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EXPEDIA LAUNCHES MAJOR BRANDING AD CAMPAIGN

Manuevers Against Rivals With Best-Price Guarantee Strategy

January 17, 2006

QwikFIND ID: AAR31R

By Rich Thomaselli

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Online travel agent Expedia.com launches a national branding campaign this morning that ups the ante on its competitors: a best-price guarantee that offers consumers a $50 coupon for future travel if they find a better price elsewhere.

Expedia, which competes against Orbitz and Travelocity as well as airlines and hotel sites, is offering to meet and better any price on a variety of travel expenses.

The Bellevue, Wash., company said the best-price guarantee was part of three new consumer-centric initiatives, which include "Your Personal Trip Guide" and the "Expedia Promise."

New slogan
Interpublic Group of Cos.' Deutsch will handle the campaign, which includes TV, print and online components. All ads will feature the company's new slogan, "Enjoy your trip." Details of spend on the campaign are unknown. Expedia spent $90 million in 2005 on measured media, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

"We believe these new initiatives will give customers even more compelling reasons to book travel with us," Steven McArthur, president, North America Leisure Travel Group at Expedia, said in a statement.

Throwing down the gauntlet
Expedia, now in its 10th year, knocks heads not only with online competitors Orbitz and Travelocity, but with airlines and hotels as well.

The best-price guarantee is an online challenge thrown down by Expedia. If a customer finds a lower price online for the same trip -- whether that's airfare, hotel, vacation package, car rental, cruise or destination activity or service -- within 24 hours of booking at Expedia.com, Expedia will reimburse the difference and give the customer a $50 coupon for future travel.

Customer centricity
"This is the best and most comprehensive offering available anywhere in online travel," Sally McKenzie, senior VP-merchandising and retail operations at Expedia, said in a statement. "We are committed to giving our customers unparalleled travel selection, value and service. Customers making their travel plans through Expedia will now have even greater confidence that they are obtaining the best fares and room rates available -- all backed by a new guarantee."

Connecticut-based PhoCusWright, a travel-research company, estimated that online bookings approached 30% of the U.S. travel market in 2005 for a value of $65.4 billion. Expedia is the market leader, followed by Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline.

When Search Maps Your Privacy

Associated Press

SEATTLE -- The images are so detailed you can tell whether a neighbor's hedge was recently trimmed or whether the car parked in front of a favorite local eatery might belong to a friend.

Such views are available online for anyone to see from some of the biggest names on the internet, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The companies' newly evolving local search and mapping services, where the photographic images are typically rendered as search results, make it easier than ever to scout out everything from vacation destinations to a new hairdresser.

Never before have searchable databases of detailed pictures covering wide swaths of urban areas been readily available like this to the public. And that has privacy advocates worried about the risks of such picture perfect exposure to vulnerable citizens such as women in domestic violence shelters.

"I think there are going to be privacy issues, no doubt about it -- somebody's going to feel uncomfortable with it," said Charlene Li of Forrester Research. "So the question becomes, 'What are the tradeoffs? Is the value worth it?'"

Yes, according to research by Forrester.

Li said she's already seeing consumer interest, and she expects companies to continue to develop such tools because they see the potential for online advertising from local businesses who may not want to buy national online ads.

Microsoft, which late last year began offering detailed images of metropolitan areas taken from airplanes, said last week that it would team with Verizon Communications to distribute local business advertisements from Verizon's superpages.com on Microsoft's local search pages.

And Amazon, whose A9 subsidiary has since August offered street-level images taken from vans, says the main goal of its site is to help people find local businesses. The company's site currently lists images from two dozen U.S. cities.

The most detailed images available from Microsoft's service are currently only for some U.S. cities, and there are some satellite images of international locations. Google offers images from all over the world, but the amount of detail varies greatly depending on the location.

For example, users scouting out urban areas like Seattle or New York City can make out individual houses and buildings, while those living in Lander, Wyoming, see a much less detailed view with Google and only get a graphic map with Microsoft's service.

Google's service mostly gets its images from satellites, and while they're not nearly as detailed as those of Amazon or Microsoft, they are nevertheless good enough to recognize one's home.

John Hanke, a product director at Google, says the technology is popular for figuring out whether a vacation spot is all it's cracked up to be -- is that "beachfront" hotel really on the beach, or across the highway from the beach? -- and for house hunting.

Daniel DeConinck, an engineer and entrepreuner living in Toronto, used Google's site to find an accountant close to his house, and has since used it to scout out nearby bicycle shops and computer retailers. He thinks it has the potential to one day replace the local yellow pages.

"Anyone who I've shown Google Maps to, their draw just drops when they see that," he said. For her part, Li is somewhat skeptical that mom-and-pop shops will quickly get on board and make photo-enriched local search a big money-maker.

"I think it's going to be really slow to take off, just knowing small businesses," she said. "You're talking about a fundamental change in how they do business."

For now, however, many people appear to be visiting the fledgling offerings simply to satisfy their curiosity. Users who visit Microsoft's Windows Live Local often first type in a street address -- presumably their own house -- and then go searching for a landmark, like Seattle's Space Needle, said Justin Osmer, a Microsoft product manager.

A9's street-level views of some U.S. cities, meanwhile, include clear pictures of people and cars when they happen to be in the frame. The aim is to give people what A9 Vice President Barnaby Dorfman calls "a very human experience," similar to what you would see walking or driving down a street.

Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum says such images can potentially be used to track people who are vulnerable. She said A9 removed images of shelters upon her request and now gives people the option to removing their personal information from its directories.

She's hoping that such policies will become widespread. "I really think you should have the option to say, 'No. No, thanks,'" she said.

But the companies say that, so far, they have received few complaints. Hanke argues that some images available on Google's site are already available through local and federal government data, such as from the U.S. Geological Survey. But the government-supplied images aren't as well organized or easily accessible as those available commercially.

He also said that someone could learn much more by just walking down a street than by looking at Google's images.

Some foreign governments have complained of security concerns raised by the Google images. Hanke said the company has fielded concerns raised by some governments, but has not altered any images.

Osmer said Microsoft has altered some of its images, such as those of the White House, to address security concerns. None, he said, is close enough that you can recognize faces.

Lt. Paul Vernon with the Los Angeles Police Department said he hasn't heard of any law-enforcement officials expressing concern about such online images. In fact Vernon said, some police officers in Los Angeles have even found the sites to be helpful for quickly mapping out a location or scouting out an area where a crime has been suspected.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft all say they are working to expand their offerings, and perhaps even add other image-based search tools.

Osmer said Microsoft wouldn't rule out showing live aerial images -- instead of the static ones, often months old, that currently populate the sites -- for things like the Super Bowl or traffic navigation.

He also said it's hard to say whether Microsoft would offer more detailed views later on. "I don't think we'll get to the point where you can zoom in and see the shoelaces on someone's shoe, but maybe it would make sense to get a close view to read a sign or navigate a space," he said.

It's A Wrap!

For the final final, comScore Networks just released holiday season and annual online spending figures for full year 2005, concluding that total Internet spending for the full year, including travel, reached $143.2 billion, up 22 percent over the $117.2 billion spent online in 2004.  

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said "... this was clearly another very strong year for e-commerce.... a 24 percent annual increase in online spending represents more than a full percentage point of consumers' expenditures, clearly showing that the traditional metric alone, retail same-store sales, is no longer sufficient to paint an accurate picture of trends in consumer spending."    

Online non-travel spending during the 2005 holiday season  (November 1 through December 31, 2005) totaled $19.6 billion, representing a 25-percent increase over the corresponding period in 2004.  Online travel spending generated an additional $8.6 billion during November and December.  

Online Consumer Spending ($ Billions)
	2004	2005	%Chg 2005vs2004
Holiday Season (Nov & Dec)
Non-Travel (Retail)	$15.7	$19.6	25%
Travel	$7.4	$8.6	16%
Total	$23.1	$28.2	22%
Full Year
Non-Travel (Retail)	$66.5	$82.3	24%
Travel	$50.7	$60.9	20%
Total	$117.2	$143.2	22%
Source: comScore Networks Excludes auctions and large corporate purchases

 

Yahoo! Runs YellowPages.com Listings

YELLOWPAGES.COM AND YAHOO! ON FRIDAY announced a deal that gives YellowPages' advertisers placement throughout Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Yellow Pages sites. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Yellowpages.com, a joint venture between AT&T Corp. and BellSouth Corp., has similar distribution deals with AOL Yellow Pages and InfoSpace's Switchboard, which specializes in local online advertising.

Map makers scurry along technology's new roads

SECAUCUS, N.J. — As Chris Arcari gets off the New Jersey Turnpike's brand new Exit 15X, green arrows join on a flat-screen monitor inside his sport utility vehicle to form the beginnings of the ramp's existence on a digital map.

In a white Ford Escape fitted with a video camera, a Global Positioning System [GPS] receiver and a laptop, Mr. Arcari and partner Rob Ditko work to maintain the freshness and accuracy of mapping databases on which millions rely. One wrong turn and, well, you get the picture.

As mapping technologies proliferate on websites, in mobile devices and inside automobiles, the work of these modern cartographers is essential.

During their December excursion off Exit 15X, the two men discover three new streets and a delivery access road. "Times like these, we just explore," Mr. Arcari says as he passes a new commuter rail station responsible for the new streets. "It's our version of finding a brave new world. We'll drive it until it connects to some point [already] in the database."

Riding shotgun, Ditko uses his pen tablet to denote an overpass, which appears as brackets on the display above the four-wheel-drive vehicle's gear shift. Later, he writes in the name of a new street, South Road.

Information gleaned from the green arrows, hand markings and video images ultimately go into databases maintained by Chicago-based Navteq Corp. and sent quarterly to such Internet mapping providers as America On-line Inc.'s MapQuest, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and in-car navigation developers such as TomTom International BV.

Developers of the map applications can then apply their own touches, such that directions offered by Yahoo between the same two points may differ from MapQuest's, even though both use the same data from Navteq and its main competitor, Netherlands-based Tele Atlas NV.

"Users even five years ago were still just amazed you can get driving directions from point A to point B," says Jeremy Kreitler, Yahoo's senior product manager for maps. "They were okay if every once in a while, [the directions] took you down the wrong street or didn't know about a new housing development."

Since then, on-line maps have come a long way.

No longer satisfied with driving directions, consumers are also demanding information on a neighbourhood's restaurants, public transportation options and even real-time traffic conditions. People generate maps on mobile devices for hikes and errands, and they want maps for locations outside North America and Western Europe, too, where coverage can be spotty.

All that translates into greater demand on Navteq and Tele Atlas to make their databases even more accurate and complete.

Tele Atlas consults more than 40,000 sources, including state and local transportation departments, planning boards and motor vehicle agencies. Field analysts also monitor county growth rates, housing construction data and aerial images.

Where maps are already available from a reliable source -- an aerial image, a government agency, perhaps a utility company -- Tele Atlas will use that. But where there are discrepancies, Mr. Benson says, the company often sends a van with a driver and a half-dozen video cameras from which computers extract key information.

Tele Atlas spends tens of millions of dollars each year in North America alone to freshen its databases, currently more than 12 trillion bytes in size.

Navteq employs 514 field analysts in North America and Europe. They drove more than 5.6 million kilometres combined in 2004.

"It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge," says John MacLeod, Navteq's executive vice-president for global marketing and strategy. "You spend a year painting it and you have to start over again. It's a never-ending challenge."

Both companies have been digitizing maps for about two decades, but only recently have GPS units, video cameras and laptops become central to the task. "Six or seven years ago," Mr. Ditko said, "we were writing on paper plots."

Re: [traveling online] Mining Local Data for the Digital Maps Race

Digital Maps Going Beyond the Roads

By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- You can pull up satellite and aerial images, discover neighborhood jazz clubs and check the latest traffic conditions. You can even get some rail schedules and, hopefully one day, tips on foot and bike trails through parks.

Digital maps produce so much more than driving directions these days.

And as features get added, mapping companies are having to build better technologies and find better sources of data - including their own users.

Microsoft Corp. is working on a mechanism that would have avid mountain bikers, for example, collectively plot good trails. Yahoo Inc. is appealing to its users to add information on local businesses and places of interest. Yahoo even recently bought Upcoming.org, a collaborative calendar of events.

"More and more data has to become available to provide these kinds of great offerings," said Jeremy Kreitler, Yahoo's senior product manager for maps. "These kinds of information will come from people around local areas contributing."

Online mapping is hot and highly competitive. Nielsen/NetRatings recorded a 28 percent jump in visitors this year, with one-third of Web users visiting at least one mapping site in November.

Microsoft, Yahoo, MapQuest and Google Inc. get their primary data from two companies, Navteq Corp. and Tele Atlas NV, both of which have been aggressively canvassing the nation's highways and byways to keep their databases complete and accurate.

Data companies are typically paid for each map consumers generate. Christian Dwyer, MapQuest's director of operations, estimates that driving directions cost his company a penny apiece and a static map much less - expenses recouped through sales of ads displayed at the site.

To set themselves apart, mapping providers must decide individually which of the various attributes provided by Navteq and Tele Atlas to emphasize: Is speed limit more important than distance? Would it make sense to take a highway for just one exit?

MapQuest, for instance, assigns scores to various route alternatives based on number of turns, distance and other factors and, unless you tell its software engine to avoid all highways, it presents the route with the lowest score.

Mapping companies also must decide how much information to provide. Zoom out, and data on local streets only clutter the map even if the information is readily available.

Yahoo employs consumer focus groups to help it figure out the proper balance. It also dispatches motorist guinea pigs onto the road with driving directions, while employees tag along and watch how they fare.

"This is where it's more art than science," Kreitler said.

The basics have changed little since MapQuest's site opened nearly a decade ago, on Feb. 5, 1996. Where mapping providers differentiate themselves, then, is in the distinct features they offer.

Yahoo provides information on subway stations and is testing multiple-point directions, in case someone wants to stop off to buy a gift on the way to a friend's. Yahoo, along with Microsoft, also provides real-time traffic information for some cities.

Google and Microsoft have satellite imagery from private and government sources. Microsoft also is testing aerial, bird's-eye-view images and is working to create 3-D maps over Web browsers (Google does these through free software called Google Earth.)

The mapping providers also are working to get their products on mobile devices. And to make their services more useful, they've been merging maps with data on local businesses like shops, restaurants and theaters.

All this will require data well beyond what Navteq and Tele Atlas alone can provide.

Microsoft already has bought aerial images from a company called Pictometry International Corp., which provides bird's eye views, taken at 45 degree angles from four directions. As well, Microsoft is shopping around for altitude data required to create models of city buildings in 3-D.

And as Microsoft tries to fill in coverage gaps outside North America and Western Europe, it is looking for potential vendors in China, Japan and other countries, said Tom Bailey, director of marketing for Microsoft's mapping products.

Beyond that, there's talk of making maps friendlier to those who don't drive.

Google recently unveiled a prototype of its Transit Trip Planner. The tool checks bus and subway schedules for Portland, Ore., to plot the best itinerary. Google promises to add other cities, but offers no timetable.

Expanding the planner nationwide will be tough, though.

MapQuest, which Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit bought in 2000, has considered such an offering for five years but has yet to assemble all the required subway, bus, train and taxi data or develop the right software to make sense of them all, said James Greiner, MapQuest's director of marketing.

Also a big challenge is creating directions for walking or biking. Even though the services are extending their offerings to wireless devices, mobile maps are geared toward driving.

It's simple to tell the computer that it's OK to travel both directions along a one-way street and to avoid highways; more difficult is programming the fact that you can cut through a park or along a path that may connect two dead-end streets.

But engineers still have much work to do on just the driving directions, said Bret Taylor, who oversees Google's mapping products.

For instance, exit numbers are important in some regions, but not in California, where they have been introduced gradually, Taylor said. The challenge, he said, is to figure out what's important where and to tailor directions accordingly.

"Our long-term goal is to have our product give directions that are as good as the taxi driver," he said. "Certainly it's not there yet."

---

Anick Jesdanun can be reached at netwriter(at)ap.org

On 12/30/05, andrew <noreply-comment@blogger.com> wrote:

Associated Press
In the arms race for digital map supremacy, Internet users are now becoming important tools for media firms. Yahoo!, for example, has directly appealed to its users to help them add local business information to its mapping services. Microsoft is asking mountain bikers to help them plot the best trails through parks. As more and more data is becoming available to digital map providers, consumer usage of digital maps seems to be increasing concurrently. According to audience measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, visitors to online maps increased 28 percent this year. In its article about the hot and competitive digital mapping business, the Associated Press compares the Web's most popular offerings from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and MapQuest, revealing the various private and government sources they license their data from. - Read the whole story...

--
Posted by andrew to traveling online at 12/30/2005 11:53:30 AM