With uncanny timing, given the problems affecting UK airspace today, Travelsupermarket says it has integrated metasearch for ferry crossings in and out of the UK.

The system is actually a white label of an existing ferry meta provider aferry.com and was added to the site on Monday this week.

The search module will be added to the main navigation on TravelSupermarket shortly but is currently resting within the site’s other channels.

The cross-channel (English and Irish) marketplace is huge in the UK and the implementation of a service comes as thousands of travellers arrange summer bookings for vehicles and by foot.

Alongside the search facilities, TravelSupermarket has added editorial content for users including port information, route maps and traveller advice.

The addition of ferries completes the full suite of potential travel products on TravelSupermarket, a process which has taken a number of years as the company has added to its original flight search engine with hotels, package holidays and car hire.

The white label deal with aferry.com is for 12 months and is based on a revenue share model from clicks to supplier websites.

TravelSupermarket is also integrating its travel news section into the main website over the course of the next few weeks. The editorial-led channel features regular news as well as content from its omnipresent official in the mainstream media, Bob Atkinson.

Travel content business SimonSeeks, brainchild of TravelSupermarket founder Simon Nixon, will unveil a second phase for the site in April 2010.

The company was launched in June 2009 and attracted a fair amount of attention by virtue of the profile of its backer, but equally the site was treated with some scepticism for its payment system for writers.

The site, which combines user reviews and editorial content alongside a metasearch engine for flights and leads to other booking sites, is said to be gearing up for a new look and feel, navigation and structure.

A marketing campaign – no details available as yet – is also being plotted to support the next phase.

Nixon’s previous business famously launched a number of high profile TV advertising spots which thrust the TravelSupermarket into the mainstream travel sites in 2007.

He spent £1 million on the launch of SimonSeeks last year and around a further £100,000 every month following the launch.

A windfall of £13 million was recently handed to Nixon from his previous parent company business MoneySupermarket for which he still acts as deputy chairman.

The payment system for SimonSeeks is based on a revenue share model and has so far yielded only moderate success for some of its contributors, with the top writer securing £80 a month in February 2010. However, the highest amount paid out in January was £40.

British Airways is starting to suffer the medium to long-term effects of its ongoing dispute with cabin crew, not least in the amount of traffic its website receives from metasearch engines.

TravelSupermarket claims the industrial dispute at British Airways was already being felt long before today’s strike ballot result.

Unite, the trade union representing cabin crew in their long running fight against managers over working conditions and pay, today revealed strong support by members to organise industrial action mostly in the form of strikes.

TravelSupermarket says following the announcement of the latest ballet in mid-January 2010, clicks from the metasearch site to flights on BA.com have slumped by 19%.

The union says it will continue to attempt to reach a settlement with BA bosses and has yet to announce dates for a strike, although the threat of industrial action is clearly making travellers nervous.

An original strike set for Christmas 2009 was deemed unlawful at the time in the High Court as ineligible members were balloted.

Bob Atkinson from TravelSupermarket says:

“Today’s result isn’t just a kick in the teeth for loyal BA passengers, it’s a disaster for both British Airways and BA’s staff, as all stand to lose out unless the airline re-engineers itself to compete in the cut-throat airline market.”

Zugu is the strange name of the new metasearch engine from price comparison firm Cheapflight, unveiled in public beta today after months of development and testing.

Three months after Cheapflights revealed it was intending on launching a metasearch product, ironically after fiercely defending the deals publishing model for years, executives have outlined Zugu’s strategy for the first time.

The engine is being touted as a “next generation” metasearch product which chief executive Chris Cuddy says has been created after watching and learning from what the existing meta players have developed over the years.

Central to the system, Cuddy and chairman Hugo Burge outlined in a briefing today, is a simpler design, user interface (”we have ruthlessly cut out the clutter”) and complete transparency of pricing from airlines and online travel agency partners.

The launch of Zugu will begin in the UK in beta and be rolled out worldwide in phases. Cheapflights is already resident in the UK, Canada, US, France, Italy, Germany, Australia and Spain.

Cuddy says the site will have more fare partners than any other meta player in the coming months with a mixture of direct-connects to airlines and agreements with OTAs.

Some of the filter tools developed for the system include the ability to group and filter by price and airline, departure and return time, and journey duration.

The highly sought-after Ryanair product line is included at launch as well as agreements with Expedia, Lastminute.com, Opodo and Ebookers.

Zugu’s emergence as a major new element to the business coincides with the formation of a new name, Cheapflights Media, as the umbrella organisation over the existing Cheapflights brand and the new meta product.

The intention is to make Cheapflights Media one of the top three travel media brands in the worldwide “within a few years”, going up against the likes of Travelzoo  and TripAdvisor on the global stage, Kayak, Farecompare and Bing in the US and Skyscanner and TravelSupermarket in the UK initially.

Cuddy says the decision to launch Zugu follows thorough examination of how people used the Cheapflights system when looking for deals and how – through other meta brands – consumers wanted to obtain fares on specific dates.

Burge admits that the long-standing ties established with major OTAs and airlines for deals have helped launch the Zugu product.

“We are going to leverage the relationships we already had through Cheapflights,” he says.

The technology behind the engine was created in-house and overall development of the project supported financially by the Cheapflights business.

There is no significant marketing strategy planned for the beta phase of Zugu apart from social media seeding through Twitter and Facebook and a competition to encourage users to guess the origin of the name.

The site has been live for at least seven weeks but, as Burge admits, this has been done discreetly in order to carry out quiet user testing.

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.

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.

To coincide with the mammoth Tnooz Predictions 2010 article, Tnooz asked people around the industry to gaze into their own crystal balls to forecast some of the key developments for the next 12 months.

The fourth in this five-part series features Ignacio Martos (chief executive of Opodo), Tim Russell (managing director of Amadeus UK & Ireland) and Bob Atkinson (travel expert at TravelSupermarket).

Ignacio Martos:

• In 2009, with the crisis fully installed across Europe, we have experienced a continuous shift of customers from high street to the online world, this has been partially motivated by the desire of searching for best deals. I believe in 2010 this trend will stay, partially because this “saving mentality” will remain on the population and also because most of the clients that tried online find a good deal and come back as repeat customers.
• Entering into new worlds – The expansion of online sales will not only be based on current products and service offerings, but will mean an expansion on sales of sophisticated products such as Dynamic package and Tour Operator packages, the big tourist groups across Europe will help the move through heavily investing on their own online sales to the benefit of themselves and the rest of online community. As a result, when current long term leasing contracts expire on existing high street agencies, closing of some of them will be considered.

Tim Russell:

• Over the last year we have seen technology have a growing impact on the travel industry. The internet has empowered travellers, making them more confident to plan their travel arrangements without the help of travel experts and creating more informed travellers despite the continued demand for specific travel services. This new-found intelligence has in turn led to a growing appetite for online travel services that provide greater access to information and complex itineraries at a more competitive price; an appetite will undoubtedly grow throughout 2010. At Amadeus we see two clear areas of focus for technological advancement in 2010 – search and mobile.
• Search is far more advanced than ever before. Consumers are demanding more intuitive and intelligent technology that allows them to get more out of the information available in the shortest space of time. In line with this Amadeus recently launched Affinity Shopper – a new offering that transforms travel websites into a ‘traveller playground’, enabling users to explore and determine their trip based on what they would like to do. For example, travellers can search by budget available rather than having to know the country that they would like to visit. This new ‘Extreme Search’ concept is a key focus for Amadeus in 2010. It will also impact the wider travel industry as this technology drives website stickiness and helps airlines to maximise revenues by actually delivering what a shopper wants, rather than a list of lowest price fares based on restrictive search terms.
• It is not only the provision of information that will impact the travel industry next year; consumption patterns are changing with travellers requesting information in new and different ways. The internet and the growing proliferation of mobile web services have already had a significant impact. As consumers demand increasing access to information and ability to engage regardless of their location, the travel businesses must capitalise on this trend by offering new mobile applications and services, such as location-based recommendations and social networking tools.

Bob Atkinson:

• Going into 2010, people will search even more than before, using online and high street resources before they buy. The search portion of their booking will also encompass more usage of social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook in addition to review sites as people look for real time advice on travel. This demand for more relevant information will continue to grow through the year. Vouchers will become a huge source of travel leads as ‘voucher culture’ takes hold in the market place – influenced by the recession and the general shopping market.
• Travel companies will be even more careful with their marketing spend, finding the most efficient ways to drive relevant search into their websites. This will have an impact in focusing on content via SEO as opposed to SEM and above the line spending – with more and more company spend being driven into the creation of relevant customer content to maximise the Long Tail effect.

Bosses at the UK’s biggest travel metasearch engine TravelSupermarket will be left scratching their heads this week after learning that the frontman for its sister brand’s expensive TV campaign is a big and very public fan of a rival travel site.

Peter Jones, a star of the BBC’s wannabe entrepreneur show Dragons’ Den, is the current face of MoneySupermarket’s £14 million push on national TV in the UK.

But in his regular Money & Work column for Skymag, the customer magazine for Sky TV subscribers, Jones says the following:

“My family and I have just been away for half-term to Barbados, and I found a great website, Skyscanner, for flights if you’re thinking of going away for Christmas.

“They search all the airline companies and compare prices and routes. You can save half the price of a ticket!”

Imagine the furore if Priceline’s William Shatner said on the David Letterman show that he rather liked Ebookers (part of the Orbitz empire)?

Yes, imagine that…

European – and increasingly global – metasearch engine Skyscanner has hired one of the UK’s current dot-com darlings to become a non-executive director of the business.

But Jason Stockwood’s appointment following his departure as managing director of dating giant match.com probably says a lot about Skyscanner’s intentions to push the brand around the globe – or as he puts it: harness the ”huge potential to build an explosive global brand over the next couple of years”.

Perhaps the first dilemma Stockwood, chief executive and co-founder Gareth Williams and co will wrestle with is what to do about Skyscanner’s marketing strategy.

Stockwood is credited with masterminding the cheeky branding campaigns for match.com, but also has a strong pedigree in online having worked at Travelocity, lastminute.com and Lufthansa.

Until now, however, Skyscanner has relied almost exclusively on canny SEO, word-of-mouth and PPC keyword buys.

But with aspirations to grow Skyscanner into new markets and not have the advantage (like it did in the UK) of first-mover advantage, Skyscanner could be considering investing in that dark world of marketing for online travel brands: above-the-line advertising – an area until recently many a metasearch provider has shied away from.

In the UK, for example, price comparison site Cheapflights famously claimed its entire growth strategy was based on online advertising and that it hadn’t spent more than a few thousand UK pounds on offline marketing.

All this changed when Travelsupermarket spent jaw-dropping amounts – some put it at around £15 million – on TV advertising in the UK, a figure unheard of amongst the metasearch players.

Although many sneered at Travelsupermarket’s strategy, others saw what the Cheshire-based, London Stock Exchange-listed company was doing: building a brand.

TS is now the number one metasearch engine in the UK and almost sweeps younger, arguably more prudent players such as Kayak away before it.

So some might say TS’s investment worked out. Skyscanner may be considering the same as it looks to establish a presence in new markets.

Skyscanner is tight-lipped as to whether Stockwood’s appointment will trigger glitzy offline marketing campaigns, but it admits there is now an “increased emphasis” on building the brand.