a guest article by Josiah Mackenzie, director of business development at ReviewPro

We all want to establish ways to increase direct sales and maximize revenue using reviews and customer-created content.

As Adele Gutman of HK Hotels recently noted: “Reputation IS revenue”. This is something that plays a key role in creating inbound demand.

But let’s take a look at how this process works.

1. Reviews: Your most powerful sales tool

The hotel and travel industry is increasingly recognizing online customer reviews as a very powerful way to measure and improve quality.

With technologies such as the Global Review IndexTM and semantic analysis to understand sentiment, managers have more tools than ever to understand their customers, increase satisfaction, and create loyalty.

But reviews and user-generated content also present a significant opportunity to increase the number of people coming to your website, and to convert more of those visitors into buyers. It could be one of the most powerful sales tools in your arsenal.

2. Benefits of UGC and guest reviews

User generated content (UGC) has been defined as any data or media that is contributed by the users of a website – rather than being created by professional journalists and editors.

In the travel industry, UGC commonly includes online guest reviews, photos, videos, social networking posts, and a wide range of other digital content.

These pieces of content can increase sales two ways:

• indirectly: by increasing rankings in search engines, bringing more traffic to your website
• directly: by increasing sales conversion rates by increasing consumer confidence

“Consumer confidence” is simply how much a potential customer trusts you. Over the past few years, a significant shift in communications authority has taken place.

According to Yankelovich research, 75% of consumers do not believe companies tell the truth in their advertisements. Further, emarketer discovered that consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more than product descriptions by the company.

When making a purchase decision, people are increasingly turning to people they trust and other consumers for advice and guidance.

3. Use user-generated content for search engine optimization to create inbound demand

For years, the primary search optimization benefit of reviews and UGC was that they provided a source of fresh content – something search engines needed and rewarded.

This is still true: Content is king. But now, search engines are rapidly integrating social data to put content into context. Online reviews and UGC are an increasingly important factor in the search algorithms that determine how web pages are ranked.

• Google is emphasizing consumer reviews to reward local businesses that the community finds helpful (especially through the new Google +1 buttons)
• Bing is reaching into their users’ social graph on Facebook to suggest content they will love

Bing announced integration of Facebook data in their search results pages in a blog post that included this short description:

“Not only [will you] see the individual pages or stories your friends like, but the overall sites they like related to the topic you’re searching for.”

The new functionality will display personalized results based on that person’s social network – such as links or content their friends have Liked.

When the person’s friends have not shared any content related to a search, Bing will prioritize content that is popular with the Facebook community at large. This means search engine optimization is now not exclusively all about building inbound links, but improving the overall sentiment and engagement toward your brand on the web.

Google also takes user-generated content very seriously. Their local business listing – the “7 box” very familiar to search engine marketers – is determined primarily by reviews and user-generated content. Recent Google patents seem to suggest that:

• the quality and quantity of your reviews
• how many websites contain customer reviews
• and the sentiment behind the customer reviews

All play an important role in increasing search engine visibility today. If for no other reason, these factors would make a strong case for investing in online reputation management.

4. Why are search rankings important for sales?

According to Rob Torres at Google: “The average travel purchase online involves over 50 unique search queries and 2.5 hours of research time.”

Each of these web searches is an opportunity to introduce your brand – but only if people see you.

Hubspot research suggests that:

• The top search result on a search page gets clicked 42% of the time
• The top 3 results get 79% of the total clicks
• The top 5 results get 88% of clicks
• Only 3% of searchers go beyond the first page of results pages

Clearly, placement in search results plays a very large role in how much website traffic your company receives.

5. Use guest reviews to increase direct sales by building trust

Encouraging more direct sales takes place through three basic categories of activity:

• Driving traffic to a website
• Making sure visitors stay on the website
• Converting that website traffic into sales

Since we covered the first point by looking at search engine optimization, let’s proceed to the other two areas.

First, making sure visitors stay on your site. Depending on the hotel type and a number of other factors, between 25-40% of people who leave a hotel website do so to read online reviews. Publishing reviews directly on your hotel website fights this loss of traffic, making that direct booking a higher probability.

Second, converting more traffic into sales – turning more more website visitors into buyers. Improving consumer confidence is a key factor in improving those conversion rates. Hotels that place guest reviews on their website typically find it much easier to get new visitors to trust their sales message.

This approach is especially important for small and independent hotels that may not have the recognition of a large chain brand.

Business travelers in particular tend to choose large hotels because chain brands offer a consistent experience. The chance of having a horrible experience is perceived as lower.

For small and independent hotels, developing a positive online reputation increases confidence that your hotel has been approved by dozens of other travelers. Trust is established through credibility, and today credibility is best built through the words of others.

6. Publish reviews in a mix of formats

Sharing reviews you receive online as written text is a powerful tactic. But mixing formats of user-generated content can make the testimonials even more effective.

Many hotels that deliver remarkable experiences for their guests receive notes of appreciation back from these people. If people send your hotel staff a postcard or letter talking about how much they appreciated their stay, get permission to scan it and upload the positive feedback to your website. Hotel SO in New Zealand shares their guestbook online by uploading images to a separate domain – WeLoveSo.com – for easy reference. How difficult would it be for you to do something similar?  

Video or audio testimonials can be the most difficult type of content to create, but can make for a very compelling sales tool. If you ever have the opportunity (and permission) to record positive feedback from guests in video or audio format, do so. Showcase it on your blog. Feature it on your website.

You may find the best way to create video is through events hosted at your hotel. The Roger Smith Hotel in New York City makes hosting live events and meetups a strategic part of their digitial media campaign for this reason.

7. Test, Test, Test

Once you have positive reviews, testimonials, and other pieces of user-generated content, place it anywhere on your website where you need to build credibility.

Look at your website analytics for pages with high bounce rates and high exit rates. This could reveal good opportunities.

As with any sales or marketing activity online, testing is crucial to see what is working for you. I recommend continually experimenting, and watch how these experiments impact factors such as:

• Time on site
• Bounce rates
• Page exit rates
• Sales conversion rates

8. Cultivate and work with your brand ambassadors

Whatever goal you are trying to obtain with public relations or marketing communications, work to have your guests and customers become the spokespeople and share the message for you.

The greatest selling tactic in the world is the similar situation story.

Consumers find stories from other travelers like them to be most credible and helpful as they make their buying decision.

• Collect and share stories of delighted guests.
• Leverage social proof in the form of testimonials.
• Put guest feedback on every page of your website
• Focus on putting positive reviews and testimonials in the website sales process, as this may increase conversion rates.
• Consider creating a separate website page or mini-site where you publish all guest feedback in one place for easy reference.
• Mix up the media formats – text, photos, and video – to achieve best results.

NB: This is a guest article by Josiah Mackenzie, director of business development at ReviewPro, an online reputation analytics service to more than 2,000 hotels worldwide.

That’s what Oyster.com rolled out today with its Oyster Shots photo-powered hotel search.

For example, users can merely click on a trending photo category such as “beaches,” select a photo for Hotel Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, Calif., and then book a room right from the photo on Oyster.com.

+

Of course, you can also enter a text query to access photo-led search results and Oyster provides auto-suggest functionality as you are typing your query to speed the process. The auto-suggest features looks like this:

So, if you start typing “Santa Monica p” then you will see auto-suggested choices such as “Santa Monica and Venice, Los Angeles +pool” or “Santa Monica and Venice, Los Angeles +Premier Room” to speed your query.

Eytan Seidman, Oyster co-founder and vice president of product, says Oyster tags each photo and leverages data about each image in its database to retrieve relevant results.

Each image contains GPS data such as latitude and longitude;  the hotel name; and the part of the hotel where the photo was taken (pool, lobby, guest room), for example.

On top of that data, Oyster then layers editorial data about the property such as whether it can be classified as a “party hotel” or a “luxury hotel,” Seidman adds.

“We have all that data across all the photos,” Seidman says. “We algorithmically match queries to the underlying photos to bring you relevant results.”

When you plug in your check-in and checkout dates, you also get real-time availability information, Seidman says.

Oyster also literally stores about 20 resolutions of each image so it can match the proper image to the monitor size, whether it be an iPad, a smartphone or a PC, Seidman says.

For its hotel photography portfolio, Oyster prides itself on avoiding marketing photos submitted by the hotels.

“Too often, hotel guests are misled by doctored marketing photos, which leads to disappointment and dissatisfaction in accommodations,” says Elie Seidman, cofounder and CEO. “Oyster Shots lets our visitors see exactly what to expect before it’s too late so there are no unpleasant surprises — just perfect vacations.”

Perfect vacations or not, Oyster offers journalist-written hotel reviews for a couple of dozen destinations around the world.

And, the company apparently is going to make a big push with Oyster Shots. The website’s We’re Hiring! sectioin lists more than a dozen job opening for photographers in destinations from Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, to Madrid and Bermuda.

Bing Travel, too, offers visual search, integrated from Bing, and replete with auto-suggest functionality.

But when you select the Bing Travel gallery for Las Vegas hotels and then click on a photo of the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, for example, you navigate out of Bing Travel to Bing.com and away from any transactional capabilities.

These incremental improvements fall into two categories: building the shop (including sourcing flight product) and marketing the shop (e.g. driving consumer traffic).

Skyscanner, one of Europe’s largest consumer-facing flight search utilities, revealed a couple of products that will assist with marketing its shop. This will help Skyscanner build on its 14.5 million unique visits per month (on web & mobile platforms combined) and 50 million monthly flight searches.

First up, is an updated iPhone app.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gscY1DVmLM

The key change from version 1 is a new “fly everywhere” search. Effectively you can run an open destination search and find where you could go and on what date the cheapest flight might be available. This is a little like the original Farecast concept (now incorporated into Bing Travel).

Skyscanner sources the data via 240 direct-connects with online travel agencies and airlines.

Living in the South of the UK (Southampton), I have 5 airports all within a couple of hundred miles. They are Southampton, Bristol, London Heathrow, London Gatwick and London Stansted.

The Skyscanner iPhone app now enables me to search outbound routes from all of these airports at once. However, this is only if I search using the full UK airport list.

Kayak still wears the crown for a multi-starting point flight search as you can explicitly state upto four airports to search from.

Although Kayak has a multi-starting point search, a single destination must be provided (for a flexible date search). So neither Kayak nor Skyscanner quite do what I want yet, although both are well ahead of others in this area.

Another Skyscanner announcement June 24 pertained to its new Facebook flight search tool.

This enables searches to be made within a Facebook page using a free text query. For example, a customer can post “London to Edinburgh on 29 June” and get a quote for the cheapest price for that route on that day.

This service is not an application. To activate it, all a user must do is “like” Skycanner Flight Search on Facebook. (But, be careful: The flight search is a separate profile and not to be confused with the main Skyscanner profile page.)

This new service is built on functionality that was initially trialled on Twitter (@flyscan). I had a play with it then and it certainly works, although it is a long way off from passing the Turing test. Fun though.

When it comes to marketing the shop, in a third development, Skyscanner announced it would open a Singapore-based operation in September.

Skyscanner already provide services (including the recent iPhone app) in 23 languages.

The new office will enable them to push on in Singapore, China, Indonesia, Japan, India and Malaysia, all countries where Skyscanner already is seeing good growth.

So that’s one and a half inches and a big step to the East….

Seeking to leverage that seeming truism that recommendations from friends are the most popular sort of advice, Bing today introduced what it calls the “friend effect” into search results.

If you search Bing for “Chicago flights”, for instance, you’ll see images of your Facebook friends who have “liked” particular Chicago-relevant websites, whether it be an online travel agency or newspaper website. It looks like this:

How useful it is that one of your Facebook friends likes Cheapflights.com and that another has endorsed the Chicago Tribune is open to debate, although you can always contact that Facebook friend for a deeper interrogation.

Perhaps these types of recommendations become more important when they refer to a particular hotel or tour operator.

Similarly, if you do a Bing search for “Boston,” you’ll see Facebook friends who “live in the area” or have liked certain websites. Take a look:

On Bing, you can sign in with Facebook to get these more personalized and hopefully more conversational search results.

“Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now [using] the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web,” writes Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president, Microsoft, on the Bing community search blog.

The new features aren’t travel-specific, and come into play whether you are searching for an LCD TV, snorkel gear or romantic getaway.

Bing also further integrates Facebook by accessing the latest wall posts from some companies’ Facebook pages into search results. For example, after conducting an “Avis” search on Bing, it retrieves the latest wall post from Avis on its Facebook page.

Bing was believed to be in the process of rolling out these features throughout the day.

The following is a Bing video outlining the new features:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPYVqHZKF2g

In a financial filing May 6, Priceline states:

Some meta-search sites, such as Kayak.com, which recently began offering its users the ability to purchase tickets directly on its website, may evolve into more traditional online travel sites with ticket-booking capability.

Actually, the reference to flight tickets was a mistake and Priceline meant to cite the fact that Kayak began taking direct hotel bookings on Kayak.com, says Brian Ek, Priceline spokesman. For flights, Kayak.com refers users to airline and online travel agency websites for bookings.

But, Kayak introduced hotel bookings on Kayak.com several months ago through a private label deal with Travelocity. Previously, Kayak had only facilitated hotel bookings by referring users to third-party websites, a process that it still undertakes, but not exclusively.

Priceline also expressed competitive concerns about Google’s acquisition of ITA Software, Google’s investment in HomeAway and Google’s “meta-search” site displaying hotel rates and text advertisements as developments to watch.

Of course, all of this has not stopped Priceline from marketing its wares on Kayak.com, where Priceline is currently advertising its Name Your Own Price service within search results like this:

Asked about Priceline’s Name Your Own Price ads on Kayak.com, Brian Hoyt, an Orbitz Worldwide spokesman, said: “We are confident that the arbitration proceeding initiated by Orbitz [with Kayak] will address Kayak’s continuous disregard of its contractual obligations to Orbitz.”

Orbitz claims it has certain online travel agency exclusivity rights in Kayak search results and is pursuing arbitration with Kayak over the matter.

Kayak declined to comment on Hoyt’s statement.

Google StreetView is a powerful tool that many people and travel companies use day to day to discover more about a location using on-street images and navigation.

Some of the travel businesses that have utilised StreetView in a powerful way include Expedia with its HotelView service and the Orbitz hotel path.

For the most part, Google’s unique formula seems to have a lack of true competition, but why is this?

Do other companies simply not offer the service, or is their service somehow buggier or less effective in what it tries to accomplish?

It’s a combination of many things, really. Microsoft offers a similar map service with their online search engine, Bing, which was generally considered by some critics to be a flop.

Microsoft has developed a similar “street view” application called Street Slide, which plans to accomplish many of the things Google’s version has, with “less clicking”.

Needless to say, critics aren’t as excited as the company. First impressions show us that the image quality of Street Slide may end up being a problem, as well as load times.

So how has Google essentially monopolized the market for this kind of software?

International competition

It would be rational to think that Google would have competitors in regards to StreetView and Google Maps.

While there are other services that provide maps, Google’s StreetView is unique in that it has to be done manually.

Google Maps is composed mainly of government-provided satellite images, while Google StreetView is a feature maintained by Google’s own team, who take all of the pictures from the roves of cars with optimized panoramic cameras or astride snowmobiles, bicycles, or other vehicles for areas that cars cannot readily access.

Google has had some issues with competition in foreign countries, such as in Austria. It wasn’t a matter of true market competition however.

Amid privacy concerns, the Austrian government banned Google StreetView from operating or providing images from their country, but critics believe it was an act of economic protectionism.

They say the Austrian government wanted to protect the domestic interests of NORC, a company that uses technology similar to Google’s own program to map Austrian cities and rural territories.

In China, the company City8 released a StreetView version of Beijing in 2006. This program was released a year earlier before Google, and Google’s battles with the People’s Republic of China have rendered many of their services useless in the country.

For this reason, City8 has been moderately successful, but only because of the PRC’s rigid censorship policies that condemned Google’s products as a “vehicle for revolution”.

Why no real competition?

Very few companies command the resources that Google does. Since Google can finance an expansive collection of new projects, they remain a literally unstoppable force on the technological front.

Smaller companies in both the United States and foreign nations do not have the means to nurture as effective a system as Google Maps or Google StreetView, so there are very few reasons for consumers to seek out alternatives.

Google was ahead of the game, and they jumped in on Google Maps long before competitors even began to think about expanding their horizons, utterly crushing MapQuest and other early threats.

The fact that Google’s Android OS is so seamlessly integrated with Google Maps and a built-in GPS makes the platform even more popular.

Since 27% of world smartphones are Android, Google Maps draws in even more potential users with a ready-made mobile platform. Google’s sophisticated navigation system is preferred by many users over the ever-popular TomTom and Garmin GPS systems.

Google’s adaptive, innovative GPS navigator utilizes frequently-updated traffic information so that the program can give the best suggestions for which routes to take on the go, and really strives to make the best use of 3G connectivity.

Because Google has created such a powerful system, true competition has yet to show itself.

NB: This is a guest article by Miles Walker, a freelance writer who normally writes feature articles for Carinsurancecomparison.org.

For example, TripAdvisor provides review snippets and WCities offers attactions data about the Seattle Aquarium.

In addition to the reviews, the pages list the attractions’ websites and phone numbers; directions, restaurants and parking details; and provide related videos.

Bing doesn’t take much risk with its attractions’ listings — the bulk of its picks are the most obvious and typical tourist spots.

Bing’s foray into this arena coincides with heightened interest in attractions and tours these days and their online distribution.

In fact, Pocketvillage, a Potsdam, Germany, startup, recently launched a metasearch solution for the notoriously fragmented tours and activities segment. And, TourRadar, which launched last summer, enables consumers to compare various tours.

There’s no online distribution, though, in Bing’s new attractions pages, which are part of Bing Local.

Indeed, there’s no integration between Bing’s attractions and Bing Travel, which would seemingly be a natural fit.

Meanwhile, Bing Travel is running of beta of its new Destination pages, enabling consumers to engage in an image-led comparison of vacation spots like this:

Below the images are Bing Travel links to flights to these destinations.

Like the destinations pages, the attractions pages detect the user’s location so flight and hotel links would make sense there, as well.

Bing announced the launch of its attractions pages in a post on its Search Blog.

There are several questions about the switch that now have been answered.

Bing Travel flights has retained its “look and feel,” but with the exception of Bing’s Price Predictor, the tools and filters basically are the same.

And, at first glance the search results on Kayak-powered Bing Travel flights and Kayak.com flights appear to be similar, but there are important differences.

Here’s a Bing results page for a Chicago ‘O’Hare to Orlando International Airport roundtrip March 25 to March 27.

The bottom of the page says “Results powered by Kayak.”

And here’s a Kayak results page for the same itinerary.

The pages look similar, but Bing and Kayak handle their supplier relationships differently.

If you click “Select” on the $629 United flight on Bing, you navigate to Orbitz Worldwide’s CheapTickets site for booking.

But, Orbitz Worldwide gets less love on Kayak.

If you click “Select” for the $629 United flight on Kayak, you are offered the choice of clicking on a $629 fare from CheapTickets, a $629 fare from United.com or “check rates” from Expedia.com.

The options look like this:

So, Bing is apparently honoring some online travel agency exclusivity rights for Orbitz Worldwide despite the switchover to Kayak, and whether Kayak.com is honoring Orbitz Worldwide OTA exclusivity provisions will apparently be a topic for the lawyers to hash out.

Another difference between Kayak-powered Bing Travel flights and Kayak.com flights is fare predictions.

In the switchover, Bing has retained its signature Price Predictor, offering tips on whether to buy or wait to book a flight, and Kayak says it has no intention of introducing a Price Predictor on Kayak.com.

The partnership is a big win for Kayak as it will benefit from the increased traffic and revenue in the countdown to an expected IPO try.

Remaining unanswered questions include whether Bing will take its Kayak partnership internationally and whether the alliance will expand beyond flights and into hotels.

In the day’s following Google’s July 1 announcement that it intended to buy ITA Software for $700 million, there was widespread speculation that the move would lead to new strategic alliances.

The new Bing Travel-Kayak global partnership is one such major strategic move. After all, in Kayak’s S-1 filing for its proposed IPO, Kayak says “our major competitors include general search engines such as Google and Bing …”

Kayak is slated to begin powering flight metasearch for Bing Travel “in the coming weeks” as the first step in the new alliance.

Krista Pappas, Bing’s global travel industry director, says air results are “the first step” in the new Bing-Kayak relationship, adding that “other steps have not been determined yet.”

“We’re harnessing the industry leader [Kayak] as a partner that can manage the innovations in metasearch,” Pappas says.

Essentially, Bing is conceding that as a general search engine its focus was lacking in metasearch, despite its 2008 acquisition of Farecast, and it is turning over much of the reins to Kayak.

“The meta price business maybe didn’t get as much attention as it needed to build out more unique experiences in the search experience,” Pappas says.

“They (Kayak) are the leaders of innovation in travel search,” Pappas says.

Bing intends to innovate on top of the core Kayak flight search results, Pappas says, with its flight predictions and features such as Bing’s new autosuggest solution and instant search results.

In a “Bing Welcomes Kayak” blog post March 4, Pappas writes that the Kayak partnership will lead to more comprehensiveness on Bing Travel and will produce “a larger set of flight itineraries.”

“For Bing this means we can focus our development resources on delivering even more unique and valuable features for customers,” Pappas writes. “In essence, this lets us do more for our customers as we continue to invest in next-generation travel experiences.”

Clearly, both Bing and Kayak, which are already allied in FairSearch.org to block Google’s acquisition of ITA Software, see Google as competitive threat No. 1.

“It’s vital to have a strong travel ecosystem and they (Kayak) are complementary to that,” Pappas says.

Microsoft is a competitor to Google and “we think of Kayak more as a partner than a competitor,” Pappas says.

For Kayak, the metasearch deal with Bing will broaden its reach and can only help with its IPO prospects as it seeks to portray itself as a viable competitor to Google Travel with or without the ITA Software deal going through.

In that vein, Kayak cofounder and chief technology officer Paul English recently got onto TV to position Kayak as a viable Google competitor because of Kayak’s “innovation velocity.”

The Bing-Kayak alliance certainly won’t help the arguments of some opponents of the Google-ITA Software deal that the acquisition would make Google too formidable an opponent for the metasearch crowd to combat as now it appears that Bing and Kayak have strengthened their positions.

FairSearch, a coalition opposing the Google-ITA deal, doesn’t see the issue merely as a matter of Google’s market clout.

FairSearch states: “FairSearch and its members have said that they would welcome Google as a competitor in travel, but that the Google-ITA deal would give Google even greater incentive and ability to engage in anti-competitive behavior that would result in less competition in online travel, less transparency in search, and higher airfares for consumers. The issue is not with Google strengthening its position in travel – it’s how they do it, and ensuring that they do it in a way that doesn’t lessen competition in the market and hurt consumers.”

Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman, says of the Bing-Kayak search deal: ”Combined with Kayak’s comments that it can compete fairly against Google-ITA, this is just the latest evidence of how fast things are evolving in online flight search, and how much room there is for other players to compete.  We’re eager to bring more competition and choices for consumers searching for flights online.”

Steve Hafner, Kayak cofounder and CEO, declined all comment on the Bing deal.

And, Pappas, too, declined to comment on the terms of the deal, including whether or not Microsoft has made an investment in Kayak.

Both Kayak and Bing Travel use ITA Software to power part of their U.S. flight search.

It’s unclear whether the Bing-Kayak partnership means that Bing will sever its ties with ITA.

When asked, Cara Kretz, an ITA spokeswoman, said: “It’s our longstanding policy not to comment or discuss terms or specific arrangements of our customers.”

The global nature of the deal could eventually put Bing Travel flight metasearch, powered by Kayak, into the U.K. for the first time as Farecast had not been ready for prime time in the UK market.

It’s unclear whether Kayak may adapt some Bing Travel features for Kayak.com.

And, it’s entirely possible that the Bing-Kayak alliance may eventually lead to Kayak powering Bing Travel’s hotel search, as well, although Bing Travel’s hotels currently are supplied by Orbitz.

So now that Microsoft and Kayak have made their chess move in response to the Google-ITA deal, it remains to be seen what kind of counter-move Expedia, another ardent opponent of the ITA acquisition, will execute.

In other developments, Bing debuted Bing deals on its mobile website and on the desktop, too.

Through an agreement with The DealMap, Bing aggregates local deals from major deals’ providers such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Restaurant.com.

On the mobile website, Bing detects your location and serves up deals, whether they be for a tanning salon or two sandwiches from Burger King.

If you search for hotel deals, you find various offers ranging from room discounts to gift certificates toward drinks at local restaurants.

Bing is emphasizing the mobile platform for Bing deals: There is a Deals link on the homepage of Bing’s mobile site.

In a blog post, Bing says to search for deals from your desktop you need to search for the name of the business, and then Bing will display a green icon if it is offering a deal.

Here’s how the service purports to work:

The user enters “Denver flights” into the Bing search box and Bing detects your origin airport and the lowest fare, all displayed under your query.

It looks like this:

In this New York to Denver example, Bing predicted a $279 fare March 15 to March 22 and that the fare would rise.

When you click on the link, you navigate to Bing Travel, where you have to run another search. Instead of the March 15 to March 22 dates, Bing has prepopulated the fields with March 25 to March 27 departure and return dates.

After running that search, the predicted $279 fare was nowhere to be found. Instead the fares on the first page of results ranged from $367 to $394.

And, when I ran another search using the original dates, March 15 to March 22 that the Autosuggest feature defaulted to, the New York to Denver fares ranged $298 to $322 on the first page of results.

Again, that predicted $279 fare had gone missing.

On the other hand, when inputting “San Francisco flights,” Bing answered by predicting a low fare of $298 from March 15 to March 22, and I actually found a $279 fare when running Bing Travel through its paces.

Bing revealed the release of Autosuggest Flight Prices in its Bing Community search blog, saying “Don’t worry about entering the formal city name or airport name.  Bing Travel recognizes colloquial names like Chi Town.”

However, when I entered “Chi Town flights” there was no fare prediction at all under the search box, and instead the navigation took me to Bing Travel for New York to Cape Town, South Africa, flights.

Hey, it’s a small world.

And, maybe Bing has some tweaking to do with autosuggest.

Skobbler this week launched the latest version of its detailed map system, ForeverMap, giving users the ability to browse mobile maps of any country in Europe but without a connection via data roaming.

The company it is the “first viable and portable digital map solution” for the mobile market – but will clearly have to establish a fanbase quickly.

One of the attractions of the Skobbler system is that it also uses pre-loaded content platforms for when a user needs additional information about an area of attraction on the map, such as Wikipedia, route finders and search.

It uses the OpenStreetMap creative commons technology for the maps.

It also works across the Apple suite including iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Earlier this month Google outlined its plans for a massively improved mobile mapping system, working not only completely offline but with 3D capability for some cities or other popular areas of interest.

For example, without inputting airport codes, dates and other particulars into the Bing search box, you can simply type, “Delta flights to New York for Christmas,” and retrieve a flight search widget and Top Deals from Bing Travel. The organic search results look like this:

The process is far from seamless — the traveler still has to insert the origin airport and take another step to launch the flight search widget and the Top Deals aren’t geared necessarily toward the consumer’s home airport — but it is better than doing a natural language flight search on Google.

[Correction: Bing's Instant Answer indeed populates origin airports based on Reverse IP technology, but didn't in the above example because the search was conducted from New Jersey -- too close to destination airports in New York.]

A Google search this morning for “Delta flights to New York for Christmas” didn’t retrieve any search engines from Google’s online travel agency partners and, in fact, the top organic result was for a Wikipedia entry about last year’s Christmas bombing attempt on board Northwest flight 253. Here’s what the organic search results looked like on Google:

About the natural language search for flights on Bing — it has potential, if developed, to ease the search experience.

Call it one small step for man, but so far hardly a giant leap for mankind.

Does she/he trust the information presented? Does he/she trust Google? Is there anyone or anything that can be seen as a trustworthy source of information?

Or, alternatively, where is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of the web?

Brand marketers on the web are constantly moaning that consumers are fickle and have the attention span of a fish.

Common complaints? They click away very quickly and they show no loyalty. But surely it is the responsibility of the seller to ensure that they have a good trustworthy proposition on the web as anywhere else.

If we examine the typical place people go for “trust” type information it is places like the Better Business Bureau or the Consumers’ Union.

In the UK it’s Which and the Citizens Advice Bureau among others.

One might also expect the government watchdogs to also provide some neutral information – but consumers are very frustrated by the delay and poor service from government organizations such as the Federal Trade Commission and Office of Fair Trading (UK).

The oversight European Commission consumer protection agency is SANCO, covering health and safety as well as consumer protection.

All of this is a pretty uninspiring solution of where to go for trust. So consumers are making their own decisions. Much has been written about user generated content, with the rise of sites like TripAdvisor, which is the big player in travel and is built from a consumer position but fundamentally those it is targeting still question whether they can trust it.

But as it’s the only game in town, consumers have no choice. But now Google is recognizing that product peviews are important and is trying to shoe horn this into search (along with all the other clutter that is coming both in the front and back of the search process).

It is partnering in a non-exclusive way with BazaarVoice to provide product reviews to the Google search and AdWord services.

The eTailing group (on behalf of Power Reviews) undertook a survey of 1,000 consumers who spent $250 or more and shopped on line at least four times per year.

Hardly an inspiring pool of source material, but so far it is all I could find on the subject.

In this study, compared to a 2007 piece of research, it is clear that there is an increasing use of product reviews as more people get to use more of the web.

However there are forces that work against this. Amongst the many factors that make the process of shopping harder online is the sheer volume of data and somewhat daunting task of sifting through the information to get a qualitative set of results.

Consumers behavior tends to either rely on the immediate circle of friends and family and then their online social network of contacts.

Or they have a trust in some brands to give them a sense of comfort. It seems that much of this is done to prevent the process of buyers’ remorse.

What we see is that there is a strong sense of distrust of the lack of neutrality of all this.

Some care – but many simply do not. So far no one has stepped up to fill that void. The default seems to be that the Googleplex is the only place to go to find things, driven by the blind belief that Google is indeed doing no evil and will respond to the user in a neutral utilitarian point of view.

As we have seen this is not the case anymore. Nor is Facebook a place of trust as it has blotted the copybook with the apps and Rapleaf scandal.

At least one can use Bing or Google to get a result. But that result is not what I want and in general we are left with a sense of less taste, more filling.

Perhaps I am more jaded than the average consumer, but I believe there is a strong sense of consumer resentment about this.

Too bad there isn’t a consumer Tea Party-type organization that can actually reflect this. But, sadly, we get enough freebies from Google to make that problem go away.

Roman society had an expression that accurately reflects the situation in the online world. Accept the stuff that search does for you because it gives you so much utility.

The Romans called it Panem et Circenses – look that one up on Wikipedia…

Step forward Bing Travel. The fun-loving folk from the rival metasearch firm thought it would be a laugh to hire a Hafner double to gatecrash the PhoCusWright conference this week.

Hafner would probably rather see Bing putting its efforts into supporting the FairSearch campaign, but one step at a time…

Meanwhile, rumours that the Hafner look-a-like is a movie star and the real Kayak CEO will be standing in as a butt double are apparently, according to a source, extremely wide of the mark…