Fresh from launching a service to allow users to get detailed search results based on their physical location instead of just nearest airport, Travelfusion has also integrated a mapping device.

The UK-based consumer-facing and B2B metasearch engine now allows users to select any location on a Google map for the From and To fields of a trip.

The map automatically works out the postcodes/zipcodes and then returns results based on the point-to-point parameters.

The system also allows users to use maps to view airports within their region (All London, for example) and obtain results for individual departure points.

The TravelFusion system is now moving quickly to position itself ahead of the Zoombu project from Oxford, UK.

Zoombu recently finalised a round of funding but is still in closed beta and unlikely to have the same spread of destinations and departure points as TravelFusion has launched within its point-to-point product.

There’s lots of discussions going round, especially in the consulting circus about the future validity of OTAs.

Will they (we) be around in ten or even five years from now, and what will we look like?

Metasearch websites, Google, Bing Travel and other new intermediaries are slowly paralyzing our industry.

New players are hailed by business strategists and consulting firms. But while the OTAs are asking what sort of value they bring, consumers flock to these so-called new players.

An industry insider and veteran says: “People opt for frozen, processed food (meta) when they can find fresh (OTA) one mouse click away.”

The same OTA executive labelled meta channels of being Mercedes compared to the OTAs being a VW.

This very well pictures a common problem in the OTA circles. We don’t know where we are going, why, and even how we got to where we are.

In the 1990s the industry focus and aim was to challenge trade structures for the better of the consumer, now sadly most have crawled back into caves of defence “working” as outsourced contractors for our suppliers – the GDSs, the airlines, the metas and Google.

We challenged the sugar daddies that were sucking up for suppliers, screaming for industry Viagra, kickbacks and incentive.

And now WE are all there standing in line waiting for handouts. It only took a little more than ten years, and in the process our suppliers got stronger.

It’s all in the volumes. If you don’t have volume your are nobody, or so they say.

BUT, it wasn’t the volume that got us here. It was the Mojo!

Being on the bleeding edge in the evolution of OTAs since it’s inception some 13 years ago, I have seen industry players going from being agile and full of a warrior spirit to become complacent and focusing purely on volume.

The OTA´s have a distinct role and purposes to fill and if we don’t we might as well sell hot dogs. So what is the purpose of the OTAs and what is the calling? Well here’s the five raison d’être for any OTA:

1. Drive innovation – Before the OTA´s there was literally nothing online to talk about. Companies like PC Travel, TISS and others showed how to use technology to present, package and sell flights online. OTAs have also paved the way for ancillary sales, dynamic packaging etc. What was innovation then are standards today. Innovation today, in online travel, comes from small start ups developing gadgets for parts of the travel process with little and no use without context. With the advent of the smart phone the field is again wide open. The browser was the catalyst to change the booking process.  The phone will change the payment, customer services and post booking process. There are many other areas to innovate in; Marketing, social media, supply access you name it. You can shred the OTA business to pieces and find hundreds of areas to innovate in.
2. Customer advocacy – OTAs should set standards for customer service levels. The customer advocacy mandate is not about schmoozing, it’s about being the industry pesticide for bad practise and terrible service. The airlines job is to fly passengers as safe as possible from A to B. Unfortunately they get themselves into trench wars with agents allowing their hotlines to break down every time there’s a major delay, strike or God forbid a terror incident. Somewhere around the globe there’s an airline that defaults almost every month and one of the OTAs jobs is to make sure that airlines with a questionable near future doesn’t get any bookings. The mandate also implies that we make the industry “greener” meaning that we fight for common standards and decency.
3. Create demand – Google, metachannels, affiliates etc drives a lot of traffic to websites. But it doesn’t create any demand. Through presentation, creative marketing, newsletters, social media and so on the OTAs can and should drive demand for new and exotic products that perhaps wouldn’t find the market otherwise. Here’s were the long tails works wonder in travel marketing. Specialized operators can niche destinations or special interest groups and fill up hotels and seats on destinations that otherwise would be unsold. We often talk about the need of creating an iPod for the travel industry, meaning creating a product that no one knew that they need or want. Suppliers and consumers will come rushing to an OTA with a creative mind.
4. Lower fares – A world without OTA would be a dark place with high fares, dodgy rules and bad service. The OTAs job is to lower fares, democratizing travel and bring order and transparency. Fares and bad business practice are brought down through transparency. Nothing brings competitors to their knees more than the truth. And the truth is the transparent UI. Network carriers, benchmark fares through the OTAs. It’s amazing what the power of UI holds. In the old world the airline brands were incredibly strong. In 2010 the UI is everything. Today OTAs have the power to address lack of airlines cooperation by simply cutting them off the UI or price them so high that they will not appear amongst the first search results. The power has truly shifted. And for some markets it’s simply waiting to happen. In many cases, unfortunately, the OTAs are busboys for the airlines.
5. Drive distribution – The OTAs were the first ones to explore the wonderful world of online marketing. Still today OTAs work harder to find their customers online than any supplier, but suppliers are catching up fast. Our business is judged by how good we are at finding (and keeping) customers. Today most OTAs depend heavily on three major traffic sources – large affiliates, Google and metasearch engines. Just like many OTAs lack in innovation I see many fail in finding customers in a clever way, and again fall prey to play the volume game. This is however a dangerous game since the business you “buy” easily can be taken away from one day to the next.

Reason matters more than size, or so it should. Customers are more and more unfaithful, and why shouldn’t they.

A partner who doesn’t go the extra mile to impress is not fun to be around after a while. My five raison d’être can reshape the future of any company and put it back in the lead. I for one believe that the race is always on and you can always change the outcome if you are prepared to change the rules a bit.

But the problem is as always in this industry: who do you work for?

UPDATE: Within two hours of this post appearing, TripAdvisor curiously pulled both of the video clips from YouTube. The clips also featured in the company’s own YouTube channel.

TripAdvisor says it “found out” the video was on YouTube and took it down. The clip wasn’t ready yet and hadn’t gone through the full vetting process, a spokesman says. Amazingly a production person in TripAdvisor had posted in prematurely.

TripAdvisor is either on a recruitment drive or has turned into one of those companies that likes to create quirky and edgy videos to show off how, err, quirky and edgy it is.

Or both.

The human resources video from the folk at TripAdvisor was uploaded to YouTube this week and paints a heartwarmingly upbeat picture of life at work for the user review giant and its string of subsidiaries.

The five-minute clip (thankfully there is also 30-second version) features all manner of staffers from chief executive Stephen Kaufer and advertising boss Robin Ingle to business development director Nathan Clapton and a whole host of engineers and marketing people.

No sign of the Snarky Owl.

With Priceline releasing its new commercial featuring the omnipresent William Shatner as The Negotiator, metasearch engine Kayak is also in quickly with its latest for the US market.

The ad, known simply as Kissing, features two insatiable office workers who struggle to contain themselves during an important meeting.

Kayak’s release of the ad follows the launch of the its first TV advertising campaign at the back end of 2009.

One of the first 30-second clips caused a mild amount of controversy as it appeared to feature a war veteran reminiscing about dangerous beach landings whereas he was in fact remembering the wild spots of Cancun in Mexico.

The new ad also coincides with a move to profile some of the company’s senior execs in the wider business consumer media, such as an article this week about co-founder and CTO Paul English.

A year is a long time in travel as well as politics – especially for Ryanair which has agreed today to publish its its fares on the Kayak metasearch engine.

The surprise move comes not so long after the low-cost airline’s widely publicised anti-screen scraping stance against online travel agencies, price comparison and metasearch sites.

The deal will see Ryanair fares, availability and schedule information included on the Kayak site.

In the summer of 2008, Ryanair famously published a list of websites around Europe it said were scraping its website to obtain fares and schedules.

It emerged that Ryanair was clamping down on the scraping activity because of major load pressures on its site, rather than the stated reason that it wanted consumers to book direct.

Two of the leading metasearch sites in the UK, TravelSupermarket and Skyscanner, had contrasting fortunes as a result of Ryanair’s action at the time – Skyscanner kept its ability to include Ryanair fares while TravelSupermarket was cut out.

NB: TravelSupermarket says it now shows Ryanair fares on its site.

Ryanair was understood at the time to be working with a number of technology providers (including Microsoft) to put in sophisticated firewalls to ease to load to the site from scrapers.

The about-face (and a very public one at that) marks a major move by Kayak in the European marketplace after a number of years failing to challenge TravelSupermarket, Skyscanner and price comparison site Cheapflights.

Officials in its European division were charged with securing a deal with Kayak almost two years ago, despite the airline’s stated policy of not working with metasearch engines.

For Ryanair the move is also a significant one.

The airline has steadfastly refused to work with intermediaries since its inception as a web-based booking airline, with much of its chief executive Michael O’Leary’s ire aimed at traditional offline retail travel agents – inevitably angering almost the entire travel trade community in the UK.

The move to work with Kayak signifies either that the airline has established new or improved XML systems from its website or has chosen to partner with the US-based engine purely for commercial reasons.

It also recently started working with Travelzoo’s Fly.com metasearch engine with content.

Skyscanner was one of the only sites that wasn’t blocked by Ryanair at the height of the screen scraping row – a decision Skyscanner said at the time was due to the less-aggressive way from a caching perspective that it was accessing the fares from the airline’s site.

Ryanair now says:

“Ryanair has never had a problem with honest cost comparison sites (ie those that simply display accurate information without loading on their own charges) but continues to work to prevent underhand practices at some sites where prices are inflated with the addition of ‘commission’ or ‘handling fees’ without the passenger being made aware of the true cost (ie the cost of the flight if they left that site and booked directly on Ryanair.com). Any true, cost comparison only, site can sign up to a licensing agreement with Ryanair to display our information.”

Kayak has also announced it is moving its holidays search tool on the site out of beta for a full launch. The channel is currently support by trips from the likes of Thomas Cook, Virgin Holidays and On The Beach.

Today’s outpouring of PR also includes news that Lastminute.com is streaming hotel content into Kayak’s accommodation engine.

Expedia Inc. historically has dabbled less in metasearch than Orbitz Worldwide and some of its other online travel agency competitors, but CEO Dara Khosrowshahi now is bullish on the channel.

“We’ll play in metasearch and we think metasearch will be around forever,” Khosrowshahi told attendees at Citi’s 20th Annual Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco Jan. 5.

At the advent of travel metasearch several years ago, the channel was widely seen as a supplier medium that might bring the OTAs to their knees, but much has changed since then.

Khosrowshahi says metasearch is not one of Expedia’s top 3 channels, but it’s an important one.

And, he doesn’t view metasearch as competition, although he’d rather, of course, get direct traffic.

Expedia’s TripAdvisor launched flight metasearch early in 2009, and Khosrowshahi says he forsees “quite significant growth” from the metasearch channel — not just from TripAdvisor’s flight metasearch — in 2010 and 2011.

Khosrowshahi says metasearch has been a “fairly efficient” channel for Expedia, and the OTA will take advantage of it, partipating up to the level that the company’s efficiency metrics allow.

When Expedia eliminated air booking fees and other OTAs followed, there was a school of thought that flight metasearch was dead because there now was parity with airline websites and not much differentiation.

But, if you listen to Khosrowshahi, then the Kayaks and Travelsupermarkets of this world have a few good days ahead of them.

Remember SideStep? With all the focus on Kayak with its TV ads, possible IPO and the intermediary saga, many would be forgiven for forgetting about the rival metasearch engine it bought.

Well, for all the talk about mobile and other developments at the mothership, Kayak appears to be throwing some energy into its acquisition from 2006.

The Connecticut, USA-based company says it is considering an iPhone app for Sidestep as a way to keep tools and services across both brands developing along similar patterns.

Kayak says it intends to continue marketing the SideStep brand – presumably almost exclusively through keyword-buying, rather than TV campaigns – and overall it is happy with search volume on the site.

Chief marketing officer Robery Birge says:

“The SideStep brand has had a loyal user base for some time, and our intention is to continue serving them.”

When Kayak bought SideStep in 2006 for a rumoured $160 million – although some still ponder whether this was an exaggerated figure – industry watchers questioned whether SideStep would eventually be folded into Kayak.

The SideStep UK site, which was the subject of a tricky and long-running legal wrangle to get hold of the .co.uk domain, was closed almost immediately after the acquisition amid a similarly slow-burning attempt as Kayak to gain significant traction.

In the US, however, SideStep commands a healthy dose of monthly traffic (about 1.4 million uniques, around a quarter of what the sister brand gets, according to Compete).

Fresh from hiring its first ever advertising agency for TV creative work, Skyscanner has unveiled the first 30-second spot to be aired in Scotland ahead of a possible wider roll-out across the UK.

The ad launched on Monday this week on a number of leading Scottish commercial channels in prime and off-peak time slots and will run until mid-February before officials at the metasearch site decide whether to extend elsewhere.

The agency behind the ad -- featuring two plane spotters discussing aircraft and fares at the end of a runway -- is Edinburgh-based Newhaven, with media buying by FeatherBrooksbank.

Skyscanner’s ad marks a return to TV advertising for the UK metasearch sector following the mammoth campaign from rival site TravelSupermarket in 2007, ahead of its floatation on the London Stock Exchange with parent company MoneySupermarket.

It is not the only metasearch to bring in a well-respected marketing guru and see a switch to TV advertising.

US site Kayak launched its controversial TV ads for the US market in October 2009, six months after hiring Robert Birge as its chief marketing officer.

UPDATE: Skyscanner probably decided not to use this experimental effort from September 2009.

This is not a 2010 prediction, but a certainty: Many more travel planning, research and metasearch websites are planned for 2010.

This crowded field promises to get more crowded.

Goissimo.com, a U.K. start-up travel planning and metasearch site,  announced Dec. 24, that its several-week-old beta has been going well and it will launch full-throttle in January, adding that “it is set to revolutionise online travel search and will lead the way into the new decade for a new era of preference-based travel choice for consumers.”

Next month, Goissimo plans to unveil the full version of its Holiday Helper search tool, saved searches, reviews and filters “along with many other exciting new developments.”

Suppliers and intermediaries in the mix include lastminute.com, Hilton, LateRooms, Airtours, Travelocity, booking.com, British Airways, EasyJet and On The Beach, among others, Goissimo says.

However, Europe is not the only arena where the travel-planning frenzy continues unabated.

Centr’d, based in Menlo Park, Calif., filed a notice Dec. 24 with the Securities & Exchange Commission that it has issued stock and raised almost $1.9 million, with another $2.1 million in equity remaining to be sold. The notice doesn’t say what the proceeds are being used for.

Centr’d uses its SentimentAnalysis tool to cull user reviews using natural-language processing technologies and then recommends restaurants, attractions, events and shopping experienced based on user preferences.

There is indeed lots of innovation taking place in the trip-planning sphere on both side of the Atlantic and other parts of the world, and it looks like the cast of new entrants will be looming ever-larger next year.

A little bit more meat on the bones of Kayak’s news yesterday that it will be launching a significant new proposition in 2010 with booking functionality for users of its iPhone application.

Reaction yesterday concentrated on a number of key themes, most of which chief marketing officer Robert Birge was happy to answer on a call today.

One of the significant points raised yesterday is now Kayak’s strategic difference from other metasearch players – or relative closeness to an online travel agency – given that it will be taking the credit cards details of customers and buying the product on their behalf.

Birge is adamant that Kayak is still a metasearch engine (”media company”, as he calls it) first and foremost and the addition of what seems to some is a fundamentally and strategically different proposition is just an obvious way to tackle the “friction” users experience when searching and then booking on a mobile device.

“We are providing them [users] a tool for them to have booking as a service on their mobiles,” he says.

Given chief executive Steve Hafner’s comments over the years about online travel agencies, some might argue that the messaging with regards to this change, at least from an industry perspective, is probably quite important and ironic.

Despite the denial of a move toward OTAland – the semantics of the development will no doubt be debated for months ahead – the realisation that handling user credit card information creates lots of issues.

PCI compliance, as mentioned yesterday, is a key area that needs to be tackled long before the new functionality (it’s officially called Wallet) appears on the app itself – scheduled for a Q1 launch in 2010.

Birge, however, admits that the finer details of how this will be addressed are still be finalised, adding briefly: “We of course understand that it’s something that we need to handle – and also handle it well.”

In terms of the rollout of the service and business logistics of launch, Birge says the app will be available across all markets “where we have a meaningful business”, primarily meaning North America and some European markets such as the UK.

However, Kayak is hoping the new app will reinvigorate its somewhat stuttering presence in Europe over the years, where it lags behind a number of significant players such as EasyVoyage, Travelsupermarket, Skyscanner amongst others.

Birge says the need to do some innovative and interesting things in mobile was demonstrated by the realisation that  iPhone was Kayak’s third largest browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox, and accounts for roughly 5% of all search volumes.

This is expected to increase as more users adopt 3G handsets.

[Interestingly, Kayak's research found there is no difference at all in how people search for flights or hotels in terms of time scale, countering the argument that mobile search is more likely on those looking for last-minute fares or rooms.]

Kayak currently has online display and text advertising running across its site, accounting for a significant amount of its overall revenues, anything up to a 60-40 split in favour of revenues from referrals versus advertising.

Although users of the mobile apps (600,000 downloads of the iPhone version, plus 50,000 Blackerry and some Android) are mostly new customers (”we have not cannibalised the website”), Kayak will eventually put advertising on the mobile apps to counteract any tail-off from users no longer clicking on the web ads.

Finally, Birge recognises that frequent flyer functionality is an important part of any air booking facility, and stresses its importance emphatically if without much detail.

“That’s obviously critical functionality, so that will be handled out of the gate.”

Meanwhile, Kayak’s controversial TV ads may well have an addition to their ranks to support the Wallet tool on the new app. TBC, Birge says.

Kayak is blaming the rise of the iPhone and the popularity of its app but the metasearch engine has effectively turned its strategy on its head by saying it will now take bookings for customers.

The company has released a new version of its iPhone app and says in 2010 it will be taking bookings via handsets.

These aren’t ordinary bookings, of course, but what sound like good old fashioned “give us your credit card details and we’ll do the booking for you”.

Users will be able to register their details on the app and then Kayak will make the booking on their behalf, notifying them when the transaction is complete.

Details are a bit sketchy at this stage, with a briefing given to IT site GigaOM in the US, but a UK official plays down the development slightly and stresses that Kayak “will not own the customer”.

What it does mean, however, is that Kayak will have to create a significant new department in its ranks to handle credit card bookings on the behalf of users.

In some respects the move makes a lot of sense for meta players offering mobile apps such as Kayak, mostly because once a search is carried out on the handset each user is at the mercy of the mobile version of the referred website to make the booking.

In other words, finding a relevant flight or piece of accommodation on the mobile meta site has the potential to descend into irrelevancy as the airline or hotel may not take mobile bookings, or the process is convoluted and not particularly good – leading to frustration with the user.

The second version of the iPhone, released this week, comes on the back of enormous success for the first app in the US where it currently sites at number five in the top free products in the iTunes store. It is number 20 in the UK charts.

Google says it has no plans to extend its recently launched Comparison Ads project to include products from the travel vertical.

The confirmation comes during a busy week for Google as it rolls out the real-time search, boosts it mobile play and launches the photo search Goggles application.

The Comp Ads scheme was unveiled in October 2009 and creates a list of mortgage products automatically taken from paid-for ads included in its AdWords system.

The launch signalled what could be a fascinating expansion of the AdWords programme, allowing companies bidding on certain keywords to find their product included in a basic yet reasonably intuitive metasearch proforma.

Extending Comparison Ads into travel might have been an interesting experiment, not least to see how its relationship with intermediaries may have been affected, as some argued here.

Google however appears content to keep the service within the financial services sector for the time being.

An official at Google UK says:

“We don’t have any plans to extend comparison ads beyond the current format, or extend it to any other verticals.”

And that’s the end of that. Maybe.

Metasearch is finally climbing into what could be an exciting second phase with news that TravelFusion is developing new functionality to allow full travel plan searches.

The UK-based firm will launch an overhauled version of its consumer-facing website in early-2010 to include point-to-point metasearch featuring a breakdown of time and prices of transportation to and from the main departure and arrival points of a trip.

The functionality is similar to the widely praised, closed-beta only Zoombu metasearch engine, which also has point-to-point search capability.

The TravelFusion system allows users to add post and zip codes in the To and From fields and then returns additional results including taxi or local metro fares and the time required.

Users will also be shown a check-in time for airport departures.

The development for TravelFusion, which has a sizeable B2B business as well as its consumer portal, comes as metasearch hits what some say is an important development period in its history.

The enthusiasm for alert and prediction technology in meta engines such as Bing and Farecompare in the US is expected to reach Europe during 2010 and a number of new entrants, such as Cheapflights, are expected to enter the market over the same period.

Small travel company reservation system technology doesn’t capture the imagination (nor the headlines) as much as other sectors attracting online travel entrepreneurs such as metasearch, consumer reviews or mobile/location services.

But bubbling under the surface there are products launching that are changing the way small travel suppliers work with their customers and suppliers.

Hotels have long had web based PMS systems but niche tour operators and activity companies are fast catching up.

Leading companies include Rezgo (presented at Phocuswright Travel Innovation Summit in 2008), TouristWay (pitched at GetFundedShow 2009), AdventureEngine, AdventureLink and TourCMS.

TourCMS has today launched a new service that it says has the potential to be game-changing in the niche tour operator/activity company sector.

Built on top of their existing web based reservation system used by approximately 60 specialist tour operators is a new service called the TourCMS Marketplace.

The service enables tour operators to load tours, dates, prices and availability. Travel website partners can sign up and form content relationships with those suppliers and have then direct access to live pricing/availability content via an XML API.

Managing director Alex Bainbridge (disclosure: also a Tnooz node) says:

“One problem that small tour operators face is that they have to work with so many different travel website extranets keeping dates, prices & availability information current.

“The TourCMS Marketplace enables the niche supplier to manage their information in one place. It is not unlike RateTiger from the hotel sector merged with a conventional flight/hotel GDS approach.

“Uniquely in our sector the TourCMS marketplace supports end point contracts. By this we mean that the supplier contracts with the OTA or travel website directly.

“Some may choose to work on an PPC basis, others on an affiliate basis, others on a advertising listing basis. The marketplace supports all of that as well as DMO style concepts where a regional website may want to list all their local companies in one place but not have to go to the effort of building yet another administration extranet that no one wants to update.”

Launch partners include Adventure Networks, which is launching a series of commercial DMO websites, and Adnet from Worldreviewer, an online advertising platform used by around 300 advertisers on 25 travel websites.

News this week that Microsoft’s fully functioning Bing Travel will not be hitting Europe in 2009 means that another site from the US with air price data prediction tools at its heart, FareCompare, might make it first.

Bing says the complexity of gathering historic data about fares over any given period is time consuming and has affected its ability to launch the Farecast system overseas.

FareCompare faces similar issues on the number crunching front, but has a roadmap which could see it outside of the US sooner than Bing Travel.

FareCompare is aiming to have worldwide coverage of ATPCO data (a body which collects fare data on behalf of the industry) by January 2010, says CEO Rick Seaney.

The company currently has domestic US and Canadian data from October 2004 to the present day and in/outbound for the US and Canada since January 2006.

The influx of worldwide data, Seaney says, means FareCompare will be pricing “millions of new itineraries” every day.

“Our aspiration is to have worldwide coverage of the most comprehensive database in the world of current and historical airfare pricing data and to bring to market a variety of tools that slices this massive database to the marketplace, via dot-com and social media.”

The question for potential European rivals of FareCompare and Bing will be if they can afford to get their hands on – or have a desire to include – similar data sets in order to publish the prediction tools which have made the two US sites popular.