A new meta-search engine launched - hotelicopter.com

Here comes a new meta-search engine - hotelicopter.com. It compares hotel prices on various OTA, just like other meta-search-engine does. I have walked through the site and below are my finding. Something different : 1. the map-based search is more user friendly where you can focus on a area by dragging the box. 2. it connects to hotels directly by supporting either online booking or make a phone call @ hotel's number 3. it use virus marketing to catch attention ( http://aprilfools.hotelicopter.com/ ) I believe there will be more meta-search engine coming out in the future. But the trend is quite clear: 1. It's getting harder to have any technology break-through on the price-comparision features. Most will leverage on existing platform or technology rather than connecting to OTA directly. 2. Rich client features are more important to differenciate among existing (more classic) market players. 3. Bypassing OTA and link hotels to consumer directly. Overall, there are less rooms (both profit and technology) to play with in meta search engine sector.

Travel Distibution Summit Asia 09- Eye for Travel

This year the summit is held in Singapore 1-2 April. The financial crisis has clearly affect the event: only 8 exibitors are attending - that's one third of last year's events. The "hottest" workshops are about SEO and SEM, which are attacting the most people in the convention. Three vendors, Forumline, EMarketingEye and WaterandStone, gave speeches about SEO and SEM. Persoanlly I think Ric from WaterandStone is giving the best speech by sharing a lot of fundermental knowledge of search engine and give recommendations based on those facts. He is a very knowledgeable person indeed. Clearly google is still the most "beloved" platform for online travel professional and everyone wants to know how to be on the first page. i don't know whether this is a good thing or a sad thing to have so few options when talking about marketing where being creative and new is vital. Now it seems that the more important thing is to follow the way of thinking of the search engine robot.... Personally I feel it's very funny

Tripology - "Agent Screening", rather than "Travel Searching"

Tripoloy is another interesting trip planner. Rather than a search engine returning tons of filtered information, it connects travellers with up to three travel agents who has been "screened properly" to give proposals and quotations based on traveller's request. This makes sense. For example, for a traveller visiting New York where he has never been there before, a local agent's advice is valuable and the recommendations can save a lot of researching time. In this sense, Tripology becomes an agent of agent, rather than a search engine. Will this model be successful? I think so, but in limited scale. It has its own niche. But its lack of brand and credibility will take long time to catch up major attention. And it doesn't change the fundament way of how tranditional travel agent are doing business. The way of distribution is not changed and the cost of distribution is not reduced. The efficiency should be improved due to the "screening process" but sitll in question.

Uptake.com - Search for Experiences.

I have recently came across this travel search site: www.uptake.com. It works like Google by crawling 1000+ travel sites and doing some data mining to categorize the contents. This is interesting as it's more like semantic search while other travel site directories can only categorie "sites" instead of "contents". By doing this, it works like an "experiecne search" that make it more friendly to travellers who have never been to the destination before and have to rely on "similiar experiences" to make decisions. When combined with some AI technics like natural language recongnition, it will be more interesting. There are other travel search engines trying to follow the similiar concepts (e.g. circos.com) and I believe that will be one of the future trends of travel search engines. Being a "smart Google in Travel" is everybody's dream. However, the site's problem, just like Google, is that it returns too many search results without clear suggestions and guidances(although they are relevant). It's trying to integrate everthing and lose focus. If I don't have much time for the researh, I would rather go for a travel agent (e.g. tripology.com) or find a similiar trip from others and customize it (e.g. travelmuse.com) or go to tripadvisor to gasp reviews from travllers. It's not intelligent enough from my point of view.

Another travel search engine, Travelbeen.com

Travelbeen.com is new search engine in travel domain. Please share your thought on it. Here is the message from the founder: "Travelbeen basically is cross between a travel vertical Google and Delicious bookmarking. We crawl hand picked travel websites (over 15,000 at the moment) categorise them, add any travel specific accreditations and then index them into a keyword search. Additionally users can bookmark pages that we have been included in our search on Travelbeen or on travel websites that have implemented the Travelbeen bookmarking code (like a Delicious). As I say it is early days but getting there. http://www.travelbeen.com "

Which company should Google buy - Expedia or Kayak ?

Which company should Google buy - Expedia or Kayak ?

Travel is always one of the biggest revenue streams for search engine. And that's why Google is trying to buy Expedia. However, I think it will cause some conflicts of interests. For example, if Travelocity is buying hotel keywords from Google and some portion of the money actually benefit Expedia. What will happen?

I think Travelocity will allocate more budget to Yahoo or other Media, for stratgical concerns. In this sense, Kayak is a better option since it's more a search engine rather than a actual travel portal.

What do you think? Go and poll for it: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/28067/vbzfd

About this blog

This blog is linked to my LinkedIn Group - Travel Search Engine
"Dedicated for exciting ideas about Travel Search Engine. What features do you expect most when searching for travel, but not yet available in existing search engines like google and yahoo, meta search engines like kayak and sidestep? What will be the future of travel search engine, in your eyes?"