TripKick has just launched (in the last few days) and it looks like a website that is worth a quick look at.

URL: http://www.tripkick.com/
Concept: Not just hotel reviews - but community generated room level reviews

For example, rooms in the Clift Hotel (San Francisco)

Wow this is going to be a challenge….  firstly there is a great deal of data and secondly hotels just are not setup for taking bookings for specific rooms - so even if you know what room you want there may be a challenge in booking it.

As a quick recap to those unfamiliar with hotel operations, hotels tend to sell in one of three ways:

• By the room - for example small hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. e.g. the Sea View room,  the Blue room etc
• By the room type - for example “double room”, “twin room” etc (tend to be mainly medium sized hotels)
• By the rate type - for example corporate rate, special rate for company ABC etc (often how the big hotels distribute)

Room level review information, instead of being useful to consumers, may actually be very interesting indeed to two constituencies:

• The hotel owner - as now you can find out which rooms could be yield managed differently to other rooms
• Tour operators making group bookings - sometimes in a group you have premium and non-premium guests…. although they may be all in the same room type. Now you can, when allocating rooms to guests, determine which people should go where (assumes that you have a tour leader in the group at checkin!)  

So the TripKick idea could work…. but I wonder whether it is just “too much information”. However it is early days - and computers should be ideal at determining what data would be of interest to users - hence maybe TripKick will succeed with this.

They should probably look towards the trade for monetisation though (either as an additional data set to conventional hotel review websites - or to hotel owners / tour operators - to inform their operational decisions)

One to keep an eye on as in the first week a website is live it is hardly fair to give a thumbs up / thumbs down quite yet!

If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!

A couple of weeks back I again opened up again an opportunity for a “review” on this blog. This time four companies came forward to go under the “musings microscope”. (see original post).

I apologise for being a bit slow on coming back to it…. but everything is a bit hectic at the moment…. today I turned on Skype for a call and within 10 minutes I was having 5 concurrent conversations with different customers from around the world. Anyway, its hectic for all the right reasons - so I am not worried too much (note to self - when turning on Skype - turn it on as invisible)

Excuses over, the website / service I want to review today is Panedia - http://www.panedia.com/

Aaron Spence, CEO, from Panedia, described their service as follows:

“We’re a content development company doing new things for online travel with panoramic virtual tours….all extremely high quality content…all shot by professional photographers. We do put our content on maps (like Google with Streetview) but a quick look at our sites will show that we’re not a Streetview (or Everyscape, Mapjack, Earthmine, BlueDasher + the rest) copy. We’re not trying to shoot every street in the world….we professionally shoot things that travellers may want to see.” 

One look at their website and I can see some beautiful images taking up 90% of my screen (the remainder mainly being a Google map). The high quality of the images and the execution on the web is top level.

One of their competitors will be Google street view. Indeed Panedia, in this blog post, have done a side by side comparison. It basically boils down to having a few, high quality, images vs a quantity of low quality “snaps”.

So what do travellers want?
I expect business travellers and those dealing with the practical aspects will tend towards finding Google street view very useful indeed - you can look ahead and work out where to park, the current traffic levels (in some cities) etc.

However Panedia are not going for that market - they are aiming to sell their quality content to 3rd parties (presumably travel companies and consumers directly) in order to help build a reason to go travelling in the first place (especially for leisure travellers with their desktop wallpaper service).

I could spend a great deal of time looking around the Panedia website as the quality of the images drags you in and makes you want to click to the next one (they are linked into adjacent images so you can travel around, much like Google street view)

What challenges do they have?
Challenges will come from two directions

• Keeping images “fresh”
• Competitors

Keeping images fresh
I remember managing website projects for large travel companies who have dedicated staff working on their image libraries. One of the challenges when working at large scale is keeping images fresh and accurate. For example, on a hotel reservation website, if a hotel undertakes renovation - then, according to trading standards rules, the old images may no longer be used…. etc etc…. its a real issue.

Panedia may have made a great upfront investment in creating a wonderful library of images - but in 3-4 years time - they are going to have to do many of them again. Therefore their opportunity is a current one.

Competitors
I am not going to list all competitors because Aaron has done a great job of that in his quote (!)…. however one that probably ought to get a bit of attention is Panoye. Basically this is a community website and has been developed by an individual rather than a company.

It is a community where individuals can upload geotagged panoramic tours with the ultimate aim of building a virtual tour all around the Earth. The guy behind Panoye says that he only did it as a website to put on his CV…. 

If I was Panedia I would recruit the guy from Panoye as soon as possible. According to his blog he wants to move somewhere sunny and is looking for a job - hence Australia would probably be fine (if the visa can be arranged!)

Why am I so interested in Panoye?
In my opinion a community effort is really one of the only ways to build a massive collection of quality images and take on Google streetview. OK Panoye isn’t the completed article yet…. but it shows that a community of global photographers can be created….. and therefore, given a bit of backing, it would exceed any effort made as an “expert lead” project.

Power to the people.

Wow. I am impressed.

Southwest Airlines have just relaunched a now great (consumer facing) blog - Nuts by Southwest

I am not sure I could do a review justice…. so I will leave it to Christi Day from the airline to introduce their new blog:

According to her profile, Christi likes cats. I love this kind of fact… it is the kind of information that builds a level of “getting to know you” but really isn’t going to expose public facing employees to an intrusion of privacy. I can’t think of many (any?) airline blogs that have this kind of info.

On the blog you can find all sorts - social media tools, a radio station and what looks like an interesting series of “behind the scenes” videos (hosted on youtube, of course)….

For example, here is a video giving an insight into the reservations call centre

OK - so now we know at what level the “corporate blog” bar is set…. just matching this will be struggle for many airlines…..

A question for you - how should you structure a “corporate blog”?

• A single person “fronting” the blog - and ensuring the message is consistent over time (like this blog - where I write it!)
• A “CEO” blog…. (even if it is the marketing team that actually writes the text etc)
• A multi-author blog (can become bland and inconsistent if not managed well)

Southwest Airlines have gone for the “single person” and are fairly unique in doing so, I believe.

I have tried to stay out of this whole Google trademark debate….. I have an opportunity to talk to Google about this directly in a few weeks time and want to let the dust settle before I come to a final view on it.

However, one point that has come up is that those brands that have entered “gentlemen’s agreements” not to bid on competitor brand names could be risking legal action - and subsequent massive fines - for breaking competition law.

Something to do with Section 2(1) of the Competition Act 1998 (Chapter 41). it applies to agreements and practices between UK companies that could affect trade by preventing, restricting or distorting competition.

Duncan Parry (Steak Media) said “We suggest brands consult their legal teams before doing so”.

Read the full article from NMA and the declaration from CheapFlights not to bid on trademarked terms where competing with their clients

Last October (7 months ago) I reviewed the Expedia Inspiroscope tool. At the time I wrote

“I don’t expect this one to stay on the Expedia homepage for too long if it is designed in its current form. Perhaps it was never intended to replace their Inspirator - and is just there for a forthcoming marketing campaign”

Well…. it is no longer so dominant on the homepage ….. the tool has been relegated to their inspiration homepage found here (OK there is still a tiny mention on the UK homepage). Instead, Expedia have a new “Where to go” map…. which I expect is much more commercially successful.

However, the inspiroscope is still getting mentioned in the UK travel trade press…. two UK travel conferences have recently held the tool up as a great example of online travel innovation - hence it is probably worth taking a second look before Expedia remove it completely!

The statistics
One of the best ways of investigating the success of a solution is to look at statistics. I don’t have any usage stats….. however Expedia have kindly still left the “vote” results available for all to see.

http://inspiroscope.expedia.co.uk/GetWordVotes.ashx

Lets do a quick analysis:

(Remember this is for a 7-8 month period, during the UK winter….. so will be dominated by summer holiday concepts, probably)

• Interesting places - 11037
• Beach - 10011
• Beautiful scenery - 9335
• Good weather - 7301
• Hot weather - 7093
• New experiences - 6228
• Time to relax - 3906
• Relaxed atmosphere - 3690
• Culture - 3505
• Exotic - 3365
• Beautiful Sunsets - 3303
• Lazy days - 3013
• Nice Accommodation - 2814
• Good hotel - 2753
• Relaxing - 2723
• Adventure - 2439
• Getting a tan - 2137
• Far and away - 1989
• Eating out - 1787
• Good food - 1721
• Architecture - 1449
• Local markets - 1411
• Excursions - 1380
• Beer - 1365
• Cocktails - 1361
• Rest - 1272
• Archaeology - 1259
• Friendly locals - 1247
• Blue sky - 1171
• A good book - 1115
• Entertainment - 1109
• Fresh air - 1103
• Snorkelling - 1055
• Socialising - 1049
• Bars - 1040
• Meeting people - 1035
• Sand - 1024
• Swimming - 1015
• Sea - 1012
• Good wine - 976
• Ice Cream - 939
• Watersports - 898
• Nice pool - 833
• Kids clubs - 767
• Boat trips - 709
• Museums - 597
• Diving - 496
• Friends - 454
• Friendly staff - 275
• Theatre - 219

Firstly the tool is definitely hitting the correct users (so the marketing and site positioning has been appropriate). With interesting places being the top result you can imagine that users are, even with a tool in front of them, struggling to come up with anything that they really want…… and relying on the tool to inspire them.

The second top theme is weather (with good weather and hot weather coming in 4th and 5th). Weather is a tricky concept as it is relative to the user’s location and the proposed activity. If you are in the South of England your expectation of good weather may be different to someone in the North of Scotland. Likewise, if you are going for a hill walking holiday you may not want the weather to be as “hot” as if you are going for a beach holiday. And for ski holidays the definition of good weather / hot weather becomes even harder to determine.

The third theme to come through is “relaxing”. Time to relax, relaxed atmosphere, lazy days, relaxing and rest are all in the top half.

Kids clubs comes in low on the list…. can we infer anything from the Expedia demographic from this?

If you are reading this, you probably know what RSS is. RSS is an XML based format that enables websites (such as this blog) to syndicate articles out to RSS readers… so you can read this article without having to come back to the central site.

Of course, RSS isn’t just about blog posts, but can be used to distribute all sorts of data that is intended for consumer consumption. You can find info about what RSS is from here:

Anyway, today is RSS awareness day. Yeah. I bet you are pleased to know that.

Fact of the day….. there are 70 million (or so) RSS users on the web…. but this is only 5% of the internet population…. (Source: RSS Awareness day website)

So what can you use RSS for (apart from blogs)?
Well you could use RSS to create a special offer or “price feed”. For example:

• Expedia New Zealand
• Travelocity - actually pretty good
• Orbitz
• Lastminute
• etc….

Does RSS work commercially?
There is an interesting case study from 2006 where Travelocity promoted their new RSS system to just Hotmail and Yahoo email addresses (these users were chosen as Travelocity knew that these users had access to RSS readers either via Windows Live or My Yahoo). Anyway, apparently, 66% of users that opened the email (outlining the RSS system) subscribed to a custom RSS feed.

TourCMS also supports RSS feeds generation…. which is nice. Only one customer is using it for that though…. but from small acorns! (Full details on TourCMS RSS support and an example RSS feed)

An industry standard
I would love to see a travel industry “standard” for RSS feeds. The kind of organisation that should be creating this “lightweight” format would be the Open Travel Alliance - but they seem focussed on “heavy lift” data formats….. The advantage of having an agreed standard would be that companies (such as meta-search companies) could create tools to consume these RSS feeds in a standard way.

Subject lines, from a standard perspective, are not very interesting (but they are the most important aspect from a consumer perspective). They tend to include:

• Product name
• Date
• Rate

The key to any new RSS travel special offer standard would be to determine what data should be in the body (so can be both read by consumers and aggregators). I suggest:

• Product name
• Travel date (either fixed date, or applicable date if an extended period)
• Offer ends date
• Rate
• Short description
• Marketplace restrictions (in code form) (e.g. only available to US customers)
• Product tags (yep - a folksonomy)

Some come on Open Travel Alliance - can you knock up a standard for us? (or I could co-ordinate it, if anyone thinks this idea has legs)

Go on….tell me below how you are using RSS…..

I have touched on the subject of lack of innovation in online travel (from the large online travel agencies) previously…. however perhaps this is a different way of looking at it.

Lets just say you have £100,000 GBP (200,000 USD) to spend on marketing. This is a major sum for a small tour operator - but a minor budget for a larger company such as a leading OTA.

Here are a couple of options:

• Spend the money on PPC advertising
• Create a great new piece of content or content area on an existing website (i.e. perhaps innovate)

Lets just assume that the average PPC marketing cost for a new customer / booking is £20 GBP (40 USD). The PPC advertising would therefore return 5000 bookings.

£100,000 GBP would buy you 4 web developers working for 12 weeks (at standard London contract / agency developer rates), plus a bit spare for hardware, software / content licenses etc. You could get quite a bit done in this 12 weeks - but it wouldn’t be a major web development project (in comparison to other IT and web project costs that large OTAs undertake)

It would be a brave executive who would be confident that their “idea” (potentially unresearched) would give a 5000 booking return….. so it is currently just too easy to continue with PPC.

PPC prices have to go up in order for people to need to innovate…. maybe Google is doing everyone a favour with this whole “trademark” bidding thing…. because now companies may determine that innovation and investment in new web projects is a better commercial option than increasing PPC.

So - what would you do with £100,000?

Even though I have the now monthly “website review” offer I still get a constant flow of emails asking for help on this or that. I never like not helping….. but sometimes people need to realise what it is like being on the receiving end of all this communication and they should focus their request appropriately (If you are buying something from me, that is a slightly different scenario)

So - now I am going to ask for your help so I can share the load around a bit.

This weeks challenge:

“Requires the student to prepare an individual critical evaluation of Expedia. This will typically be represented in the form of a business plan where the key technological, business and wider aspects are recognised. The report should identify to what extent it has made a success of eCommerce and provide a reasoned discussion about its future success. Word count 2000 words max”

This is for a BSc. in Ecommerce and the Internet at a UK university. Yes the irony that the request says “requires the student to prepare” isn’t lost on me.

So - rather than having to write 2000 words….. the real challenge for you will be to come up with a succinct answer using fewer than 250 words. Please either write below…… or perhaps on your own blog (and add a link to your blog in the post below).

Actually this could be fun.

What can you win? Er…. nothing! (Unless someone from Expedia wants to sponsor this!). However somehow (to be determined) we will choose a winner….. and I am sure the student will be grateful.

PS - Note to professor / lecturer….. obviously we are not actually writing the report….. just coming up with ideas and themes…. isn’t this just how the Internet is meant to be used for research?

UPDATE: I have now added my 230 word critical evaluation below!

This blog is now 1 year old. Please send cards and chocolate by post……

I think it is still worth continuing with….. as a result of the blog some people now think I am a publicity seeking mad arrogant posh chap. I suppose that is a success.

Subscriber growth has been slow and steady….. here is the chart…

The recent drop is as a result of Netvibes not being counted in the statistics over the last week….. I am sure they will come back! Other minor drops happen every weekend (with lowest subscriber numbers always being on a Monday - so most of you, it would appear, subscribe and read from work)

Here are the TourCMS booking statistics for the same 12 month period…

Yes - TourCMS really did handle approximately twice the number of bookings this month than February…. and 8x the number done in December 07….  (although about 20% of April is down to historical booking backloading from new clients not necessarily fresh new bookings - so May 08 may not be a step up). The 100 figure isn’t number of bookings…. but percentage of the largest booking month.

Well at least both charts are moving in the right direction. Anyone else publish charts for their business? Or is everything under NDA?

I love the letters page of some of the travel industry trade press. It is where people who haven’t found blogs get to vent their frustration about various aspects of the industry.

One letter that grabbed my attention this week was in Travel Weekly. It was written as “Name and address withheld”….. which I find a rather unattractive way of publishing. I know publishing “with name” is hard…. indeed I was talking to someone the other day who had commented recently on a blog….. and they mentioned that they had felt very exposed…. well yes - and I feel exposed every time I publish…. it is just something you have to learn to live with.

So what did the letter say?

Extra time not on in travel agency

I have worked in the travel industry for several years for a top high-street travel agency. I enjoy the work and always meet my targets.

Does this mean that the targets are not set high enough?

But I have major concerns about employees being continually asked to work beyond their normal hours. We constantly leave work late, sometimes after 7pm in a day that should finish at 5.30pm. This gives the company several hours’ free work per employee every week.

Umm…. You are the company - the company is you. I worry about any employee that refers to their place of work in the 3rd party. Maybe it was just the way the letter was written.

When we approach our manager about this problem, the usual answer is: “There is nothing I or your employer will do to reimburse you for your personal time”.

Well yes. The manager is right. However, if you have asked your manager more than once…. maybe you should look at how you are asking - or whether you are asking the right manager - or even if you are asking the right question.

It is difficult for us to leave on time because if a customer comes into the store after 5pm, it can take upto two hours to complete a sale.

This is the line that made me want to write this response. Firstly - your customers want to access your experience and knowledge at a time that suits them. If they themselves are at work all day…. then of course they want to come to see you after they have finished. Going back to the point about working hours….. maybe you can start a “late” shop shift (perhaps starting later in the morning for days that you work late)….. You could form a rota with the other staff at the shop to ensure late coverage.

However, what really interests me is the line about it taking upto 2 hours to complete a sale. What are they doing in that 2 hours? Is this product research, customer decision time or just struggling to get through to the product supplier (e.g. a tour operator) in order to check on some specific detail on behalf of the client. I would love to know how this 2 hours breaks down.

If you ask the customer to come back tomorrow they might go to another shop, so I never refuse an enquiry.

The attitude is correct. I like this attitude because I like to bend over backwards to ensure that a client is served 100% (although my business is a slightly different one). However, it does show a slight lack of confidence in this agent’s own approach to sales. What could the agent do to ensure that they can “close” the sale quickly - but deal with the transaction the next day during office hours? (or incentivise the customer to return the next day).

The travel web industry
I am not a great fan of this “long work hours” mentality that many people believe goes hand in hand with working in a travel technology or web company. However I think this high street travel agent ought to consider how their competitors (probably online travel websites) are working flat out to put them out of business. The battle isn’t pretty - and likely the most focussed on “winning” will come out with a job in +5 years time.

Many web design agencies - and other service companies - will work an “all nighter” in order to meet a deadline and not let down a client….. and at the technology end of the travel industry….. working late at night is a common period…. as uninterupted time is when most work gets achieved (and when upgrades can be scheduled) 

So yes - if you have a family - then working until 7pm when you are expecting to work until 5.30 pm isn’t what you want….. so the challenge is to create a business environment where, if your customers want you “after office hours” then the manager should be creating staff work time processes that support this.

This may require a redesign of how a high street travel agent operates. I believe that some form of high street presence will still be available going forwards - but only those that are fully focussed on being available when customers want them. Shutting at 5.30pm just won’t be good enough. In fact, in high street travel agencies of the future… this maybe the opening time!

Last month I asked if anyone wanted me to review their website (to be published on this blog).

6 brave (or PR hungry) websites / companies came forward….. so I thought I would repeat the offer. (see last months entries, and my review of OkTaTaByeBye (a travel community based in India)).

My rules

• If I see or experience something that needs to be improved I am likely to say so.
• I am less lenient on large brands who have the budgets to get it right first time….. it is 2008 now… not 2000.
• As a travel ecommerce consultant I have a rule that I won’t give an opinion that an idea (or execution) is rubbish unless I have a better idea…. I use this same principle when undertaking a website review (especially a public one). i.e. I won’t just be critical (if deserved)…. but offer helpful advice.

To be reviewed add a message on this post outlining why you believe your travel website or service should be considered. In 7 days time I will pick one (the one with the best reason or that will be of most interest to travel industry readers)….. If you entered before, please enter again…. (if you wish!)

Travolution asked yesterday why mega-corporations find it so difficult to be innovative online. Well my simple answer is that, in my opinion, you can’t have a successful start up culture as well as a successful “innovative big business” culture…. those people with the innovative ideas tend to find their way into startups so are not there to put the “big ideas” into practice at large corporations.

Anyway, forget about innovation, many large companies struggle to just get anything new online working at all.

Lets look at The Times - a well respected, quality, media brand (UK) (and part of the News International stable of media organisations). They currently make money from travel classified advertising (along, obviously, with other income sources).

We know there is a battle going on with advertising revenue….

“Between 20 and 100 additional online users are needed because the revenue per reader for a newspaper website is far less than the equivalent figure earned by a print edition, even though online advertising is booming.

“As more and more people shift their news reading from print to online, the newspaper industry must dramatically increase its online advertising revenues or die,” said Vincent Crosbie, a senior associate at American media strategist Borrell Associates.”

[Guardian, 2006]

So what have the Times got, online, to replace existing income their offline travel classified advertising?

They have launched a new online travel classifieds directory…. OK - not innovative…. but perhaps they can execute it well.

Technically, this directory is powered by the AdTarget classified ad system from adprecision. Adprecision commercial Director Alasdair Cross said of the partnership “News International owns some of the most valuable and popular websites in the UK and we’re delighted that they have chosen our technology to power their travel search and contextual advertising” (see press release)

OK - so lets do a search for travel to London….

Well I suppose, on a global scale, Falmouth is fairly close to London….. but its not exactly a direct match. Lets try something else, perhaps the directory is better for UK people travelling abroad…. so lets search for Spain

Ah - those offers looks interesting - lets take a look

Ummm - not a great deal of detail to entice me to click through….. but perhaps I will anyway…

Oh dear….. not sure I really wanted to go to buy a luxury log cabin! (You can see the mistake - this website looks like an accommodation provider - and they have the words “spanish agent” in the top left).

Things to fix
The issue with their new solution is a data one…. how do you launch a brand new system, without advertisers, but make it sensible enough that users who find their way there may actually find something useful. Here are my top fixes:

• Rather than return bad results - return no results….. and perhaps a mention that you can advertise there.
• An alternative to returning no results - howabout backfilling with product offers from 3rd parties. There are many travel meta-search companies who would jump at the chance of being RON advertising for random travel keywords. They could supply products etc that would nicely fit in with the rest of the site.
• That generic “world map” image is awful. Even a “blank gap” is better than that.
• Get a new head of advert quality control. This directory should not be public in this state.

I still think the Travel Mail are ahead in the travel newspaper stakes!

Yesterday Yen Lee, from Uptake (the travel search engine formerly known as Kango), stated (as quoted by Travolution)

“What’s surprised me is that when there are so many really strong brands in Europe, we’ve spent 80% of today talking about price. People don’t go to Barcelona because it’s cheap. They go because of what they can do there. Think more about the experience, rather than the cost.” 

[Travolution Summit 2008, London]

Jo Buhler, in a comment on the Travolution blog, replied

“Amen to that, Yen!
It’s the industry that keeps shooting itself into its collective foot with this price focus, which has dominated the discussion since day one of online travel and then being surprised at the resulting mass media coverage that, of course, hammered away at this as well. When does the smart benefit emphasizing marketing finally kick in……?”

Yeah I am not going to get into a big “price vs benefits” discussion - but I thought I would highlight an economic theory that relates to this - and explains why price is so important. The theory is called price disperson.

Price dispersion is variation in prices across sellers of the same item, holding fixed the item’s characteristics. If price dispersion didn’t exist (and everyone sold at the same price) then there would be no reason to comparison shop and consumers would always buy from the same places, and agents profits would stagnate. New online entrants would also find it difficult to break into a market.

i.e. suppliers create price instability on purpose - and actually this benefits both the “agent” and the supplier. So lets stop worrying about it and get on with making great products, websites and systems!

In conclusion, actually these price differences are fairly fundamental so the successful operation of the travel industry.

And before anyone thinks I have suddenly become an academic (!) I am “borrowing” concepts from this article on Slate. Thanks should go to Hal Varian (an economist at U.C Berkeley) for these findings. Should I stick to technology? Umm.

A few weeks ago I read an interesting opinion piece in the New Media Age (a UK industry news magazine for web agency types).

In the article, David White, Head of European Operations at Efficient Frontier, made some well made comments about how search marketing is executed:

“In an attempt to optimise bid positions, many agencies have huge teams of people, both on and offshore, using spreadsheets and pivot tables to manually analyse keyword positions”

Yes.

“This is a very tedious job, it’s time-consuming, boring, complicated and very easy to get wrong. So it’s little surprise that these organisations are enduring record levels of staff churn”

He concludes (after further thoughts which are worth a read, available in the original article)

“Search marketing is now so complex it’s akin to the financial markets and, as a result, its experts are market analysts, not marketers. It’s the mathematical experts who will create the highly complex pay-per-click campaigns that are required to deliver incremental value”

I absolutely agree 100%.

I remember about 6 years ago (end of 2002) working for a client (a hotel distribution dot com no longer trading - they sold out to another hotel distribution company a while back - hence I am able to recount this story!).

My brief was to create reporting systems and put in place a pay per click campaign in 7 different European languages…. across what was then Overture, eSpotting and some other “odds and ends” of PPC opportunities. The budget for the campaign was “multi million Euros”. (The assumption was we would get the money back…. rather than it being pure spend - hence a budget is fairly meaningless)

Being a technical person rather than a marketing guy, my initial reaction was that we needed to build a bid management system…. because I realised that we had too much data to handle “humanely”. (yeah I meant that!). We were managing several hundred thousand search terms per engine - and were advertising, across all languages and marketplaces, across 7 or so engines. Yikes.

I built a system that basically merged data available from the PPC engines with subsequent conversion data coming from our booking system. For example I would know that London would convert differently to Manchester…. but that a Manchester hotel booking wouldn’t be worth as much as London…. so the system would devise what we should bid in order to attain a certain revenue projection. Mind you, we still had to edit bid prices by hand in the PPC engines…. which was pretty much what I spent all day doing.

We were also looking at merchant model vs reservation model percentages….. as if you could find some cities that would have a higher proportion of hotels that we sold “upfront” to consumers… that money would be in the bank before we had to pay for the search engine advertising bill… hence would generate positive cash flow. Our analysis model also took into account aspects such as different commission collection percentages for different cities… some cities we struggled, on reservation model bookings, to collect what was owed to us!

Actually, what I have written above is what should have happened.

What really happened is that the director of marketing person (the client) wanted me to quit development on the bid system…. and go a “marketing lead” route…. they kept on saying “just get the search terms up….. we will sort it all out later”.

In the end that is exactly what we did…. the terms went up…. money started flying out…. bookings started flying in…. and the only analysis we had was a weekly excel document with the headline numbers. On some weeks we “won” other weeks we lost badly… but we had no idea what was working and what wasn’t.

My work ceased with them. Now I won’t do any PPC unless someone does it mathematically….. (actually I don’t really do PPC work now!)

If I were working in a travel company, if you have a web savvy financial controller - I would prefer to give the PPC marketing to them rather than to a marketing person…. I expect you would get more success with it.

p.s. I have worked for at least 4 hotel booking distribution companies or big hotel agencies…. unless you know me personally - you probably will not be able to guess which one I am talking about…. so don’t jump to conclusions!

Most press attention seems to be given to large M&A activity in the travel sector….. but what is it like at the smaller end of the market?

Today I was looking in a public database of UK web design companies for sale. I tend to look at the profiles because I am intrigued at what different companies have as turnover and order conversion - both statistics that I use to benchmark my own company. For example, today I found this gem of a quote on a listing for a London based web design agency for sale:

“The company currently writes approximately £2million in qualified web design proposals each year, winning approximately 12% of business. The vendor believes that the right partner could quite easily transform the conversion rate towards 40%-50% quite easily as they will be able to exploit opportunities that the vendor has not been able to (in many cases the company makes final supplier selection shortlists)”

Umm…. that is interesting. I know what my pitch conversion rate is…. hence this kind of statistic is gold dust to me.

Anyway, on my regular read, I found a company for sale that specialises in travel ecommerce and travel technology consulting.

Here is their summary listing:

Asking price: £485,000 (approximately 1 million USD)
Sales revenue: £800,000
Years established: 8
Employees: 14
Reasons for selling: The current majority shareholder is looking to exit the business
Website: Ellion.co.uk

Ellion have published case studies from work undertaken on behalf of Haven Holidays, Butlins, Bourne Leisure, Warner and HF holidays. They also have a suite of solutions devised for the travel sector including data warehousing (Trooper), a browser based parks information system (PINS) and a contact management system (PROCON).

The are also the company that devised the GoWander.com website - a social networking site for the Wanderlust travel magazine.

Go and read the business for sale profile yourself

Before anyone asks - I have no knowledge as to why Ellion maybe for sale and am not associated with them. I am writing about it here because most subscribers are in the travel or travel technology sector and would be interested. Maybe even one of my blog subscribers would be keen on buying them?

As has been widely published, Microsoft has purchased Farecast for a reported 115 million USD. The acquisition (but not the price) is confirmed by a post on the Farecast blog.

“We’re excited to confirm that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft! This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers.  We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come.  On behalf of the Farecast team, thank you.”

Why this acquisition makes sense (to Microsoft)
To answer this question we firstly need to look at what the Farecast system is about:

• A system containing 13 billion airfares (mainly US, but has some US to Europe, Mexico, Caribbean and Canada routes)
• Helps consumers determine when would be a good time to buy a flight - as Farecast predicts whether the flight price is likely to go up or down in the near future (so nicely messes up airline yield management systems by using yield management on the consumer side - a poacher turned gamekeeper approach)

The approach that Farecast uses is based on predictive data mining. From the Farecast website….

How does Fare Guard Work?
Fare Guard is powered by Farecast’s patented and revolutionary predictive data mining technology. There are three main components to Farecast’s predictive technology: Data collection and persistence, predictive modeling and simulation testing.

Data Collection and Persistence: Each day, Farecast systematically collects huge volumes of round trip airfare prices for a window of 90 departures dates and 7 corresponding return dates (see figure 2. below). This collection process occurs on each of Farecast’s 2000+ supported markets (e.g. LAX-JFK).

This means that for each departure and return date combination, Farecast will have measured the cheapest prices 90 times by the time of the departure. Farecast stores this data for all time. In fact, Farecast has collected over 150 billion airfare pricing observations to date! This data is used to build powerful predictive models that can predict the future direction of the cheapest prices in a market for specific departure/return dates.

 

 

Predictive Data Mining: Data Mining is the process of identifying novel, understandable, useful patterns in large, multivariate data stores. Using state-of-the-art techniques from the fields of machine learning and statistics, Farecast regularly builds predictive models that are created or trained using historical pricing data. Measurements of the raw historical data are engineered into features or attributes that are ultimately used to train a complex ensemble of predictive models.

 

 

Simulation Testing: How does Farecast know how well their technology works? Farecast uses sophisticated simulation technology that creates groups of virtual passengers with different purchasing profiles. Leveraging their vast store of persisted historical data, these virtual passengers arrive in the “past” and follow recommendations from the Farecast predictive models. Because the operation is run on historical data, the correctness of the prediction and profit or loss the consumer experience can be calculated instantly and tallied.

 

 

 

All in all, this is pretty impressive stuff. But why of interest to Microsoft? First, lets look at another ecommerce area where data mining is important.

The Netflix prize
Netflix are an online DVD rental company. One of their business challenges is improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.

Netflix have built their own system for making these predictions but they were curious to see if their system was as good as it could be. As a result they have put up a prize (1 million USD) for any individual who can develop a predictive system that is better than their own. This competition is being co-ordinated by the Nexflix Prize website. So far they have received 25,000 submissions and they have a leaderboard. No one has won the grand prize (yet).

What can we learn from the Netflix prize?
One of the key findings so far is that, as reported by Consulting assistant professor Anand Rajaraman from the computer science department at Stanford University, is that more (diverse, but related) data usually beats better algorithms.

i.e. entries that have in some way incorporated data from the Internet Movie Database and other external sources tend to come out better than those which are solely based on algorithms and the shared, central, dataset.

This is much like the real situation in travel ecommerce - as every large OTA has pretty much the same data nowadays….. hence are, in the real world, much like the academically accurate environment that Netflix have setup.

Further discussion on Anand’s blog post on the subject

Back to Farecast / Microsoft
OK - so what Microsoft now has is data. Lots of it (and more than their direct “web search” competitors). What will they do with it?

I expect that somehow this data will be used to inform a very good travel vertical search engine (after all, Farecast is a great search mechanism already, from the consumers perspective). This search functionality will compete much better with the likes of Google, Yahoo etc because, looking at the learnings from Netflix, we know that more data often makes better search (rather than better algorithms)

What will Google do? We know that Google has some nice extra data for travel already (they are not just an algorithm any more). (see my previous post about how Google maybe categorising all travel advertisers or my summary post about what Google is upto in travel, including how they now have flight and hotel data on their main search results)

However Google don’t, to my knowledge, have any accurate, live, fare data (and I have no knowledge!). Maybe they will buy Expedia after all!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the PCI standards required for storage and distribution of credit card data within large hotel distribution OTAs (Online Travel Agents) (see original article)

Anyway, last week I went to the 7th eTourism Futures forum at Bournemouth University - and stayed in a new Premier Inn hotel (Bournemouth East) (10th April). Not a bad hotel actually….. Normally I prefer any hotel owned by Accor (as I get to watch French television) but Premier Inn have Freeview…. an interesting dilemma.

One thing that struck me was that the credit card payment system (for entering in pin numbers) was in full view of the internal CCTV camera. Not only that, but the reception CCTV signal was broadcast, live, to a monitor in the public bar.

This means that any member of the public could, while waiting at the bar, see newly arriving hotel guests enter their pin numbers…. not exactly ideal. 

What does PCI say about CCTV cameras?
I couldn’t find anything specifically in the standard about recording PIN number entry probably because PCI doesn’t extend to that part of the process. However, I have found some interesting quotes on the web….

From Silicon.com 

Tesco - “Generally the customer will be standing in front of the PIN terminal so we don’t see that it poses a risk”

eh? So Tesco (a large supermarket chain) rely on good luck that PIN entry is obscured by someone between the camera and the PIN entry machine.  

British Retail Consortium -  described it as a form of “electronic shoulder-surfing” but said that retailers can minimise the risk by taking sensible precautions and positioning the PIN pads away from cameras

On the APACS (The UK payments association) website there is this PDF which contains the following advice:

Cameras must be fixed so that a customer’s PIN cannot be identified. Access to CCTV footage should be restricted to authorised staff

So Premier Inn….. I think you have some work to do! 

Next steps
I have completed a feedback card (at the hotel)….. lets see if I get any communication from Premier Inn. Apparently I was the first person to complain about this!

Google have a number of account managers who specialise in travel. One of their previous employees, on their public Linkedin profile, has the following:

• Senior account manager - Travel - For Google (January 2003 to September 2007) 
• Lead Relationship Manager for Expedia Inc
• Managed all aspects of the Expedia - Google relationship for Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Expedia Classic, and Expedia Corporate
• Work with different Expedia teams to build out an effective Advertising strategy on Google as well as partnership opportunities to help drive additional revenue to Expedia
• Coordinate efforts with Global teams to share US successes to all Google Account Managers who work with Expedia Inc Co’s
• Appointed Global Lead for Expedia relationship, spoke at Expedia’s Global Marketing Summit and held a Global workshop at Google’s International Travel Summit
• Built out the “Power 16″ marketing plan that is currently what Expedia’s entire Search Marketing program is based on 

That last point I find interesting. It would appear that Google have devised Expedia’s entire search marketing program (well that is what is says!). Yes I know that, if you spend enough as an advertiser, you get help….. but upgrading help into letting Google devise an entire search marketing plan is quite a bold commercial step.

If you want to find the profile yourself, Google it….

This particular individual, according to their profile, is no longer working for Google.

Read further coverage about Expedia / Google at the base of this post - Would your business cope if Google stopped sending you (free) traffic?