Cheapflights in Australia - but this is not open territory

UK flight meta-search leader Cheapflights has announced and launched a holding site for an Australian version of the business. The Australian version of Travel Today claims the site is beta but as there is no booking engine it yet in place it is clear there is still a lot of work to do if they are to meet the planned end of year launch date a launch date next year.

Cheapflights is the first of the global players to announce a meta-search launch in Australia. Kayak and Sidestep have made European moves but are so far silent on Asia. Bezurk is the only local player targeting Australia. Sprice have an Asian business launched but have lost out on the chance for the Australia URL (currently owned by an Australian based Asian grocery store).

That does not mean they have a first mover advantage or guaranteed meta-search product lead in Australia. By the very nature of the Australian market all of the major online air players (Webjet, Travel.com.au, Flight Centre, Expedia and Bestflights) have built there domestic (and trans-Tasman) air businesses around meta-search principles. As neither Virgin-Blue or Jetstar (the number two and three domestic carriers) participate to any meaningful degree in the GDS', the only way for the local full service agents to access their inventory through screen scraping and API based aggregation technologies that result in the booking actually being made directly with the carrier. In many respects the whole of the domestic online intermediary air business is already a version of meta-search. Welcome to the party Cheapflights.

Also of interest from the article is they are already quoting the pricing for the Australian offering - AU 70 cents for a click on a short haul route and AU 81 cents for a long haul route. Though there is some confusion on this number as they are quoting 81 cents as equalling GBP 81 pence. My guess is that the 81 pence is right - making the long haul click price closer to AU$2.

UPDATE - made some minor changes to the launch date note above based on comments from (I think) an insider at Cheapflights.