Taking a break

Obviously my posts are less and less frequent. It's time to take a, more extended, break from the blog. Thanks for stopping by and all the best in your travel start-up endeavours.

Summer Airfares Video

John Rauser of Farecast created this cool Summer Airfare Strategies Video, which provides tips on when to travel to Europe and domestically this summer. Got me thinking about which other travel websites are publishing useful video content these days. Will do some digging...

(Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Travel Site Rankings

Took another look at the Quantcast travel site rankings again and noticed some big gainers and losers since August. Kayak and Farecast have increased their ranking by 30%, while Yapta and SideStep have dropped by over 200%. Not sure how Quantcast rankings for these companies compares to Compete, Alexa and others but interesting to see the movement.

Update: Peter Daams over at TravellersPoint pinged me with their ranking... 17,118, which puts them just behind Mobissimo.

Update II: Some have understandably argued that the data is flawed. It is hard to compare sites with the free tools out there. In fact, to get a sense of the challenges, check out Marcelo's Seattle Start-Up Index that combines Alexa and Compete - you can see some rank higher on Alexa and lower on Compete than other companies. One way to improve Quantcast's accuracy is to get quantified.

Also, just to make it easy, check for yourself:
Priceline - http://www.quantcast.com/priceline.com
Hotwire - http://www.quantcast.com/hotwire.com
SideStep - http://www.quantcast.com/sidestep.com
Kayak - http://www.quantcast.com/kayak.com
Farecast - http://www.quantcast.com/farecast.com
FareCompare - http://www.quantcast.com/farecompare.com
AirfareWatchDog - http://www.quantcast.com/airfarewatchdog.com
Mobissimo - http://www.quantcast.com/mobissimo.com
Yapta - http://www.quantcast.com/yapta.com
DoHop - http://www.quantcast.com/dohop.com

(Disclosure: I work for Farecast.)

Kayak World's 5th Largest Travel Site

Big announcement last Thursday afternoon, Mike Arrington broke the news, that Kayak has raised $196 million, from multiple sources including Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, and acquired SideStep.

The companies reported that the combined traffic and revenue will create the "world's fifth largest travel site." The combined entity have reported gross bookings/sales of $3.5 billion and revenues of $85 million. More at search engine land.

Kayak has reported that the "merger will bump the number of searches on its sites to 33 million in January, more than double the 16 million in January 2007." In a redherring story, Paul English says "Kayak is taking aim at Expedia, the No. 1 web site based on travel searches per month... At the same time, Kayak partners with Expedia by referring searchers to that site, which serves as a ticket-selling agency... [similar to] shopping search engine like shopping.com and a retailer like BestBuy."

Greg Saks of Compete pulled together an excellent analysis of the Kayak/SideStep merger. Definitely worth reading. Thought it would be interesting to look at Farecast and Mobissimo, the number two and number three travel search player, relative to Kayak. (Granted that with the acquisition of SideStep, this gap increase substantially.)

John Cook at Seattle PI weighed in on how this deal impacts Farecast.

GigaOm testing Mobissimo and Farecast against the rest and scored them both higher.

This is a big deal and sets us up for another exciting year for online travel in 2008.

(Disclosure: I work for Farecast.)

Embracing the Media Model

Will be interesting to see if other OTAs follow Expedia's lead and enter into creative hybrid transaction/media models with top suppliers. (Talking about within the core Expedia.com search paths. Obviously Expedia has embraced the media model as a whole - they bought TripAdvisor, SmarterTravel, etc.)

This is a smart move, as more and more consumers leverage OTAs as search platforms and book directly with suppliers, this is a way to monetize the search activity and create a value-added relationship with their supplier partners.

Read more about the Expedia/IHG agreement here or over at Diane Clarkson's blog.

Kango and LeisureLogix

These two, new travel start-up companies launched last week by two ex-portal guys, Yen Lee (Yahoo Travel) and Jeff DeKorte (AOL Travel).

About Kango
"Personalized travel planning for family vacations and more. Our mission is to help people plan vacations that they absolutely love." More on Kango from TechCrunch.

Given how competitive it is in Silicon Valley for talent, TechCrunch points out what a solid team Kango has put together and I agree, "CEO Yen Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives."

About LeisureLogix
"Eighty-eight percent? That's the percentage of travelers in the U.S. who use their cars for vacations. And despite the overwhelming size of this market, there is nothing online that offers personalized, integrated road trip and route planning with reservation capabilities and extensive travel information and activities.LeisureLogix is working to change that."

Farecast Hotels in NYT

New York Times published a great piece today called "Finding Bargin Rooms at a Glance" that described the value of Farecast's new (in beta) hotel search product and specifically the Hotel Rate Key. Here is a small excerpt:

"Farecast, known for predicting domestic ticket prices for air travelers, is testing a new feature designed to pull the veil back on hotel prices and let consumers know, at a glance, whether the rate listed for a hotel is actually a good deal or not."

Farecast Hotels was also covered in Boston Globe, LATimes, TechCrunch, Reuters, CNET, SeattleTimes and many others.

[Disclosure: I work at Farecast.]