Travel 2.0…
Posted by Aaron on 16 Jun 2006 at 11:32 am
More 2.0 Madness! Being involved in the travel industry, Travel 2.0 is of special interest to me. As some of you know, I’ve never been a big fan of travel meta search engines. I’ve never quite “got it” when it comes to what they offer the consumer. And their marginal success would seem to indicate that I’m not alone. But this step toward what is being called Travel 2.0 actually seems like it may have some legs.
Most of the sites mentioned in the article from Hotelmarketing.com (see the bottom of this post) are tools that give the consumer some real power in planning travel, mostly airfare at this point. By allowing users to search historical air rates, and even predict future rates, these engines may really have something of value that can’t be easily obtained elsewhere.
If you travel with any sort of flexibility, as I usually do, you no doubt spend at least a little time searching for the best rates. And it never fails to amaze us that the same trip to Boston we took last month for $250 is going to cost $500 this month…
Using a combination of Google maps, past price data and tracking software, FareCompare.com allows users to chart historical pricing data for coach and business/first class fares and search for all the lowest future rates to multiple cities from a given starting point.
FareCompare’s engine updates new fares in less than 3 minutes. GDSs typically take 2-4 hours to publish fare updates. Using our tools industry analysts benefit from knowing what is going to happen in a given market before the changes actually occur. - www.farecompare.com/search/corporate
Since the service doesn’t actually sell airline tickets, however, it’s still a mystery how FareCompare will manage to stick around. Sound familiar? Should this be called Travel Bubble 2.0 instead?
Metasearch 2.0: Consumers turn the tables on revenue managers
Tagged as: Google, Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Other, Travel 2.0, Travel20, Travel2, Web 2.0, Web2, FareCompare, Meta Search, HotelMarketing, Google Maps, Bubble 2.0
Nice writeup on Travel 2.0. I agree that we have to take caution on the hype, but
it is also about time that incumbent travel companies sit up and take notice of the trends in usability, collaboration and analytics that are shaking traditional e-commerce.
I am doing a short study for my company on travel and web2.0, and I found only a few companies and individuals actively thinking about such community-driven travel sites.
Have you checked out tripmates? I think this is the future of group travel + travel-diaries. There are now quite a few recent B2C startups working on community and analytics driven ideas.
On the other hand, does anyone know of any travel technology companies that have sprung up recently to launch “travel 2.0″ applications and frameworks? The only one I could find was Travenues a startup in India, that is still working on its products. The Travenues site has a formal definition of travel 2.0 that is pretty interesting.
Laurent-
Thanks for the comments. Tripmates looks great from a 2.0 type perspective. From what I can tell they are going to try and make a revenue model out of advertising, which isn’t an easy thing to do. My hunch would be that their exit strategy involves selling to someone like Yahoo! (think a mix of Yahoo! Travel, Flickr and MySpace). Could have some legs, especially if group travel continues to grow as it is now.
Travnues looks like they haven’t really come up with any real ideas/products yet. Web 2.0 is more than trendy technology and marketing jargon, it’s collaboration, community and trust and is independent of the technology that enables it.
Craig Newmark of Craigslist had this definition :
“Web 2.0″ means a lot of things to different people. In my favorite sense, it refers to sites which are run in a culture of trust, where the users form a community which runs the site. As David Weinberger says, it’s a site about “us” (the community) not so much about ‘them’ (the nominal owners). You might observe that this is a return to the values of the early ‘net and Web, kinda Web 0.0.”
[…] Why book a United airline ticket and a Hilton hotel on Expedia when I’m “guaranteed” to get the best price by booking directly with the supplier. I have to punch in my credit card number twice? Big deal. Plus, if I’m part of the suppliers loyalty program I can usually get some bonus points/miles by doing so. Expedia does have some great shopping tools though; so I use their site, but they don’t get my business. Add to that a collection of “Travel 2.0” sites that are in the works and suddenly using agency sites to shop price starts to lose its draw as well. […]
Aaron,
I checked out tripmates after reading the previous entries. I agree that this is the future of travel information- social networks meshed with valuable user-generated travel content. The google maps are a nice touch. Will be using tripmates when I travel- haven’t seen anything very similar (other than sites like trip advisor and virtual tourist- which are a little boring for my taste).
Thanks for the comments, Dwayne. Tripmates definitely has some promise. There are several partnering opportunities for them as well it would seem…
Thanks!!
Hi, you have a jolly good post here, thanks for the good read
I think ultimately FareCompare will have to partner with providers. This is often the business model of these types of sites anyway. They promote themselves, go viral, and then pour on the ads or partnership deals.
Sites that try to do that to start often find they don’t gain readership as fast as they would if they otherwise stayed independent for a period of time.