Expedia is rolling out its new branding to more corners of the world this week but has decided on a different approach for the Australia and New Zealand market.

The well known Building Blocks TV ads thrown at consumers recently in the US and UK isn’t making its way Down Under, with ad agency BMF coming up with a completely new idea.

The TV spots are the first made for the Australia and New Zealand TV audiences.

The ad, which has the new logo and linguistically awkward “Where You Book Matters” tagline, is designed to illustrate the vast hotel content available on the Expedia site rather than the dynamic packaging capabilities in the UK, for example.

Expedia Australia lags behind rivals Webjet and FlightCentre in the Australia online agency marketplace.

Figures from Hitwise for the week ending 1 May 2010 show that the Australia site has a market share of 7.2% and the dot-com attracts a further 2.87%.

Combined they challenge FlightCentre (10.09%) but are still 3% behind WebJet.

Here’s the ad:

NB: Hat-tip Mumbrella.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has announced Argentinian amateur film-maker Andres Borghi has won Tourism New Zealand’s web-led search for a new promotional video.

Borghi’s three-minute Working Day clip was selected by Jackson following a four-month competition which saw over a 1,000 wannabe directors submit ideas for a screenplay to extol the virtues of New Zealand.

Following the launch of the Your Big Break campaign in November 2009, submission process and 60-second video pitches, a panel of Academy Award-winning producers, editors and film-makers created a shortlist of five entries.

Each director was then invited to New Zealand to shoot and edit their screenplays into three-minute clips with a NZ$100,000 budget, including use of Jackon’s post-production facilities in Wellington.

The entire process was catalogued on the Your Big Break blog, including interviews and clips from the five finalists.

Jackson in Los Angeles for the 2010 Oscars and to announce the winner of the Your Big Break competition, said:

“This short film stood out as a fresh and original piece of storytelling. I loved the whismical way it showcased the natural beauty of our country; its humour kept the viewer engaged and entertained from beginning to end.

“Most importantly it made you want to see more of the stunning landscapes of New Zealand. I was particularly impressed by the director’s use of camera, the editing and the strong visual story-telling. This was an extremely accomplished piece of filmmaking.”

Australia-New Zealand online accommodation service Wotif is aiming to unsettle some of the biggest players in the region’s flight search and booking sector with the launch of WotFlight.

The new service launched today and is initially targeting domestic flights in and around Australia, with plans to expand into regional and long-haul flights over time.

Another flight search and booking system wouldn’t ordinarily capture huge amounts of attention, but the pedigree and experience behind the Wotif mothership is likely to make its new rivals in the airfare area take note.

Wotif.com launched in 2000 as an online distressed hotel inventory service, but quickly extended its booking time and global reach to challenge some of the biggest names in the Australasian region.

It is now one very few businesses to dominate a market instead of Expedia-owned TripAdvisor in accommodation rankings on Hitwise, courtesy of its running start and strong brand in Australia.

Wotif is currently almost 2% ahead of TripAdvisor in market share and 4% and 5% ahead of Booking.com and HotelClub respectively.

The new WotFlight brand is being touted as a “natural progression” for the wider group by its CEO Robbie Cookie.

Inevitably the two brands will work closely alongside each other as visitors to the new site will be offered accommodation vouchers on the sister site.

The fighting talk has already started, with brand manager Megan Magill claiming supremacy over content and functionality against its new rival in the flight search sector before the site even launches.

Webjet, Flight Centre and the Australian divisions of Expedia and lastminute.com currently top the Hitwise rankings in the agency categories.

Let me take you down under. All the way down under to the online travel market in New Zealand.

With a population of only 4.23 million (123rd in the world), NZ punches above its weight in a number of arenas (sports, arts and movies being just a few).

Also in online travel. PhoCusWright tell us in their latest Asia-Pacific report that the combined ANZ online travel market is US$6.2billion (2008).

On a pure population split this would put the NZ online travel market in 2008 at just on USD$1billion.

All of the big online travel players are in the market in some shape or form. Expedia has a local site.

So too Travelocity but under their Asia-Pacific name Zuji (no flights and, only after a false start, as a joint venture). Orbitz is also very active in NZ through HotelClub and RatesToGo (but I will leave it for others to comment on Orbitz).

Priceline has the lowest touch operations as they don’t have an NZ version of Booking.com – but Adrian Currie, chairman of their Asia biz Agoda (and now also listed MD ANZ for Booking.com), is based in the land of the long white cloud.

In addition to the big four, Australian online travel giant Wotif has crossed the Tasman with ease and established themselves as the number one online accom player.

Excluding suppliers, map sites, pure content sites and government sites, the top ranked travel sites according to Hitwise are as follows (in brackets I have put their actual ranking)

1. House of Travel (local offline company) (4)
2. Flight Centre NZ (Australia’s largest offline) (6)
3. Wotif (10)
4. HolidayHouses.co.nz (14)
5. Webjet NZ (16)
6. TripAdvisor (17)
7. Expedia NZ (20) (Expedia.com is ranked 35)
8. Travelbug (owned by Trade Me – largest site in NZ – more below) (36)
9. TotalTravel.com (Yahoo7-owned accomodation listing service) (38)
10. HotelClub and RatesToGo (41 and 40 respectively) (combined would be 25)
11. Booking.com (46)

NB: You’ll note that Zuji/Travelocity is not in the Hitwise top 50.

This is a lot of activity from a lot of large online travel companies for a market that is only worth $1billion.

There is an ease of expansion element here as you can enter the NZ market using a lot of the foundation resources set up in the Australian market but it is also a sign of the growth expectations and online adoption rates.

In 2007, into this very crowded and competitive market came the launch of Travelbug.

Travelbug is a domestic/inbound hotel-only online travel company launched by the Fairfax-owned and eBay-killing Trade Me.

NB: Fairfax is one of Australia’s largest offline media companies and Trade Me is an online auction site in NZ, the largest website in NZ by traffic and drove eBay out of the market in 2001. More details on Trade Me wikipedia article.

While new to online travel Travelbug has a huge PR and traffic machine behind it.

An announcement from Travelbug/Trade Me this week saw an escalation of this battle in NZ.

Travelbug/Trade Me announced that it would be buying online booking software provider BookIt for an undisclosed sum (official press release).

BookIt are a reservation and booking engine for small accomodation, activities and tour providers, allowing a hotel, B&B, farm stay etc to set up a reservation system and website.

It also allows for connections into other websites through channel managers. Finally, it provides distribution through BookIt resellers which include a number of DMOs such as Tourism Auckland.

The small/independent property market solution part of the BookIt system is not a huge win for Travelbug as they have been using a solution called Vianet for many years now (originally an independent company, now owned by Trade Me). But the expansion of inventory and resellers is a good move.

I spoke with Trade Me’s manager for strategy and analytics, Alex Fala, about the deal.

He told me that it was a joint supply and demand deal – that BookIt would bring on even more independent inventory that already available on their Vianet system and 40 or so resellers.

Overtime the Vianet system would be completely replaced with the BookIt solution.

Fala says that Travelbug is not concerned about the number of competitors active in NZ or that his company is the only one of the majors focused exclusively on the NZ market (ie no international inventory).

He says New Zealand is “immature but growing. We believe that there is enough growth in the market and it is dynamic enough [to support the number of competitors]“.

Travelbug’s challenge remains how to funnel the enormous Trade Me traffic into the Travelbug site.

The BookIt deal comes with some traffic so is a good step but not the full answer to this challenge.

Tourism New Zealand is probably recognised as one of the more progressive DMOs out there with its use of social media to tap into the search phase of the booking cycle.

It was one of the first to realise that YouTube [via the Pure New Zealand channel] is a far cheaper way of distributing video content to a wide audience on a global scale – rather than or alongside expensive 30-second TV adspots.

And now it has put its faith in Kevin Bowler, a techhead through and through, to spearhead the organisation’s next phase.

Bowler joins the DMO from Yahoo! Xtra, a joint venture between Yahoo! and Telecom New Zealand to power the New Zealand Yahoo! portal with news, weather and feature content. He joined in 2007.

The Auckland-based executive certainly has a digital pedigree and also had a brief foray into the travel sector earlier in his career, having run the marketing efforts of Telecom’s mobile brand and as an account manager for Air New Zealand when at the DDB advertising giant.

He takes up the position in January 2010, replacing outgoing CEO George Hickton.