Interview with Wego CEO Martin Symes and Product Boss Ross Veitch on Content, Advertising, ADR, Meta-search and (naturally) Twitter

It has been a frustrating conference season for me this year. I had to leave TRAVELtech early this year to rush to the side of a sick relative. Then I missed WebInTravel altogether because of a back injury. As well a missing out of a lot of schmoozing and boozing, I missed a chance to catch up with Martin Symes and others from the Singapore based meta-search company Wego (aka Bezurk). Martin is an online travel veteran with stints at Zuji/Travelocity, BA and American Airlines. He is also an entertaining presenter and dinner companion. Through Wego he is at the forefront of meta-search in Asia so an interesting person to hear from. Last week I had a chance to catch up with Martin and Wego Product Boss Ross Veitch by phone to hear the latest on Wego, meta-search and the Asian travel market.

Here is some of our exchange. [nb- I was not smart enough or well trained enough to include in my notes which of Ross or Martin answered my questions so in the below I have blurred them into one respondent]

BOOT: How’s business?

Wego: Great – steady growth in all the metrics we look at. Traffic is up 200% year on year and revenue about the same. The recession has been good for us as it has brought to us looking for distribution and has added to the price sensitivity of consumers. Move from Bezurk to Wego brand and new platform has also helped, especially with SEO traffic. [SEO] Now makes up 50% of our traffic so acquisition costs are low.

BOOT: I noticed you have a new feature of ranking hotels by popularity in the sort order. Does a meta-search company have to choose between being a price based search engine or being a a mechanism for recommending hotels to consumers?

Wego: See them as complementary. We have adopted the same philosophy toward UGC aggregation as we have to price aggregation. Have not tried to do it ourselves. For content it is critical to get a mass of reviews so have crawled hundreds of different review sites and then broken down the content, created indexes and built a snapshot of what people are saying. The volume of hotel reviews for larger properties is overwhelming. We can help customers cut through the reviews and the price.

BOOT: The theory was that the recession/GFC would drive down CPM rates and drive up CPC rates as advertisers shifted their marketing budgets from display advertising to direct response. Is this true? What have you seen?

Wego: Hard to say as our display business is coming off such a low base. June on June we have had a 600% growth in display revenue – again a low base. Also for most of our customers we are selling integrated packages for display and direct response [clicks - BOOT]. An example is Hotel Spotlight [three hotels at top of search– BOOT] which is generating a dramatic increase in click through rates to not only the spotlight itself but organic listing further down the sort. Now trialling the hotel inserting their twitter feed messages into the Hotel Spotlight. Giving hotel a chance to put fresh content into the promo spot [now available in Singapore and coming elsewhere soon – BOOT]

BOOT: What about other plans for Asia? There is some tight competition with Qunar in China and Ixigo in India.

Wego: Some days India is our biggest source market for traffic. Though the click through rates are lower than other markets. Even so we think that it has more potential as a market than Chian. Very hard to monetise traffic from China. Our Chinese language sites are launched we have a few more languages planned

BOOT: ADR declines are hurting everyone. You are able to see prices from so many different angles. Where do you think ADR is going next year?

Wego: Agree, we saw big declines in ADR this year. Can’t see too much continued downside next year without another recessionary event. We hope to see rates stabilise and then we can get into targeting of deals. We are having discussions with suppliers about targeting to different user groups. This is the exciting next step for us and OTAs.

BOOT (to Martin): Final question about conferences and presentations. Twitter and instant blogging are now an unstoppable feature of presentations at conferences. How has it changed the way you present and prepare?

Wego/Martin: With presenting you now have to be aware that things will be taken out of context, re-twitted and sent around in seconds.

PS – Apologies again to Ross and Martin for (other than the last question) losing track of who was answering which question. Chances are that the answers I have above are a merger of comments from both of them

PS 2 – disclosure: Back in 2007 I did some consulting work for Wego

Wego becomes Bezurk - but dodges the Trip name bullet

With the ink barely dry on my recent post to my recent post "Kango becomse UpTake, Vailoma becomes TripSay - seems it is easier to buid a product that get a good URL these days" comes news that Asian based meta-search company and News Ltd investee Bezurk is now called Wego. Here is the press release. New name comes with some additional features around trip planning and some very SEO friendly looking destination and flight routing looking links.

I exchanged a an email with founder and Chief Marketing Office - Craig Hewett to understand more. Here is an edited version of our exchange.

BOOT: Does this mean that the name Bezurk will fade away or will you keep the two in parallel?

Hewett: We will slowly transition Bezurk.com users to Wego.com over the next few months, so until then both sites will run in parallel but the intention is to eventually redirect bezurk.com to Wego.com

BOOT: How hard was it to pick a new name and get a new URL. Can you share some names you rejected?

Hewett: Coming up with brand names which we liked was the easy part the hard part was finding ones which were available as a dot .com as well as the key country domain extensions.

In the early part of the process we kept up coming up with made up names which incorporated: trip, search, flight and they all sounded too similar to other exiting travel site names.

We lived on http://instantdomainsearch.com/ which tells you instantly as you type whether a domain is registered – speeding up the search process. We ended up combining different words together and searching close to 2000 names and landed up discovering wego by pure luck.

Fortunately for us Wego was owned by a company in the US who had acquired the domain when they acquired another company a few years back and had no real use for it and happened to put it up for sale a few days before we came up with the name. So we snapped it up straight away.

ed - Craig also mentioned that some of the names researched and rejected by the Wego team included tripsearchr, triptasia, tripseekr, tripkiv, tripsecretary, trippa , tripblender, tripdecision and trippursuit. But as Guillaume over at Hotel-Blogs points out the last thing the industry needs is another "trip" based name.

BOOT: Still focused on Asia or pushing out to other parts of the world?

Hewett: ...primary focus will be on Asia Pac consumers. We are fortunate that Wego.com as a brand name lends itself globally should we have global aspirations

Pithy ending - I like the new name (but was also a fan of the Bezurk name). Am glad that Craig and Martin dodged the "Trip" name bullet. New name and News funding = busy 2008. Their only worry now is that people confuse them with the World Evangelical Gospel Outreach (yes it exists).

Disclosure - in the past I have consulted to Bezurk/Wego

501 not out

Time has passed and the posts keep flowing. Time for my "not out series" - a regular summary of the last 100 posts that I first started with 101 not out and continued with 201 , 301
and 401.

Just like the 401 update it has been deals, deals, deals that has dominated the last 100 BOOT rants:

• Wotif evenutally managed to by Travel.com.au/Lastminute.com.au despite a fight from Webjet and a cunning move from AOT. Followed up almost immediately buying Asia Web Direct;
• TripAdvisor launched a new version and continued its targeted site buying spree with HolidayWatchdog;
• TravelCLICK was sold to Genstar and the BOOT called it first;
• The Asian acquisition bonanza continued as Priceline returned to the market though an acquisition of Agoda, ;
• Sidestep disappeared in a flood of newly raised Kayak cash; and
  
• Venere bought Worldby.
  

Cash flowed into online travel:

• Fastbooking took Euro35mm;
  
• Worktopia grabbed $5mm;
  
• Bezurk got "an undisclosed sum" from News;
  

I spent some interesting times on the phone doing start up interviews with:

• Yen Lee of Kango;
  
• Gregg Brockway of TripIt;
  
• Martin Symes of Bezurk; and
• Kellie Pelletier of Kayak.

In the weird world of quirky news:

• bags fell from the sky;
  
• The president of Sri Lanka got bumped and was not happy about it;
  
• Man fired dog and bragged about it; and
  
• nobody, I repeat nobody is doing anything naughty naughty in the new Singapore Airlines double bed suites.

Oh and Qantas turned from being the flying Kangaroo to the thieving Rat.

But I saved my most angriest post for number 400 - the last in this seasons. When the new Australian government said they were doing me a favour by continuing to allow Qantas to over charge me on flights to America.

If you're still reading then I'm still writing.

The Bezurk Sessions: Interview with Bezurk CEO Martin Symes on News Digital Media investment

Meta-search stories have been dominating the news in the last month, naturally driven by Kayak’s purchase of Sidestep. This has (unfairly) stolen a little of the deal buzz around the investment by News Digital Media (one of News Corps online arms in Australia) and OWW Sinapore's investment in Asian meta-search company Bezurk (my first mention of the story here).

I have a connection to the Bezurk deal through some consulting work that I did for them in early 2007. So it would not be fair to give my thoughts and any commentary around the deal. However I did have a chance to chat with Bezurk CEO Martin Symes today about his post-deal plans around Brand, Product and ongoing relationship with News. Here are some of the points that came out of our conversation.

Maintaining independence

Bezurk will maintain its independent operations from other News online assets. This is important (says Symes) to ensure that Bezurk can continue to work with other media partners and reflects that New has taken a minority stake. Symes and team will work hard to integrate activities with other News online assets (mainly in Australia) but this is not guaranteed. Will only do it where it makes sense. I read this to mean that the News properties such as News.com.au or truelocal.com.au or Moshtix nor Bezurk itself are compelled to link to each other but that each will have the inside running on a a pitch to the other. Bezurk is already an important part of the travel section on News.com.au but this occurred prior to the investment deal.

The other important factor for continued independence says Symes was that Bezurk needs to continue to think and operate like a start-up. This is both in the sense of cost control and lean operations as well as the need to have the flexibility to innovate.

New Plans - Some more people, some more product and some more markets

The deal has brought some much needed money into Bezurk that Symes intends to use for the following:

• New Markets – about to launch in India off the back of a “portal deal”. Will open a small Sydney office in the next few months;
• New people – will be announcing soon a new SEM manager and senior marketing appointment; and
• New products – cars and packaging to come very soon. Will also allow them to uncut some of the corners around QA and testing that were required given their pre-deal budget restrictions.

So what does the Kayak/Sidestep deal mean for the meta-search market and for you

Symes (not surprisingly) sees the Kayak buyout of Sidestep and Yahoo! upgrade of Yahoo! Travel through the relaunch of Farechasee as a “fantastic validation of the model as people are prepared to put a lot of money into the sector.” He is sceptical that Kayak can deliver on the integration plans they have as quickly as they want (see my Interview with Kayak’s Kellie Pelletier for more on the integration plan).

Does meta-search need to be local market focused? Why should a consumer care that Bezurk is an “Asia Pacific market specialist”? Wont Kayak give a consumer all they need?

The last area of questions for Symes was around why he thought customers needed a local meta-search provider and what he thought Bezurk offers that is better than Kayak.

Symes says “Great question. We are still developing exactly what it is that each market needs by figuring out the local practices and booking patterns. I argued during my time at Zuji that you have to be as nimble as possible locally to access local content. Same is true in meta-search. You can get 80% of the way to meeting your customer’s needs by being a generalist but if want to be the player in a market, the authority then you need to do the last 20%. Need to be local.”

Congrats again to Martin, Craig and Ross on this deal.

News Limited takes a stake in Bezurk.com

The Australian newspaper online edition is reporting that News Limited (Australian arm of News Corp) has taken a stake in Asian travel meta-search company Bezurk.com. Details in the article.

UPDATE - interview with Bezurk CEO Martin Symes on post-deal plans

Meta search vs OTA: Should an OTA buy a meta-search company?

Was asked an interesting question about meta-search and online retail by a share analyst reader. Paraphrased, the question was

We get plenty of Private Equity calls relating to meta-search companies. Most want to know if these companies would work in Europe and who would be interested in buying them. Do you think that an online travel agency could/would buy a meta-search engine?

The main difference between a meta-search company (Sidestep, Kayak, Bezurk etc) and an online travel agency (Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity etc) is that the first group are media companies and the second are retailers. The common element is that each is after the traveller - wants to attract travellers to the site to commit to a revenue generating activity. However the meta-search media business requires very different approaches to marketing, customer retention and business development than the OTA. This is because the activity the consumer is engaged in is different, the tools for retaining customers are different and the revenue model is different. Will quickly touch on each and then look at whether or not an OTA should buy one.

Customer Activity - You would think that since the activity on both meta-search and OTA is search that there would be little difference in customer activity. However the difference here is what is going on in the customer's mind. A consumer on an OTA is experience hunting. Is looking for advice, support, connection - all of the things a consumer desires from a retailer. In meta-search the consumer is singular in their focus - give me the cheapest price on the exact thing I want. This is why OTAs invest so much in brand and customer care. Meta-searchers are traffic arbitragers - they survive by buying traffic at a cheaper rate than advertisers will pay for referrals.

Customer Retention - Retailers can work to keep customers by offering discounts, exclusive deals and targeted promotions - ie product. Meta-search retention comes through bringing consumers into the search experience through reviews, social networking and new inventory connections - ie content.

Revenue Model - commission vs pay per click; cash from consumers vs bucks from media buyers; selling travel vs selling eyeballs.

OTAs therefore have the advantage in customer retention and breadth of marketing tools. But meta-search has the advantage in ease of access to supply and significantly reduced operational costs (no need for customer care and reduced supplier relations costs).

It is because meta-search is media rather than retailer that the biggest meta-search deal around was Farechase being bought by a media company - Yahoo!. However this does not cancel out an OTA as a potential buyer of meta-search. We have a very power example of success in an OTA buying, owning and running a media company through Expedia's ownership of TripAdvisor. Any acquiring OTA just has to embrace being a media company.

I am a fan of the meta-model but (as with all web companies) it is all about good product and execution. There is lots of success in travel so far for meta-search but comparison experts like Pricegrabber have already failed in moving to travel. The fit with a media company is stronger than that of an OTA. Of course - haunting the whole sector is whether or not the general untargeted search people (ie Google) develop the more targeted tools of meta-search.

Meta-search and GDS: Bezurk and Amadeus do a deal

Asian meta-search company Bezurk.com and European GDS giant Amadeus are officially working together. A deal was announced last week for Bezurk to use the Amadeus web services product known as Meta-Pricer. This does not mean that Bezurk will move to doing its own bookings. Rather the deal is to reduce the toll that Bezurk places on the websites of its airline partners. Here is the press release.

It is an unexpected twist for a meta-search partner to seek out a deal with a GDS so I wrote to Bezurk CEO Martin Symes to get the inside scope. Here is our exchange.

BOOT Asks: Why do you need GDS help?

Martin Symes Answers: Using Amadeus MetaPricer to access airline fares and availability does a few things for us:

1. Improves our supplier proposition – offer airlines a no cost solution
2. Streamlines number of places we need to go to get fares/availability
3. Speeds up response times – gets results to users faster

Most important is the first reason. The airlines we work with have a wide variety of approaches to getting their fares on to their websites. Some connect straight to their host systems from their internet booking engine (IBE). Some have a cache sitting between their host and the IBE. Some use the host of one of the GDS's. Many use a third party IBE which accesses their own host. Each of these arrangements has it's own technical constraints and economics associated with giving 3rd parties access to the data on any sort of scale.

Many carriers that embraced search engine marketing some time ago offer travel search engines access to API's, which typically query a cache populated predominantly by natural search traffic. Unfortunately many carriers don't yet offer these direct API's, although some have plans to do so. In some cases, we have been asked to provide advice on the design of these.

This has meant that screenscraping has been the next best means of us getting access to airline data. Screenscraping works perfectly fine for many airlines which have a system with sufficient capacity, are fast enough, can control and track access, have a layout that doesn't require multiple page requests per query and who aren't getting billed per query by a 3rd party company running their IBE or host for them.

So for reasons both technical and economic, screenscraping is not always a viable means of us getting the data we need. In these situations Amadeus MetaPricer is a good solution because there is no cost to the carriers or extra load placed on their websites because we are querying fares and availability via the Amadeus system. The only thing the carrier needs to do is distribute their fares to our Amadeus Office Id's for each point of sale.

BOOT Asks: Why Amadeus?

Martin Symes Answers: We issued a mini-RFP to all the GDS’s; Amadeus’ response was the most appropriate from a functionality and price perspective. We have also found them to be very responsive to deal with.

BOOT Asks: Who's paying?

Martin Answers: We pay a nominal fee per query; which is more than covered by the revenue we generate from the commercial agreements we have with our airline partners.

BOOT Asks: What about the non-GDS participating airlines like Air Asia, Virgin Blue, Jetstar, Tiger?

Martin Answers: We continue to maintain direct connectivity with non-GDS airlines; many of which are able to provide access to their inventory through API’s or via screenscraping their public websites, where they have given us permission to do so.

BOOT Asks Are non-airline sites (ie hotles) concerned about the number of searches you are doing? If so, what's the plan?

Martin Answers: We work closely with our OTA and hotel partners and have developed unique search methodologies for each partner to minimise any impact. The conversion rates and therefore incremental revenue benefit we drive for our partners far outweighs any search cost issues they may have.

I was going to write that this was the first GDS and meta-search deal but after some investigating found that back in 2001 Amadeus did a deal with Sidestep. Am told by an Amadeus spokesperson that this 2001 is very different to the Meta-Pricer deal with Bezurk. The first difference is that the 2001 deal was a lower level of connectivity (an API vs Web Services) and secondly it was not for the full searching capability that is in this deal - this one includes fares.

Will give them the benefit of the doubt and agree for now that this is a first of its kind. UPDATE - Kevin at Travolution points out in the comments that Kayak and Amadeus entered into the first meta-pricer deal.

It raises some interesting questions about the ability of supplier and OTA sites/systems to support the pounding that meta-search companies threaten to deliver and of the GDS' companies continued efforts to re-invent themselves as technology companies. I get the product reason behind Bezurk's decision here as they need to continue to improve the product delivery to their inventory providers. Is further proof that the meta-search model is still in development and I hope that this deal helps Bezurk continue to grow its product range.

Bezurk is sooooo Business 2.0

The future of Business 2.0 may be uncertain but the Time Inc publication has survived just long enough to give a great wrap to Asian meta-search company Bezurk. Bezurk joins high profile and mega-funded players like Joost and Rebtel in the "Business 2.0 It's a Web, Web 2.0 World", their measure of the best of the non-US sites to watch. Well done Martin, Craig, Ross and team.

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.

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.