Kayak to take on UpTake (or is it the other way round)

Quick post, as I am running around today

Meta-search behemoth Kayak.com (poised to hit a billion searches in Q1 09) has announced that it is adding hotel review meta-search to its engine (care of HotelMarketing). Two interesting points caught my mind here:

1. Uptake.com (nee Kango) came to this model first and has raised money and profile to go after it. But Kayak clearly has traffic to burn; and

2. I interviewed Kayak's VP Communications Kellie Pelletier back in Jan last year after thier acqusition of Sidestep. At the time Sidestep had a lot of content assets (such as the now dead TripUp). Kellie made it clear to me that Kayak was not looking to pursue a content based strategy - rather would rely on their engineering lead to beat the OTAs and "regular" search companies. I am trying to decide if this move into meta-searching content is a change in strategy or not. On the one hand it is embracing content but on the other it is using engineering to collate and organise someone else's existing content.

Need to think about his more but Uptake - watch you back!

Qantas and BOOT are talking

Quick update - My post yesterday generated a nice response from the Qantas Media Office. Will share with you soon what I find out about their new customer service training centre

Wotif to sponsor Canadian Football Team London City

How is this for a marketing first? An Australian based online travel company buys space on the shirts of a Canadian Football team named after an English city. Wotif.com have announced a sponsorship deal with London City football (Canadian team) that will include logos on the clothing and fan accommodation booking site (LondonCityAway). Not the first time we have discussed sports sponsorship in online trave here at the BOOT. Wotif as a company (up until recently) is not famous for pure brand spent marketing. If you'd ask me to bet on what would be the next brand spend announcment, then sponsoring a Canadian football team would have been a long way down on the list of items that would have got my wager. What do you think? Crazy for an online player to sponsor a football team?

HomeAway buys Homeliday with part of their cash mountain

Back in November US based vacation rental listing company HomeAway raised a staggering $250mm at a billion dollar plus valuation. Sitting around at PhoCusWright with other bloggers we speculated who they would buy with the money and whether or not they would use the money to get into Europe. Now care of a Kevin May Travolution story we know that they have spent some of it (no idea how much) on acquiring the French based Homeliday.

Other vacation rental business owned by HomeAway include:

• VRBO.com,
  
• VacationRentals.com,
  
• CyberRentals.com,
  
• A1Vacations.com,
  
• GreatRentals.com,
  
• Holiday-Rentals.co.uk,
  
• OwnersDirect.co.uk,
  
• FeWo-direkt.de; and
  
• Abritel.fr.

Hard to pass any substantive judgement without knowing the price paid. Generically speaking the vacation rental business is (like any media business) a scale game, so improvements in scale (including brand breadth) are a good thing. That's right, I said "like any media business". Don't let the look and feel of HomeAway fool you. It is not a retail/sales model like an OTA or online hotel company or the HomeAway competitor VacationRoost. HomeAway operate on a listing model - properties pay to list on the site. The base package is a flat listing fee (this I know for sure) which might be supplemented with premium listing packages and fees (this I am speculating). Think of the model as a targeted, online yellow pages model. Summary - a media business not a retail business. Media loves more and more scale and HomeAway are happy to buy their way.

Qantas feeling world pain and wont return my calls

Despite a revenue growth of 2% to $7.92 billion, Qantas has joined the list of airlines being beaten up by the economic smack-down. Profits are down 66% to $210mm for the second half of calendar 08 from $618mm the previous year. Shares are currently in a trading halt - at time of writing - pending an announcement on a capital raising (full news story here care of SMH). I would not normally run a post on declining results for an airline like Qantas (because that is what we have online newspapers for) but in this case it reminded me that I have been trying to get in touch with Qantas media/comms staff and have heard nothing.

Last week Qantas announced a new $10 million customer service training centre. This peaked my interest as I have regularly commented that Qantas appears to have a culture of process rather than service. I wrote to the media contact at Qantas (bottom of the press release) and asked if they would be interested in giving me a briefing on the new facility. That was last Friday. As of today - Wednesday - no reply.

Now it is possible that they think I am so negative on Qantas that it is not worth giving me a briefing. But that would be an unfair assessment of the BOOT. While there are plenty of critical comments on the blog about Qantas - especially on the glitches/failures on of the in flight entertainement system - I also have positive comments such as my post "In defence of Qantas" and have rated Qantas as number 5 on my list of top 5 airlines. But even so, surely they would want to talk to any commentator - especially negative ones- about service improvements. The other possibility is that that the Qantas media/PR team simply do not reply to bloggers. If that is true, then they have their heads in the old media sand. There are so many examples of social media impacting on Qantas as a brand. My blog is the number two hit in Google (on my results) for "Qantas VOD". Message board and info-blog FrequentFlyer.com.au is the number two in Google for "QFF" (the shorthand for Qantas Frequent Flyer). Twitter is awash with commentary about Qantas etc etc etc

I hope the real answer is that they just haven't gotten round to writing back yet. If so, Qantas - if you're listening - email me.

TVTrip raises another €7 million. Total raised now almost $14mm

Hotel video review site TVTrip.com has just finalised their Series B round raising €7 million (first saw the story over at TechCrunch). Brings total raised so far to just shy of $14mm (depending on how you convert Euros to Dollars and not including initial angle rounds). Investors included Balderton Capital (portfolio includes Bebo) , Partech International (portfolio includes Dailymotion) and AGF Private Equity (portfolio also includes Dailymotion). The latter new to this round.

I get the video review space. I can see clearly how consumer conversion will increase based on better hotel descriptions and videos. What is not settled in my mind is how to do the perfect Video. Clearly consumers have short attention spans. We know that the length of the average video viewed online is less than a few minutes. We also know that consumers are looking mroe and more for content from actual guests/users/

There is thus a huge challenge in getting the right balance between supplying video but making it short, sharp, relevant and real.

At PhoCusWright in LA a Video back-end provider/production company TripTelevision (CEO Kulin Strimbu) waxed lyrically about their auto clip technology that takes short sections from a long vidoe and auto-compiles it into a 30 sec spot. So that in 30 seconds you can see a bit of the lobby, room, pool, restaurant etc. A click on the video at any time will take you to the longer version video devoted to that particular part of the hotel. TVTrip has approached with a sliding channel approach where options on which part of the hotel you want to look at are provided as different channels to select from.

Video is here to stay but these layout options need further work. TVTrip now have millions of dollars to spend on working it out (and keeping up with increasing broadband costs). Congratulations to CEO Marc Ruff and team.

701 not out

This last 100 posts has flown by. It is time for my regular "not out series" where I recap the last 100 posts and remind you of the themes that have been dominating the blog. I started almost three years ago with 101 not out and continued with 201, 301, 401, 501. and 601 not out.

I spent a lot of the last 100 posts attending and covering the big online travel conferences of Oceania, Asia and the US. A couple of highlights:

From TRAVELtech in Sydney

• Richard Noon of Webjet estimating the Australian turnover of Expedia, Zuji and Travel.com.au; and
  
• WorldNomads the inspiring Footprints charity program with the fantastic marketing and conversion benefits.

From Eyefortravel in Sydney

• Me talking about helping consumers navigate too much information;

From WebInTravel in Singapore

• Alfred Chang of Ctrip sharing his views of the market share "online" in China;
• Ram of PhoCusWright hosting an interesting round table on India with heads from Makemytrip and Yatra; and
  
• Phillip Wolf and Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright and me talking about online travel, Google, UGC, the Economy and (of course) Asia.
  

From PhoCusWright in LA

• I tried to sort out all of the trip planning sites and mobile applications;
• We heard interesting stories from the bosses of Expedia, Priceline and Kayak; and
• We came across the interesting way in which an offline publisher in Germany (MairDumont) is supporting and online trip planner (TripWolf).
  

While I was busy at Gabfests the world went into an economic death spiral:

• XL went bust, Alitalia too (kind of); But
  
• Uptake, HomeAway, and TripWolf managed to raise some money, bucking the trend.
  

I touched on some (in my view) interesting themes including

• Whether or not BA did a good or bad job point all of their Highlife content online;
• Whether or not Google has too much influence over how we design our websites and content strategies; and
• Whether or not you should use paid search as a place for a he said, she said bitch fight.
  

And in BOOT news

• We watched live on the Internet as a family member escaped from the horrors of the attacks on Mumbai
  
• We hit 1,000 subscribers;
• You heard me talk to Addison Schonland;
  
• I saw a man die at Hong Kong airport;
  
• We joined the Recombobulation Revolution!!!
  

I'm having a blast writing, I hope you are enjoying the reading.

PS - in case you happen to be counting this is actually post 703