Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Tripbox was born out of the need to provide cheap holidays for friends and family. Tripbox has since evolved into a fully fledged online travel agency, selling holidays to the wider public whilst adhering to its low cost ethos.

It was founded by Savio Fernandes, a travel enthusiast with experience in software development and design.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Tripbox has been bootstrapped up to this point; however, we do have some exciting ideas that need developing which may require us to raise capital in the future.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Searching for a holiday on the web can be a stressful experience, not helped by the gaudy colour schemes and deals and advertisements that usually clutter travel websites.

So, we wanted to develop a website where the holiday search experience would be enjoyable with the information always displayed in a comprehensible manner.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Tripbox sells low-cost hotels, travel ancillaries and flights to a wide array of destinations. The website is plugged into most major bed banks and ancillary suppliers offering great choice to customers.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our key customers are couples and families mostly interested in beach holidays. Our main age demographic is 18 – 40 years old.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Customers have commended Tripbox for its fresh look and straight forward booking process.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Tripbox is solely reliant on online bookings and does not take bookings over the phone. This results in low running costs and helps us sell holidays at a cheaper price.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Engaging website with an inspiring, clean and consistent layout different from the homogenous ‘travel agency’ look.
• Search results only display the essential information in an intuitive manner and a range of easy to use filters help make the volume of information easily comprehensible for the user.
• Straightforward booking process.
• Sell holidays as cheap as possible.

Weaknesses:

• New player in a very crowded marketplace and lacking brand awareness.
• Reliant on data from slow third party content providers.

Opportunities:

• Build a steady customer base as users become more price conscious.

Threats:

• Larger, well-established online travel agencies.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of support from people who have appreciated our concepts from the very beginning.

We did have some people say that good design is not the thing that may attract and inspire customers, but we believe that design coupled with low prices make a very effective combination.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

In 12 months time, we hope to have found a good foot hold with a decent customer base, aware of our brand and our low prices.

We would also like to further enhance our site and include some interesting features which are in a conceptual stage at the moment.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The move follows what the company says is the significant success of its Top Secret Hotels service, a product which now sees around 50% of customers buying accommodation the day before needing it.

For car hire, visitors to the site can choose a type of vehicle and location, but the supplier brand is not disclosed until after the booking is made (triggering a 10% discount).

Recently installed new CEO Matthew Crummack says vehicles will only supplied by its regular partners such as Alamo, Avis, Thrifty and Europcar.

A similar system is in operation for products such as theatre tickets, where visitors can select a show type (musical, play, etc) but not the specific performance, in return for a guaranteed ticket in the “top three seating bands”.

The decision to extend the opaque model to new areas is the first significant move by Crummack since joining as CEO from Expedia in August 2011.

He says the widening of the Top Secret service is part of a bigger effort to pull Lastminute.com back to its original concept of being a late-booking service, and build on the “lifestyle” elements of a trip, such as attractions and other in-destination products.

Although the brand remains strong in flight-only, package holidays and hotels, Crummack believes online travel agencies without a unique offering will find life difficult as the already-crowded marketplace feels the pinch from the economic pressures around Europe.

“If you are not clear to customers about what you are and what you stand for – in our case its great and quick getaways, and value – it’s going to be a very tough world out there. We have no desire to play the averages.”

This week’s most significant development in the hotel space for a number of years, the launch of the multi-brand Room Key service, has not gone unnoticed at Lastminute.com, especially as some consider online travel agencies to be the mostly likely to suffer if the service succeeds.

“There are some very strong hotel brands involved,” Crummack says, “and having them coming together like that is a welcome move.”

Lastminute.com will be speaking to each of the brands individually over the coming months to make sure there are better and more valuable ways of working together, he adds.

CEO of the business and ex-Pegasus founder John Davis has high hopes for Room Key, not least because it has been 18 months in the making after a number (names not disclosed) of the six founding partners came together to work out how to tackle the problem of growing distribution costs and a desire to capture more direct bookings.

From a corporate perspective, the six companies – Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel Group - wholly own the joint venture, Davis says, although a exact breakdown of the stakes in the business has not been disclosed.

At launch today (Davis stresses it is a “beta” product at present) there are 23,00o properties listed on the system, with designs on having close to 80,000 worldwide by the middle of 2012.

Davis estimates the total number (“cap-out”) of hotels on the system will eventually be around the 120,000 mark.

The 23,000 figure will jump within the next week, Davis says, as another major hotel chain is joining the platform, though not as a founding partner.

Similar to the launch of Google Flight Search in September 2011, online travel agencies are currently not participating in the platform.

Industry analysts such as Henry Harteveldt of the Atmosphere Research Group suggest this is a “shot across the bows” of OTAs, but Davis says the door is open for them to participate, adding: “We will do whatever is necessary to get the right coverage on the site.”

Unlike the Travelweb multi-chain effort of the early-2000s, which featured Pegasus as a provider of accommodation, no GDS or other switch will be participating in Room Key, Davis confirms.

So what is the motivation behind Room Key, and why now?

Davis says chains have become increasingly wary of rising distribution costs for some time, while hotels increasingly want to “own the booking”, giving them a chance to up-sell ancillaries to travellers and allow guests to manage their bookings in a better way.

From a distribution perspective, Room Key will have lower “commission” or referral fees than other platforms, Davis claims, plus as the site is purely a metasearch service the hotel will continue to secure the booking and handle so-called guest management.

The shadowy figure of Google and its growing Hotel Finder service does appear to be lurking in the background, at least in terms of the timing of Room Key’s launch, although the idea for the site clearly came about before Google muscled in on the game.

Davis will not discuss where he thinks (and hopes) hotels will divert their existing distribution costs from in order to feature on Room Key, but Google is clearly one brand in his sights, as well as other metasearch players (Kayak’s Steve Hafner wrote “Travelweb part deux, congrats JD” on a TechCrunch article about Room Key) and the OTAs.

The challenge will presumably come when persuading OTAs that it might be a good idea to feature on Room Key, but at the same as potentially losing out on their home turf.

At this stage it appears chains are micro-managing whether all their properties are included or not, whether some are exempt, etc.

Davis says some of the chains have an opt-in system for franchises, while others have automatically include franchise properties and they will have to opt-out. Some may not have a choice, he admits.

The site is only at stage one, Davis concedes, with property reviews coming “very soon” at the conclusion of discussions with “major players in the review space”, as well as a plan at some point to include reviews from its own users.

The current process of allowing users only to search by city and date will also evolve, he says, with options to find properties based on hotel name and chain to follow.

But with any new consumer-facing brand comes the age-old problem of gaining exposure and growth.

Davis says a full-scale, multi-national marketing campaign will begin in March 2012 to attract visitors, with a number of “creative ways” of getting exposure.

More importantly, perhaps, will be the support which Davis says the chains (“birth parents”) themselves will be giving by alerting new and existing customers to the fact that the Room Key service exists.

Meanwhile, the Hotelicopter team, which is was quietly acquired by Room Key in June last year for an undisclosed fee, makes up a large part of the 22-strong number of staff.

Its CEO Adam Healey will head a Room Key Solutions division, maintaining the existing white label partnerships Hotelicopter has with tourism boards and DMOs while developing other partnerships, Davis says.

Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel Group have combined to establish the joint venture under the leadership of CEO John Davis, founder of the Pegasus hotel distribution and technology service.

The site is essentially a metasearch platform for properties, prices and availability across all six companies, including their sub-brands and affiliates.

Users can browse rates across every property, read independent reviews, compare prices and share information around their various social networks.

The site is global and has enlisted ex-Hostess Brands SVP of marketing Stephany Verstraete as its chief marketing officer and J Kurt Zimmer (a former TIAA-CREF and Dupont IT executive) as chief technology officer.

Ahead of the launch, RoomKey bought accommodation site Hotelicopter to run the search technology behind the scenes as well as continue to provide its affiliate platform for destination marketing organisations, under a division known as Room Key Solutions.

The formation of the Room Key venture comes as the hotel sector continues to battle with various issues around distribution and pricing on the web, including the continued roll-out of Google’s Hotel Finder service (which many of the above brands participate in).

Davis says:

“Finding the right hotel is complex and, unlike booking a flight or reserving a car, it is a personal decision process – one which no one understands better than hoteliers.

“We believe Roomkey will provide consumers with an innovative resource that will give them unprecedented confidence in their booking decisions by fulfilling their hotel search needs, with comprehensive and trusted content, and over time, through additional features such as the ability to connect and share their plans with family and friends – all provided through a simple and flexible site experience.”

Collaborative efforts on the web by major hotel chains, similar to those that saw the formation of Orbitz and Opodo by the airlines, are not exactly new.

In April 2001, European trio Hilton, Accor and the Forte Group joined forces to launch AndBook, a search and booking service featuring properties from all three brands as well as accommodation on the Pegasus platform.

AndBook’s creation had to be validated by the European Union, due to competition concerns, but it was expected to become a significant player in hotel search.

It eventually failed to gain any significant traction as it suffered, similar to many travel brands at the time, from the downturn in tourism in the wake of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.

The Forte Group was also broken up shortly after AndBook’s launch.

In the US, Travelweb was a web distributor of merchant hotel rooms in the early-2000s, formed by Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott, and Starwood.

Travelweb’s other part-owner Priceline took over the remaining 71% shares in the business in 2004 for $21 million, eventually folding the system into the main Priceline brand.

Room Key, however, arrives in a very different era in hotel distribution and marketing, with more channels than ever before and the emergence of big and potentially very influential players, such as Google.

The normally-fierce rivals are crawling over themselves to talk up Room Key, with is being described as “unique” (Chuck Sullivan, Hilton Worldwide), “well positioned” (John Wallis, Hyatt), an “industry first” (Steve Sickel, IHG), having “immediate scale” (Shafiq Khan, Marriott) and promising “clear benefits to the industry and consumers” (Flo Lugli, Wyndham).

NB: Further details here in this interview with Davis.

In a further statement released today the company says Dnata Group holds 75% of Dnata World Travel, the company set up to purchase the OTA, while TravelRepublic directors Paul Furner, Kane Pirie and Chris Waite own 25%.

All three will remain in their current roles with the strategy for growth in the UK and Europe still in place as well as plans for ‘expansion further afield.’

The statement, from managing director Kane Pirie, adds that no redundancies are planned for TravelRepublic and concludes with a line about ‘record breaking sales and profits’ expected for the year to March 31 2012.

The company confirmed today that it has been acquired by Dnata World Travel, a Dubai-based subsidiary of the Emirates Group which specialises in cargo, catering, ground handling and agency services.

Terms of the sale have yet to be disclosed, but according to Thomson Reuters is a 100% transfer of shares to Dnata. Further details are to be released shortly.

The deal marks the end of over eight years as an independent agency following its creation by co-founders Paul Furner and Chris Waite in 2003.

The company has grown steadily to become one of the leading OTAs in the UK alongside Expedia and Lastminute.com, pushing the likes of early movers Opodo and Ebookers into a second tier of web brands in recent years.

Focused primarily on the UK market, TravelRepublic recently expanded operations into Spain with a dedicated office and website. In early-2011 it also had its first significant site redesign since formation of the company.

In recent years, TravelRepublic found itself at the centre of a dispute over consumer protection rules in the UK after the Civil Aviation Authority attempted to punish it for allegedly flouting ATOL legislation.

The CAA dropped the case and lost a subsequent appeal when TravelRepublic and its managing director Kane Pirie were found not guilty.

TravelRepublic’s sale comes during an intriguing period for European OTAs.

Mega-brand Odigeo was created during 2011, bringing together Opodo, eDreams and GoVoyages under a single corporate identity, while the relentless growth and power of Booking.com continues to challenge the likes of Expedia in the accommodation sector.

We all know that nobody clicks on banner ads, right? A decent banner will net you only one click for every 1,000 impressions. So even if you bought one million impressions that is only 1,000 clicks.

After you blow through your budget you might end up with one or two bookings from those 1,000 clickers. But what about the other 999,000 people who did NOT click your banner?

It turns out many of them end up going directly to your site weeks later to book.

A so-called view-thru booking occurs when a user views a banner but does not click. The user then might visit the airline or hotel website directly to book days later.

Most travel suppliers use a view-thru window of time to give credit for bookings made after the banner was viewed.

Typically that window ranges from seven to 30 days, but can be 120 days for an international tour or cruise. The travel supplier simply places view-thru tracking pixels on its booking engine confirmation page.

Those pixels match up to the banner ad that was served to the traveler so that travel suppliers can give credit to the right advertiser that influenced the booking.

I have seen 25-100 times more airline and hotel bookings from view thrus compared to bookings that happen after a direct banner click.

Case study

For example, let’s take an airline called XYZ, whixh runs a banner ad promoting a $99 fare sale on a travel website called Travel Site #9.

A user would view that airline’s $99 banner ad but not click on it. The user would recall the ad and visit the airline’s website directly 11 days later to book.

Using view-thru tracking, XYZ airline would know that the booking was made by a traveler from Travel Site #9. This is called a view thru booking.

Tracking bookings can be a bit confusing since you must also track the bookers that clicked on your banner ad or textlink and then booked later.

Some of you are familiar with post-click bookings as they have been around for quite a while.

In our example above what if a user from Travel Site #9 actually clicks the $99 banner ad from XYZ airline? The user then might book directly on the airline website 17 days later. That is called a post-click booking since the user clicked the banner and then booked on the airline’s website.

I have seen a travel supplier get ten bookings from post-click activity. But then that same travel supplier would see an additional 500 bookings from view-thru tracking.

You can see tremendous value and benefit from tracking both post click and view thru bookings. It will increase your ROI and allow you to see what is working and what is not performing.

The cons are very few but some critics make the case that users tend to shop around across six websites or more before they purchase.

While this may be true, the user would not have booked if it was not for seeing your $99 banner ad on Travel Site #9.

Just because the user visits six websites does not mean he will see your travel offer on all six sites without you promoting it.

Some travel suppliers will give partial credit for view-thru bookings compared to giving full credit for post-click bookings. But the ROI is still amazing when you factor in even partial credit on view-thrus plus the post-click bookings.

So how can you get started? There are many advertising platforms and tracking tools that can track both view thru and post click bookings.

What to do

Some of the top vendors that I have worked with include: Adtech, ZEDO, DART, Atlas and Mediaplex.

If you cannot afford to use one of these vendors, you can ask the advertisers that you buy banner ads from if they can track view thru bookings for you.

You would simply place their tracking code from their ad server on your confirmation page of your site before the campaign went live.

Then you run some banner ads on various websites and monitor the reports to see your ROI. Make sure to target as much as possible.

If you only fly from LAX, for example, then do not run banner ads to people living in NY. If your hotel is in Memphis and most of your visitors come from a five hour drive radius, then target users living in those cities or users looking to visit Memphis.

Keep in mind that view-thru tracking can work for both B2C and B2B travel organizations. So even if you sell travel technology or services in the industry, you can still run banner ads on B2B websites like Tnooz for example.

You would place the tracking code on your website where a prospect would purchase or perhaps fill out a contact us form.

If that user has viewed a banner ad on a B2B website, and then visited your website later on, you would know where that user came from.

I like to think of a banner ad as an outdoor billboard on the Internet.

You drive by that billboard and of course cannot click it. But you do read it, remember it and take action later on.

A banner ad it turns out has the same effect as it clearly influences purchases both online and even offline. One study from Comscore showed that running banner ads leads to a 274% boost in the number of searches for your brand on search engines.

This concept makes sense as people are more likely to type your product into Google after they have been exposed to your brand online. Another study from Media Post showed that a banner ad impression influences 70% of all user conversions or bookings.

Even beyond bookings you also should track anyone who signs up for your loyalty program or email newsletter after they have been exposed to your banner advertising.

So if you are not able to track all these bookings and traveler actions, then I highly recommend that you do not waste your money buying banner ads.

You will be disappointed if you only measure success based on banner clicks so make sure you track the full extent of your banner campaign.

NB: This is a guest article by Ryan Bifulco, founder and CEO of TravelSpike.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

I’m Michael La Rosa – just some super lucky guy who happens to be called a CEO. My background is building awesome software.

And my team, I don’t even want to list their names – because there is no one better, and I am way too scared of people poaching them away. They are that awesome.

Cristian our developer who is a maniac, Julian our UX genius (as you can see), Cesar our chief get it done guy, and Esteban who makes sure our internet doesn’t get shut off and also on the occasion saves the world from self destruction.

But most of us have been working the last few years together, and our last company was acquired. I should really get superman uniforms made for these guys, because they are super-hero like.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

$400,000. More on the way.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Two big problems:

• Planning a trip sucks and is expensive. We are making planning a trip super easy, and amazingly awesome and a little more easy on the wallet.
• Travel businesses count on 80% of their business from travel agents and pay crazy commissions. We are going to change that, and put businesses in control of their business. Not a travel agent.

Describe the business, core products and services?

We are in the business of making a travelers trip absolutely mind blowing. We are also in the business of helping travel businesses make way more money, and having control over their reservations.

That is our business, core product, and services we provide: Travel awesomeness.

Here is a clip and demo:

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

There is no such thing for us as a key customer or key user. I think this question is pointless. Every customer is key, and every user is special.

If someone spends $1 or $1,000,000 with us, they both get treated the same – as super special customers, because they are.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We are our customers. We build TripFab for us. When we had something we wanted to use, we took it to investors.

So I guess we are our “Chief Idea Validators”. Isn’t that how it’s suppose to be – build something with passion, right? Market research just seems so… dull and non-passionate.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We charge a 5% transaction fee. Then, we take 4.9% of our 5% we made, and spend it all on our customers.

Our strategy for profitability is to make one travelers trip freaking amazing. If it’s one a year, one an hour, one every second – we start with one, and it’s was so awesome that you tell at least one person.

Eventually, it all works out.

I think a better question is – what are we going to do to make a travelers trip mind blowing?

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

I have never done one of these, and probably will never. Why?

Threats, to be honest, I really don’t care about competitors. I don’t look to see what people are doing, because I just don’t care.

We are building TripFab for us, and travelers that want to use us. And we will always do that. We are a team of innovators and visionaries – and we will innovate and set a vision.

The second we put any opportunities on paper, is the second we stop looking everywhere.

And our strengths and weaknesses? What are strengths are today, is our weaknesses tomorrow.

Again, we just want travelers to have the most amazing trips of their lives, and want travel businesses to have control of their business – not depend on travel agents or crappy travel aggregaters. Seriously.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Everyone. But I listened to everyone.

Why? Because most ideas suck and don’t sound successful when they start. But when you listen to why it sucks, you can figure out each time how to make it suck less. And here we are.

So tell us how we suck so we can be better.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The most insanely happiest travelers. One or one million. It’s all the same.

You build great companies by being crazy passionate about making sure each person is insanely happy. Everything else takes care of itself.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

I had drinks with my mate Jack (name changed to protect the innocent) at the weekend.

He’d just returned from eight days in Hawaii and I was keen to hear how it went. To be honest, I was pretty sure what he was going to tell me, but let me give you some background before I get to that.

Real life

Jack is thirty-something, single and as red-blooded as the next guy. Outdoorsy without being a jock, enjoys a drink and loves a good restaurant, etc. etc.

His travelling companion was an old schoolmate of his from the UK, they’d travelled together before so there wasn’t going to be any issues of them wanting to go in different directions.

Eight days of surf lessons, sun, seafood, cocktails and etc. all surrounded by girls in bikinis, they hoped. So far so good.

Neither had been to Hawaii before, so Jack’s mate had a long call with a friend of his in New York who had spent a few months there last year.

Apparently an Hawaii expert, she was quick to suggest what sounded like a pretty good plan: four days in Honolulu and then four days on the neighboring island of Maui.

The boys were excited, bookings were made, bags were packed.

The Honolulu part of the trip went well, with well-earned hangovers each morning, washed away by noon thanks to the surf lessons on Waikiki Beach.

Plenty of bars, great food, people to meet (see “bikinis”, above) and generally all the sorts of things the boys were looking for.

Day five, and they’re off to the airport, vaguely wondering why they are leaving paradise and hoping that it was just going to get better. It didn’t.

And that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with Maui… it was just the wrong place for these two guys, who simply couldn’t recreate the Waikiki experience they had come to enjoy so much.

“Everyone was a couple! We could see ourselves coming back here in ten years with our families, but as single guys… No, it just wasn’t for us.”

The heart of the issue

That’s the problem with the whole social travel model, right there.

Your friends, no matter how well meaning, are not travel experts. They’re not going to ask you the right questions or make the right assumptions about what turns you on.

They’re just going to tell you what they like, which may be miles from anything you’d enjoy.

[The boys' Hawaii expert, it turns out, is a botanist who loves long walks with her husband while listening to Enya on her iPod. Vive la difference!]

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating you forget your real friends, your Facebook friends, your family or your colleagues completely, nor am I suggesting you traipse down to see a travel agency instead.

Save for the minority of agents who are truly experts on something (see Conde Nast’s annual list for what I mean) there’s as much bad advice to be found there as there is good.

What I am suggesting is that relying on your friends is as likely to result in just plain awful advice as it is in good advice. There’s no getting around it.

Instead of building your plans around input from others, blend their suggestions with lots of your own research.

Academics who study happiness will tell you that the anticipation derived from researching an upcoming vacation will be every bit as uplifting and energising as the vacation itself. And it will ensure you have the best vacation for you, not the same vacation your friends had.

So what about all those companies we’re seeing emerge with sites that channel advice from friends, all to help your planning process?

They’re good fun, and sure to provide some great ideas that will enhance your trip. Just don’t rely too heavily on them: the very best person to plan your next vacation is still you.

NB: This is a guest article by Rod Cuthbert, founder and chairman emeritus at Viator and founder and CEO at Qewz.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The announcement puts an end to a long-running debacle which included the collapse of the UK-based BlueSky Technologies two years ago at a critical point in the first delivery of the so-called Globe project to put the reservation system of every Thomas Cook tour operating brand on a single platform.

In the delayed annual results for the year ending September 2011 released today, Cook says £86.3 million of its financial write-off relates to “historic costs associated with a long running major IT project”.

The wider £428 million figure relates also includes “impairment of goodwill in our UK and Canadian businesses”.

It is still unclear the total costs incurred by the failed reservation system project, although a string of people familiar with the programme over the past 12 months have put the project well into six figures.

An official says:

“Over the past five years, we’ve continually reviewed the development of an integrated tour operating platform across the business. Compared to when the project was initially scoped, Thomas Cook is now a totally different business with many brands and tour operators with specific IT needs.

“As a result, the increased costs, time and risk now far outweigh the potential benefits of the project.”

The announcement comes as Thomas Cook prepares for another round of retail shop closures, restructuring and job losses, amid high losses during 2011, £398 million for the 12 months ending September this year, despite a 10% increase in overall revenue.

The company says it will close around 200 “under-performing” shops within the next two years but invest in its online offering, including relaunching its websites “in time for peak trading”.

It expects to see the total number of bookings made online increase to 40-50% over time from the current level of 25%.

The Globe project will no doubt enter folklore as one of the most problematic IT programmes in travel tech history, with millions spent on consultants, in-fighting amongst executives and, today, the eventual axing of the entire scheme.

A number of companies were invited to pitch for the project in the mid-2000s, with BlueSky winning what was seen at the time as a flagship project for the company but a massive undertaking for both it and Thomas Cook.

It has since emerged that at least one large travel tech company declined the opportunity to run the project – and told Thomas Cook as much – as it believed the job was simply impossible to do, given that the tour operator had a myriad of brands on different and very complex systems, each with their own vastly different requirements.

Despite the warnings, Thomas Cook went ahead with the programme and pretty much came into difficulties within the first year as BlueSky and Thomas Cook’s then-IT provider IBM fell out over delivery schedules and integration.

Disagreements at board level then came as costs spiralled, leading in September 2009 to the collapse of BlueSky and a switch from IBM to Capgemini as its main IT provider and consultancy.

Despite the dismay which the project appears to trigger from many of those involved in it, internally and externally, very few have spoken publicly about it.

Perhaps the only senior executive to have since hinted at the differences in opinion over strategy is Russell Gould, the company’s former-ecommerce director.

Speaking at a conference in September this year, he made a general but pointed remark about travel technology projects:

“It’s about lots of little agile developments every month, because if you start to build a new platform it will cost a fortune and be likely to be redundant.”

As we head into the busy travel season, travel agencies – both online and storefront – are poised once again to handle significant volumes of consumer traffic.

Online travel companies play a vital role helping airlines, hotels and other travel partners reach millions of consumers around the world through their one-stop travel shopping sites, and provide consumers with decision-making power to research, compare and purchase travel that fits their interest and budget.

Further, because of the transparency and competition that OTCs facilitate, they help lower prices for consumers, and to increase travel bookings for suppliers – a win-win-win for all involved.

For example, 40% of all travel is booked through travel agencies, and one third of all ecommerce in the US is travel based. So it is little wonder that Google – the Goliath of the Internet – wants in on the action.

Google closed its deal to acquire ITA Software for $700 million in April this year and has since launched the first version of its Google Flight Search tool.

For the travel shopper, what could be better? The biggest search engine in the world providing a search for consumers to get the best air fares, right? Wrong.

As that old adage reminds us: let the buyer beware.

The first version of Google Flight is not very impressive, with only a handful of airlines participating. No doubt it will get updated and expanded, but unless the underlying model changes dramatically, the choices will remain limited, and the prices will remain higher than traditional online travel companies – not a good tool for consumers to search for travel.

The reason for these shortcomings are clear, given that the parameters of Google Flight were clearly dictated by the small group of airlines that were Google Flight’s launch partners, and their intentional exclusion of agenices from the mix of search results.

Or, as Jeremy Wertheimer, the vice president for travel at Google, recently indicated when asked why Google Flight did not provide links and offerings from OTCs to help consumers search and compare, said:

“…we work with airline partners, we are in the airline industry, just as we are in the hotel industry. We are not actually in the stand-alone-technology-we-do-what-we-want industry – we’re in the airline industry. And our airline partners were very clear – as we discussed with them this year – that they were not interested in participating if we provided links to OTAs.”

Wertheimer’s comments speak for themselves as to why consumers who think they are going to Google Flight for impartial searches and the best information should be wary – they are not going to get an impartial search result with multiple choices like a traditional OTA, but instead are likely to end up with a limited menu of options, as dictated by the airlines.

And, it remains to be seen whether Google Flight will disclose those arrangements and limitations to consumers. It sounds like the airlines are calling the shots. And it sounds like Google Flight is perfectly fine with that arrangement, though their customers may not be.

In other words, instead of a typical Google search result, which delivers a significant supply of supposedly unbiased search results, Google Flight appears to simply serve as a search engine with a limited focus, and a clear, but undisclosed, bias toward a small group of suppliers.

This highlights another shortcoming of Google Flight for consumers – the lack of consumer protections that it provides.

The US Department of Transportation plays an active role in policing consumer protection rules with regard to advertising and transparency of information.

The established OTAs abide by very stringent rules with regard to how information is displayed and conveyed, and whether search results are biased (they are not).

However, whether Google Flight has embraced those same disclosures and protections is unclear. So the buyer should beware. And so should Google.

NB: This is a guest article by Joseph Rubin, president of the Interactive Travel Service Association (ITSA).

The site, which launched in June this year, has secured a deal with Russia’s notoriously protective distribution systems run by SIRENA and TAIS, getting access to content from a string of airlines which would ordinarily unavailable to those off the GDS grid.

Jizo claims air content on both the SIRENA and TAIS systems are out of reach from other search engines, giving it quite a sizeable lead over other consumer brands and also those outside of the country eager to give travellers access to the vast array of internal Russian airlines.

Out of approximately 30 Russian scheduled carriers, only five are hosted on external distribution systems (such as Aeroflot on Sabre), meaning there is a vast swathe of content currently inaccessible to travellers unless they visit a SIRENA or TAIS-connected travel agency.

Travelport has a existing strategic partnership, signed in July 2010, with SIRENA to give Russian agents access to international carriers via the Worldspan and Galileo platforms.

The Jizo deal will be the first time that many of the Russian carriers will be available in a consumer-facing search engine both in and outside of the country.

SIRENA is a system which was created in 1972 as the Soviet GDS. After the collapse of the Iron Curtain the organisation split into two (SIRENA and TAIS), essentially to allow competition between the pair.

SIRENA commercial director Marina Volodina says:

“No other search engine in the world has established direct access to the broadest CIS fare databases before. With this project Jizo becomes a unique metasearch engine currently including the most extensive proportion of domestic flights in Russia.”

NB: Image of Moscow Airport via Shutterstock.

Known as FACT-Finder Travel, the tool is a semantic search system targeting online travel agents which allows consumers to enter free text during search queries, including spelling mistakes, slang and abbreviations.

The company hopes the improved usability will help switch online travel agencies to its solution.

The system interprets what users are looking for and populates search criteria boxes with the correct information.

FACT-Finder has been working with ecommerce sites from other sectors for some time but decided to extend into travel because of what it claims is a general poor user experience.

During a usability test on five German OTAs, the company found semantic search reduced clicks to input all the travel information from an average of 16 with conventional search to two for semantic.

Time taken to input details was also reduced from an average of just over one minute to 22 seconds.

The company is offering what it describes as an innovative commercial model whereby companies only pay if they see improved conversion rates.

The intuitive technology has already been implemented by German OTA, weg.de.

Here is a clip:

The focus has traditionally been on cost control. Reducing the operational or flexible costs on the hotel balance sheet is what used to determine the profitability of a hotel. But not any more!

To control staff payroll, purchasing costs and overhead spending used to be the main components of the job of a hotel asset manager. With the rise of the internet and increased dynamics of hotel distribution we have seen a shift in focus over the last few years.

The attention of hotel asset management has been increasingly moving towards room yield. Driving occupancy and average room rate is the key nowadays to controlling the bottom line the hotel.

Of course a hotel revenue manager should have a strategy that goes far beyond REVPAR. NREVPAR (read article) and GOPAR are of instrumental importance.

We have seen an overall revenue growth of 15.8% in first three quarters of 2011, through strategic pricing strategies. We looked beyond mere cost control and had our hotel clients invest in SEO and internet marketing to increase direct sales. As a result, distribution cost was reduced and profit increased.

Of course we do not advocate leaving costs uncontrolled. That would irresponsible, as with the recovery from the crisis hotels have to be weary not to reinstate cut services amenities too quickly.

However the scope of attention has to be widened and emphasis needs to change. Simply cutting costs and “trimming the fat” will also have an impact in the long term service levels of hotel and in the end impact financial results negatively.

Fundamental to success will be to gain more market share in a recovering market. With the occupancy rising across the board in many markets, it is important to fight and pick up one or two points more than the competition.

Furthermore, ADR/ARR should be pushed up where demand allows, in an effort to improve your hotel’s RGI (Revenue Generation Index).

The solution of classical asset management companies will almost always be to put a flag on the roof. However in the era on online distribution, social media and online reputation management, a brand is no longer needed.

Also should be considered the fact that costs of such a hotel franchise are tremendously high. Moreover the model is out of date. These companies are no longer the best solution in today’s market place.

Modern day revenue management, internet marketing and online distribution is the solution to generate a healthy ROI on your hotel investment. The industry has to move beyond operations to manage well business development.

And the next logical trends to be implemented in hotels will be total revenue management and business acumen, taking revenue management beyond the hotel room and optimize the results of all hotel revenue streams.

NB: More on hotel asset management on the Xotels website.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

In the US alone, in 2009 the web was used by approximately 90 million American adults to make their travel arrangements (2009 is the most recent year these statistics are available from the US Travel Association).

Since that time, it is likely the figure has grown considerably as more consumers shift further from traditional travel planning methods to using sites such as metasearch engines and online travel agencies.

Travel reservation websites have become robust businesses that handle a tremendous volume of consumer searches, requests and transactions for making all their travel plans with frequent flyer miles, preferred hotel guest car rental points, hotel reservations and countless other online interactions.

These information hubs provide everything a traveler could want in preparation for their next destination.

While travel reservation sites provide an important service for consumers, the flipside is that they require a high degree of technical oversight due to the fact that the sites variables are changing rapidly and are updated dynamically and in real time.

This places greater demands on software development teams – teams that are increasingly distributed across multiple time zones and locations.

An added pressure is that software development is directly tied to revenue. The changes and updates development teams are called on to make are increasingly “business-critical”.

Consider the flood of data and volume of software code required for a single reservation or transaction on one of these major travel sites, then multiply that thousands of times over with the demands of real time as thousands of consumers research, reserve and purchase flight, car rental and hotel options.

Add to that the requirements of special offers, deals, and the unique attributes of each person’s frequent flyer or executive club profiles.

Then magnify this even more during the many peak travel times that occur throughout the year, or the demands of weather-related events that disrupt travel and it becomes apparent how a single software glitch or a site crash can result in major revenue losses, not to mention the residual consumer frustration and damage to the brand.

Because of this, with the exception of small airlines or hotels with more basic informational web sites, simple software development tools are becoming overwhelmed by the intense demands of these complex sites that are constantly processing a tremendous volume of reservations and transactions. This is where Software Configuration Management (SCM) comes into the picture.

Also known as Version Control, SCM consists of the tools and processes that developers and development teams use to make sure all implemented changes are incorporated and shared with the team in the most efficient and accurate way possible. A single misstep in version control, and a travel website could experience a glitch or the worst case scenario – a site outage.

Site outages can be devastating to online businesses such as travel sites. For these reasons, SCM has become a crucial element to the ongoing operations of travel web sites.

Let’s consider one example…

A global travel company operates dozens of sites in virtually every language and handles everything travel-related, including flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises. Travelers can choose from a wide variety of pleasure and business travel packages and special deals that are constantly changing and being updated in real time.

More than thirty development teams consisting of hundreds of developers are required to keep the site running smoothly 24/7. The developer teams are distributed across the globe, continually working in parallel and simultaneously on software development projects.

Unfortunately the site has outgrown the software development tools and processes that had been adequate at one time, but business growth demands required a more robust version control solution to manage the integration of all of these projects being developed in parallel around the clock.

The release engineers and architects working in this development environment will find themselves dealing with a number of challenges that are typical of complex, distributed software development initiatives such as:

• Getting to “done” within each stage of the development process
• The complexity of managing software changes
• Attaining rapid release cycles
• Remote and outsourced teams
• Scaling and code sharing among Agile and non-Agile teams

Attaining rapid release cycles is particularly important for travel web sites to handle the constant code changes and site updates already mentioned.

Travel sites also have a legal obligation to post immediate updates and changes to baggage or security policies imposed by regulatory and compliance organizations.

In addition, the recent daily deal and flash sales craze have intensified the variables and frequent changes that travel sites must manage seamlessly to handle the growing volume of these special deals.

To put this into perspective from a developer’s point of view, adding the capacity to handle coupon deals to a travel site is equivalent to at least half the effort of launching an entirely new site!

These challenges are driving travel and hospitality sites to take a closer look at the software development tools and processes they currently have in place to determine what’s needed to improve the efficiency, performance and reliability of their web sites which are the lifeblood of the business.

There’s no “one size fits all” solution. It all comes down to the right mix of tools and software development processes with a robust enterprise-class version control system as the hub and foundation for optimal web performance.

NB: This is a guest article by Chris Lucca, technical marketing manager for AccuRev.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Capturing a 65% market share of the overall traffic to agency sites in India, the trio dwarf the market share achieved by the top three sites in other categories.

The airline top three have 52% share while the destination and accommodation leaders have 31% market share.

Most popular travel websites in India for the week ending November 12 2011:

Agencies

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	Make My Trip	www.makemytrip.com	30.76%	1
2	Yatra	www.yatra.com	20.71%	2
3	Cleartrip	www.cleartrip.com	12.60%	3
4	AZDreams - India	www.azdreams.co.in	9.60%	4
5	Via	www.viaworld.in	2.39%	5
6	Zoomtra	www.zoomtra.com	2.21%	6
7	ezeego1	www.ezeego1.co.in	1.87%	-
8	Ixigo.com	www.ixigo.com	1.42%	7
9	www.travelyaari.com	www.travelyaari.com	1.22%	9
10	book.mustseeindia.com	book.mustseeindia.com	1.17%	8

Destinations and Accommodation

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	Maps Of India	www.mapsofindia.com	12.65%	2
2	Tripadvisor India	www.tripadvisor.in	12.27%	1
3	MustSeeIndia.com	www.mustseeindia.com	6.43%	3
4	Club Mahindra Holidays	www.clubmahindra.com	4.48%	7
5	Beoo	www.beoo.com	4.15%	4
6	HolidayIQ	www.holidayiq.com	4.11%	5
7	TripAdvisor	www.tripadvisor.com	3.94%	6
8	I Love India	www.iloveindia.com	3.00%	8
9	Booking.com	www.booking.com	2.62%	9
10	India Mike	www.indiamike.com	2.06%	10

Airlines

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	IndiGo	www.goindigo.in	20.45%	1
2	Jet Airways	www.jetairways.com	15.58%	2
3	SpiceJet	www.spicejet.com	14.78%	3
4	Kingfisher Airlines	www.flykingfisher.com	7.57%	5
5	AirIndia	www.airindia.com	6.81%	4
6	GoAir	www.goair.in	5.38%	6
7	Air India Express	www.airindiaexpress.in	4.14%	7
8	AirAsia	www.airasia.com	3.73%	8
9	Emirates	www.emirates.com	2.90%	9
10	JetLite	www.jetlite.com	2.64%	10

NB: Data courtesy of Experian Hitwise

Odigeo (website is currently just a holding page) is the corporate identity for the online travel agency powerhouse formed when Opodo, eDreams and GoVoyages were brought together in July this year.

The name will not be used in any consumer-facing marketing but is the official front for the group (including TravelLink) following a plan by AXA Private Equity and Permira Fund to bring the OTAs together into a single corporate entity, claiming the quartet is now one of the biggest players in online travel in Europe.

With heavyweight backing, Odigeo is now looking at ways boosting existing services and reach into new markets, CEO Javier Pérez-Tenessa (previously the co-founder of eDreams) says.

In the US this week at the PhoCusWright conference in Florida, executives were eyeing some of the new businesses and ideas around social, localisation of services and mobile (the so-called SoLoMo), in what they say are plans to “enhance products and customer experience” beyond the traditional OTA model.

The organisation says developing such services in-house “does not make sense”, so is looking to partner or acquire new technology or businesses.

Areas under consideration include developing trip planning tools to bolt onto existing search tools and mobile services, allowing it to grow its presence “pre and post transaction”.

Travel itinerary management is also a service the company would like to incorporate across the portfolio of OTAs.

The combined OTAs took around Euro 3.5 billion worth of bookings last year, primarily from having strong positions in France and Spain for air ticketing and beds.

The company has ambitious targets, claiming it wants to become market leader in every country it operates and clearly eyeing companies from outside Europe such as Expedia and the Priceline-owned Booking.com that have large footprints in a number of countries across the continent.

Although Odigeo would face strong competition in the US from the same companies, Pérez-Tenessa says it will look to try and make an in-road into the market, although it sees Asia and Latin America as the next major opportunities elsewhere around the world.

The deal with Orbitz Worldwide-owned Ebookers will see SilverRail’s Silvercore integrated across 12 country sites in Europe, giving the agency its first foray into rail search and ticketing for multiple train operators on the continent.

Although Ebookers and Orbitz are now on a unified technology platform, Orbitz has not been included in the partnership.

As well as giving users the ability to book rail-only fares, Ebookers will be packaging tickets with hotels also available on the system.

SilverRail is hoping the deal will trigger a wave of interest around online travel agencies to start focusing on rail product, especially in Europe where high-speed train travel is seeing heavy investment by a string of countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

The company, which was on the receiving end of a $5 million investment round in April this year, signed another significant deal a few months ago when Sabre picked it to power the rail search and booking provision on the GetThere platform.

To explain this, I have created an infographic to demonstrate why air results are displayed in such seemingly different ways. The pyramid is not built to scale, but shows the hierarchical level of issues for air results.

The top two tiers are what can be accommodated via online outlets, including OTAs, airlines and metasearch sites. The next four tiers are all possible results that travel agents and airlines can work on and see.

The bottom one… well that’s just plain bad. So now you know.

[Click for larger image]:

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

GO Activities from GO Outdoors. Go Outdoors is the largest outdoor retailer in the UK. The GO Activities team is headed by Mike Griffin and Ollie Kilvert, who joined GO from Be Travellers in December 2010. GO Activities will be run as a GO Outdoors Travel subsidiary.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The investment has come from GO Outdoors, however our excellent developers STATUS (www.statusdigital.co.uk) is also a partner.

What problem are you trying to solve?

In the UK at least, online bookable outdoor activities and services just don’t exist. GO Activities changes that.

Many people simply aren’t aware of the range of activities that are available to them, (just what is Ghyll Scrambling?), GO Activities tells people what they are, and where they can do them.

Small tourism businesses struggle with marketing themselves to potential customers. As a supplier on GO Activities their activities are marketed to millions of potential customers who we know are interested in the sort of activities that they provide.

Planning all the elements that go into a short break or holiday is currently a time intensive process that involves information from multiple sources. GO Activities uses innovative planning tools that allow users to do quickly and easily do it all in one place.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Thousands of outdoor activities for all budgets and abilities, and thousands more accommodation options.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Anyone interested in taking part in outdoor activities based in the UK.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Before we embarked on this project Ollie and Mike spent a week in stores. They spoke to hundreds of customers about their interests and asked them to fill in a questionnaire.

One of the questions was a planning task. It asked: “Given five days, which of the above activities would you do, and when would you do them? (you can do two per day)”.

We expected the required level of engagement to annoy people a bit, and that they would glance over it. Instead people were spending 20 minutes on it, the whole family were getting involved, they were asking what some of the activities were and when we told them were saying “that sounds fun, we’ll do that”.

One person even asked: “Where can I book this?”. Because of this the site has integrated planning tools and information about all of the activities that we sell.

The rest, well really we just designed a site that we would want to use. The vision was very strong, and we have worked hard to avoid compromises.

Will it be successful? Who knows, but I will certainly be using it, and so will everyone else at GO Outdoors.

It’s a company run by outdoor enthusiasts, with a customer base of outdoor enthusiasts, and in the outdoor activities world I think this is more than just a faster horse…

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We want to sell loads of outdoor activities, and accommodation. The rest would be telling! [Ed: That's the point of the question!]

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Pretty obvious. It’s a unique offering from a company with an established customer base who we know are interested in the sort of things GO Activities is selling.

Weaknesses:

• It’s new, nobody knows if people will book these sort of complex products online, all we know is that they do in other sectors of the tourism market.

Opportunities:

• To be involved in what people do with the kit they buy in store, after they have left the building (something that traditionally outdoor retailers have not been good at), to improve access to outdoor activities for everyone who wants to do them, and to strengthen an outdoor activities sector that is vital to rural economies all over the UK.

Threats:

• Time will tell.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

I appreciate that people have a tendency to only listen to things that people support their ideas, and reject things that do not. But genuinely, no one has sai: “That’s not going to work.”

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire shows us that sometimes the audience gets it wrong. But in this case, if I was sitting in the hot seat, one question away from a million pounds (and I didn’t have some intricate system of coughs by an accomplice set up to guide me to the right answer), I would definitely be going with their answer.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We have the opportunity to create something that is good for us, good for activity providers, good for the rural economies they support and most of all good for our customers.

If we are somewhere on our way to capitalising on this opportunity in 12 months time, then I will be marking it down as a success!

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.