Hotelscombined joins the meta-search wars with a difference

Caught up for coffee today with Yury Shar of Hotelscombined.com. Yury is a fellow ex-Cendantite and former super-star from Travelport owned FlairviewTravel. He and his fellow Hotelscombined founders were the creators/builders of some of the best pay-per-click bid management systems I have ever seen. They are now back in the online game with two meta-search products - Productreview.com.au and Hotelscombined.

As the names indicate ProductReview is a broad product site (much like PriceGrabber that I commented on earlier) and Hotelscombined is hotel meta-search.

The Hotelscombined product is fighting in the same space in Asia as other meta-search players Bezurk and Sprice.com. They are also happy to take on the big guys - Sidestep & Kayak. They are trying to build a global business from Sydney. Yury tells me that currently 60% of traffic is coming from customers outside of Australia and they hope to raise that to 70% by the end of the year.

But Hotelscombined are more than a me too play. They have taken a different functionality/UI approach than the other players. They are keeping the traffic on their site for longer than the others. The typical meta-search player (if there is such a thing) sends the traffic over to the partner site relatively early in the search - just after the sort order results are displayer. Hotelscombined keeps the traffic for a click or two more. It sends the traffic over after the room type selection has been made.

The result is that they should:

1. have a larger number of page views per visitor producing interesting monetisation options; and
2. be sending traffic that is more qualified than the typical player and therefore producing higher conversions for partner site.

The major downside is that the searches take a little bit longer to complete. It also means that their layout looks different to the others. Sometimes difference can be good, but it can often confuse consumers getting used to a new model.

With their history and expertise expect Hotelscombined to be very aggressive and targeted in paid search. Well done Yury on a great product.