“The days of the simple online flight-booking engine are numbered”

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Published: 24 Feb 2009

SITA has stated that with the rise of social networking over the Internet the days of the simple online flight-booking engine are numbered.

"Web 2.0 technologies will transform airline websites into travel planning portals that go far beyond date and location. By making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to provide real-time content from diverse sources, Web 2.0 technologies meet travellers' demands for greater information and personalisation," said Jim Peters, CTO, SITA, as the company marked its 60th anniversary with a look at how technology will change the face of air travel over the next five years.

"In the near future when a customer makes a booking, the airline website could extract the passenger's preferences from its frequent flyer programme, combine it with external content from travel web sites so that hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions can be overlaid on a Google map and the traveller can then take a virtual sight-seeing tour and be linked in with friends' travel plans."

SITA forecasts that mobile devices are about to have the same impact on the passenger journey as the jet engine did 50 years ago.

"Mobile phones are fast becoming access points to online services and over 90% of passengers carry them. Digitally-equipped passengers will access all their travel needs while on the move including purchasing airline tickets and checking-in. Mobile boarding passes could save the industry $500 million as we move towards paperless travel," said Peters.

Doing it right

Yelp Can Be Profitable by 2010 Even as Sales Slow, CEO Says 

By Joseph Galante

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Yelp Inc., the Internet site where consumers read and write reviews of local businesses, will still be able to turn a profit even as advertising revenue growth slows, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Stoppelman said.

Yelp's diverse group of local advertisers have shielded it from the economic slump and the site can still be profitable by late 2010, Stoppelman said yesterday in an interview.

"As we're trying to sell to high-end restaurants, that's become more difficult," Stoppelman said. "But as we're trying to sell to auto mechanics, that hasn't necessarily become more difficult because people still need to get their car fixed."

Yelp has Web sites for more than 20 U.S. cities and is expanding into the U.K. and Canada. Users rate local businesses on a five-star scale and post comments. The site competes with online directories such as IAC/InterActiveCorp's Citysearch, Zagat.com and YellowPages.com.

Restaurants account for about 30 percent of Yelp's advertising customers, Stoppelman said. Businesses can sponsor their pages and write back to users. They can also pay to be listed at the top of search results and highlight their favorite user review.

The East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper based in Emeryville, California, reported this week that of dozens of businesses it contacted over several months, six said Yelp salespeople had offered to remove negative reviews from the site if they bought ads.

The allegations are "demonstrably false," Stoppelman said yesterday. It's against company policy to offer such deals and no salesperson has the authority to pull reviews, he said.

BlackBerry Application

Yelp, which has developed an application for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, is working to create a similar program for Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry smart phone, Stoppelman said. That may be ready this year, he said.

Yelp was founded by Stoppelman and Russel Simmons with a $1 million investment from Max Levchin, who co-founded EBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, where Stoppelman was vice president of engineering.

Yelp has raised $31 million in funding and was valued at $215 million after a $15 million investment last year by DAG Ventures, Stoppelman said. Bessemer Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital also own part of the company.

Even amid the economic slump, Yelp hasn't cut jobs. Stoppelman said the company has no plans to seek further investment.

"We feel we can get to profitability on current cash," he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco atjgalante3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 20, 2009 00:01 EST

Fly me to the moon

Travelzoo's Fly.com Launches Yet Another Travel Search Aggregator

Posted at Techcrunch: 15 Feb 2009 05:00 PM PST

Publicly traded travel site Travelzoo has launched the beta version of its new comprehensive airfare search engine, Fly.com. At first glance, Fly.com is a Kayak-look alike (except that Fly.com searches are limited to airfares only). The two sites offer virtually the same search options, except that Fly.com's price comparison sites are limited to Priceline and Hotwire, whereas Kayak offers comparison searches on Priceline, Hotwire, Expedia, Travelocity and Airfare.com

What differentiates Fly.com from Kayak is the way in which a user can see the listed flight information. Fly.com includes a summary view, where each airline's lowest and highest prices is listed. The user can then click on the airline to see the flight times and ranges. Also, the user can see the economy, business and first-class prices in one search. And Fly.com's results include "Why Me?" boxes, which inform travelers about amenities on a specific route or airline. For example, a "Why Me?" box attached to Virgin Airlines informs the user about Virgin's in-flight entertainment options. While some of these may be innovative, it's doubtful that these differentiators will be enough to drive people away from a more comprehensive site, like Kayak, where a user can also search for rental cars, hotels and package vacations. That said, Fly.com does seem to have at least a few advantages - for one the site lists American Airlines flight options, whereas the airline company ditched its listings on Kayak. Update: American actuallyreturned to Kayak in October.

Travelzoo created buzz around its $1.8 million purchase of the domain "Fly.com" in January. Undoubtedly, Fly.com is a highly desirable domain name, but history has dictated that success does not necessarily correlate with a good name (just take a look at the Pets.com fiasco). Hopefully, Fly.com can figure out a way to truly stand out in the sea of travel search engines.

a digital list of their accomplishments

Diddit: A Social To-Do List For Your Life

Posted: 11 Feb 2009 06:00 PM PST

Diddit, a new site launching today to the public, is looking to help you check off all the things you've done with your life, and discover new things that you'd like to do. The site allows users to browse through thousands of activities in categories ranging from the bars you've visited to "Bizarre Retro Candies" you've eaten at one time or another. To coincide with the launch, Ludic Labs, the company behind Diddt, has also announced that it has closed a $5 million funding round led by Accel Partners with KPG Ventures also participating.

At first glance, the site seems a little pointless - I don't particularly care if my friends know that I've eaten Pop Rocks during my lifetime or that I've visited AT&T park (though I should note that I had similar thoughts when I first discovered Twitter). But after exploring the site a little more thoroughly, I can see why it might become very addictive.

For one, it's a great place to look if you're trying to think of things to do during a day trip or a night out on the town. Interested in California's Gold Rush? Check out the list of historic museums, parks, and landmarks that focus on just that. Want to experience Polynesian culture in the San Francisco Bay Area? They've got a list for that too.

But the site isn't just focused on destinations - it has sections for just about everything you could have experienced, including books, movies, games, and foods. If you've discovered a new author you're interested in, there's a decent chance you'll be able to find a collection of their best works, along with reviews from other users.

Every item in a list - be it a book or an amusement park - has its own profile, which offers a listing of user reviews, ratings, and other essential information (the profiles are very similar to those seen on Yelp). And while today is the site's first official unveiling, it has quietly built up a user-base of 10,000 who have shared 750,000 items, so there's plenty to read about.

Diddit shares many features in common with a number of other sites (for example, Yelp offers a huge library of user reviews and lists, as does Amazon). But its broad scope and already-thriving community may help it get a foothold, especially if it can acquire dedicated users who genuinely care about building up a list of their accomplishments (diddits) and To-Dos (wannados).

Music Company Expands Event-Marketing Efforts Via Partnership With Starwood Hotels

Live Nation Aspires to Be One-Stop Shop for Sponsors

by Andrew Hampp Published: February 05, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The NFL, MLB and Live Nation? The world's largest concert promoter wants to be mentioned in the same breath as any sports league when marketers plot their event sponsorships.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts will be the official hotel partner for select Live Nation venues.

In recent months, the music company has been quickly consolidating its properties to provide sponsors the largest possible audiences at concerts, on the web and, now, in hotels, through a new partnership with Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

Starwood, a hospitality group that includes the Westin, Sheraton and W Hotels, will be the official hotel partner for select Live Nation venues, including the House of Blues clubs, offering Starwood preferred-guest members special ticket offers, premium seats and exclusive artist experiences. Live Nation will also encourage its artists to stay in Starwood hotels while they're in town. (Note to fans: Stalking your favorite singer just got easier.)

Merger talks with Ticketmaster
Starwood will sponsor a special "Where to Stay" feature on LiveNation.com, the company's newly revamped ticketing site, originally designed to compete with Ticketmaster but now the subject of possible-merger talks.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 4 that executives at Live Nation and Ticketmaster were close to reaching a merger agreement that would give Live Nation control of ticketing for all Ticketmaster concerts, or 70% of the concert-ticket market, according to analyst estimates. Live Nation executives declined to comment.

A merger would face increased scrutiny under the Obama administration, given Ticketmaster's existing ownership of nearly three-quarters of the concert market. The combined corporation, to be called Live Nation Ticketmaster, received a neutral review from Benjamin Mogil, a media analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners in San Francisco, who called the deal "positive" for Live Nation.

Growing sponsorship branch
Live Nation's corporate mantra states that artists used to use their tours to promote albums, but now they use their albums to promote their tours. That's where the company's growing sponsorship branch comes in.

Russell Wallach, Live Nation's president of North American Alliances, told Ad Age the day before the merger rumors circulated that Live Nation's goal is to become the one-stop shop for event-marketing dollars. "I look at every league and believe no one can replicate the model we have in owning tickets, relationship with artists, owning venues and our digital assets combined," he said.

In the past year, that positioning has started to pay off for Live Nation, which saw a 12.5% year-over-year increase in sponsorship dollars to $74.8 million during the third quarter of 2008. Total attendance during that quarter was also up 5.7% to 17.5 million people, a sign that the looming recession had little effect on the summer concert season.

Anchoring Live Nation's summer sponsorships was Burger King, which teamed up with Live Nation for the Jonas Brothers tour to promote the launch of its apple fries. Not only did the fast feeder sponsor on-site product sampling, exclusive content and online tie-ins, it also produced a viral video halfway through the tour's run that has since generated more than 1 million hits on YouTube.

Multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal
A similar formula will be applied to the Starwood partnership, which Gretchen Kloke, the hotel company's senior director-global loyalty marketing, described as a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal. "Live Nation opens up the doors for us to get in front of millions of concertgoers in their venues and websites," she said.

Starwood will also be able to track any new revenue that comes into its hotels on a market-specific basis as a direct result of its Live Nation partnership, the key metric the marketer will use to determine the new deal's success. "The biggest thing for us is how our members will respond to the offerings we provide," Ms. Kloke said.

Live Nation is showing no signs of slowing its expansion: It also announced a new partnership with CBS Radio this week. Under the new pact, both companies will jointly produce live concerts and experiential events at CBS Radio stations and markets, giving CBS a crack at the growing number of marketers that advertise at Live Nation events. Live Nation's sponsors grew to 770 in the third quarter of last year from 719 in the same period in 2007.

"For many years we have enjoyed a very successful relationship with Live Nation, helping us grow our radio shows across the country into some of the biggest events of the year," CBS Radio CEO Dan Mason said in a statement. "With their national platform of venues and their team of talented promoters and marketers, we feel we will be able to expand the breadth of radio shows we offer on-site, on-air and online in a substantive way over the course of this agreement."

Venture into music distribution
Up next for Live Nation is its first venture into music distribution. It has successfully wooed artists such as Shakira, Madonna and Nickelback out of their major-label recording contracts into "360 deals," which give Live Nation the rights to everything from the artist's merchandise to tickets to new albums. Mr. Wallach said he expects to announce the first album to be distributed by Live Nation in the coming months, and he is already speaking with package-goods marketers to sponsor the new kind of album launch.

"We want to see how we can distribute music globally, selling music in locations from Maine to India," he said.

Travel Wiki

Start up AdventureDrop is launching what seems to be a very, very rough beta version of its wiki-based travel portal focused on providing an easy way to find adventure travel by location and activity. The site's wiki platform allows others to edit, add and share adventures with the community.

AdventureDrop currently only features somewhat dull U.S. travel adventures. For example, if you do a search for travel in a jungle, most of the locations that appear are in the U.S., including the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area in Texas and the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River in New York. And the user rating for both of these "top jungle adventures" is four out of five stars. Also, the site doesn't list providers for all the activities.

If AdventureDrop goes global and can hone its searches, it has the potential to be a nifty resource for those wanting to find the ultimate trip involving scuba diving, mountain climbing or a hot air balloon. And the site has a few innovative features, including allowing users to create customized itineraries, the ability to rate adventure travel spots and form groups based on a particular adventure travel activity.

No doubt, the site needs some work. But if it can expand its global reach and use the user generated concept to its advantage, it could give National Geographic's Adventure Travel Portal a run for its money.

TVtrip Raises €7 Million More For Hotel Video Reviews

Posted: 02 Feb 2009 03:41 AM PST

Paris-based TVtrip has scored €7 million (nearly $9 million) in venture capital funding on top of its previous $4.8 million Series A round, bringing the total of capital invested in the company up to a healthy $13.8 million (excluding the undisclosed angel funding the company raised to get started). Previous investors Balderton Capital and Partech International participated in the second round and were joined by AGF Private Equity this time.

TVtrip is essentially a guide for hotels from around the globe, but centered around video reviews and enhanced with third-party reviews from sites like HotelClub and Venere. Visitors are offered unbiased, professionally produced video reviews for hotels and get to book straight away through affiliate partnerships with booking sites.

So far, the guide covers 157 destinations and 2900 hotels worldwide, and has built up a directory of about 9800 videos.

The service's main selling point in my opinion is the rich video player, which lets you jump to different rooms from one and the same hotel, offers a direct booking link, lets you view the location on a map inside the interface, switch to a photo gallery, etc.

Ever since TVtrip launched, I've been wondering why they didn't offer a way for people to embed / share videos. I used to think TVtrip simply wanted to position itself as the premier destination site for video reviews for hotels, without the option to share its content on other places, but I was wrong. Co-founder and CMO Marc Pfohl tells me they did actually share embedding functionality on demand, and that they will be opening up more when they launch their next version, due March 10. The reason it took so long, he says, is because they wanted to be able to track where the videos appear with great detail.

TVtrip was founded by 4 ex-managers of Expedia Europe and backed by former Expedia CEO. The startup faces competition from (the equally French) Trivop, Tripr.tv,Travelmedia, Hotelly and Travelistic.

Difference marketing

Vegas Turns to Reality Show Amid Recession

Ditches 'What Happens' Campaign, Takes Townspeople on Vacation and Posts Video YouTube

By Natalie Zmuda 

Published: January 29, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" certainly seemed ready-made for reality TV. But it's a new campaign, "Take a break USA," that is getting star treatment.

As winners of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority contest, the residents of the rural outpost of Cranfills Gap, Texas, were greeted in Vegas by 'The King.'

The popular branding campaign that promoted Sin City as a high-rolling destination where anything can happen has been shelved in favor of a more recession-proof strategy. The "Take a break USA" campaign was quickly developed last fall when it became clear the recession would take a dire toll on the travel industry.

"It is a direct response to how the economy is affecting people's use of discretionary dollars and the impact on travel budgets," said Terry Jicinsky, senior VP-marketing at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. "We're very focused on helping people eliminate the hesitation they have. ... Many of the messages received through the campaign are about impromptu travel."

Dwindling revenue
Mr. Jicinsky said he hopes the campaign, which is rolling out now and will run through at least March, will lead to short-term visits and stem fast-dwindling revenue in the city. It replaces R&R Partners' first effort to address the economic uncertainty, a short-lived campaign called "Crazy times call for crazy fun," which launched in June. Preliminary figures for 2008 show a 4% decline in visitors and a 4.5% decline in hotel occupancy in the city. Both figures had been relatively flat before taking a nosedive in the fall, Mr. Jicinsky said.

With research showing that consumers believed Las Vegas was grinding to a halt -- media reports have highlighted the slowdown in new construction, and travel agents are offering steep discounts -- R&R Partners, the visitors authority's creative agency, set out to show consumers that simply isn't the case.

"Consumers wanted to know that Vegas was alive and vibrant and that they'd have the same experience as the last time they were there," said Rob Dondero, exec VP at R&R Partners.

To that end, the organization wanted a campaign that would be more retail-oriented, promoting local attractions and accommodations without focusing on discounted prices. "If you use price to market a destination and prices go up, the campaign you used previously works against you," Mr. Jicinsky said. "It's one of the things that people who market destinations are very conscious of."

Appealing to cash-strapped consumers
The concept of documenting a citywide vacation for one small, quintessential American town of hardworking, deserving individuals was settled on as a way to appeal to cash-strapped, stressed-out consumers. Some 125 towns were considered, as the agency looked for a cross section of residents that would match the diverse array of visitors Las Vegas attracts. After narrowing down their choices, agency execs visited several towns and began identifying potential storylines.

Cranfills Gap, a rural outpost some 100 miles southwest of Dallas, was eventually chosen. Roughly one-third of the city's 350 residents took a five-day trip to Las Vegas in December, agreeing to let the agency chronicle their adventures reality-TV-style.

The residents were organized into groups such as the "Vegas Vixens" and "The Wild Bunch," and itineraries were created accordingly. But there were still some surprises along the way, Mr. Dondero said. One couple got engaged during dinner early on in the week, and an 81-year-old woman decided she simply had to go skydiving.

Online component
An online component of the campaign features those itineraries so other visitors can recreate the experiences. Through a partnership with YouTube, about a dozen webisodes are being broadcast atvisitlasvegas.com and youtube.com/lasvegas.

The partnership with YouTube is a first for the visitors authority, Mr. Jicinsky said. He said he believes that social media and viral marketing are little-utilized channels that destination marketers should be looking at more closely. "Rather than just relying on 30-second television spots or print ads, [we all] really need to ramp up this social-media and viral-marketing aspect," he said.

Traditional media, including five 30-second spots, as well as newspaper and magazine ads, is still a part of the campaign, however. The campaign cost about $2.5 million to produce and has nearly $13 million in media buys behind it in the first quarter. Executives say that is on par with previous campaigns.