Tnooz: 7 companies from the "old guard"

My latest post on Tnooz is live. Title "Online travel reboots – Seven companies from bosses coming back for more glory".

I go through seven new companies formed by the online travel old guard including Triporati, NewTravelCo, Tripit, Hotelscombined, Wego, Getaroom and Voyij

Over-heard at NoVacancy: tweets and chatter from No Vacancy hospitality conference 18 March 2010

Normally it is the end of the year that signals the conference season with TRAVELtech, WebInTravel and PhoCusWright following each other month by month starting in September (note - TRAVELtech is Aug 31 this year rather than usual Sept). But for the BOOT this year the season has started early with adtech, No Vacancy having just wrapped up and Eyefortravel TDS Asia coming up in Singapore on April 28 and 29.

Last week was my first year at No Vacancy. It is part of the same conference stable as Martin Kelly's SearchEngineRoom and TRAVELtech and is targeted at the hospitality industry - all channels - rather than being a purely online or technology conference. I (and others) tweeted our way through No Vacancy under the hashtag #novacancy. Not all of you are on twitter so here in this post are some of the top tweets and quotes I took away from No Vacancy. Here are the the most interesting tweets:

On the market general (Australian bias)

• 2009 hospitality market in Australia according to Dransfield."held up better than expected" "rates down 3%" "revpar down 8.2%". 2010 "good start, expect rate increases" but " lost 40% of capital globally" "another shock could come" They went on "Credit availability + bank conservatism means still shortage of capital" "has hit valuation "av hotel down 20% value"
• Travelclick" gds htl vol in 2009 46mm trans, to 2003 levels". Wonder how much corp bookg decline, how much OTA neg rate growth?

On Online Agents and Intermediaries

• Robbie Cook (Wotif CEO) said "60% of business is direct to site, then organic search, paid is a single digit % of the business". He went on to say that "Wotif saved $2.2mm in costs post travel.com.au business post acquisition."
• Yury Shar Hotelscombined said that "less than 10% of traffic comes from typing in URL direct" "59% of traffic affiliate. Paid 24%, rest organic search" Sam_Linder added in his tweet "@hotelscombined 2 mil visitors pm to 6 mil in last year. Affiliates is primary channel, 15,000 such as skyscanner in uk"
• Latest stats from stayz.com.au "22,400 properties, 270k newsletter subs, 160k bkings/ 650k nts in 2009 (+ 30%yoy)" also advertising revenue

On Hoteliers

• Starwood AsiaPac "2009 -2% in occupancy, -7% ADR for -9% RevPAR in Pacific" "online only channel to grow- branded faster than OTA"
• Starwood "2-3 years to get back to 2007 rate levels" to which robertkcole said "Sorry, Starwood's dreaming if they think it will only take 2-3 years for rates to return to 2007"
• Accor AsiaPac "Occ finished 2009 at 74%. Good but down from all time high in 2007" "price down 6%" revpar down 9%"
• Accor "Online up from 10% of sales in 2005 to 35% planned for 2010" "65% of online sales will be direct up from 50% in 2005"
• Accor "happy with 65% of online business being direct. Won't artificially cap 3rd party distribution or hold back inventory"

Other accom types

• 25-46% of bookings online at "freespirit" (a holiday park/caravan park company). If true for whole sector then parks online larger percentage than hotels

Rumour True! Google trialling meta-search in maps for hotels

Who knew that a BOOT rumour (admittedly one from a trusted source) could prove to be true. I wrote last week that I had a good but unsubstantiated story that Google was planning a launch of travel meta-search. Now we have confirmation that they are putting prices into the display of hotel results with priced links to booking engines. Not all users are seeing this functionality (in classic Google multi-variant testing) preventing me from giving you a screenshot of my own, but over at "eWeek Google Watch" you can see some screenshots of a "hotels in new york" search with prices and meta-search style functionality.

Kayak, Wego, Hotelscombined, Sprice and more - hold on to your algorithms this is going to be a bumpy ride!

More analysis over at Tnooz

PS - WOW I scored a TechCrunch link out of this

"The AsiaRooms of 2009 is not the AsiaRooms of 2005": Interview with John Fearon, AsiaRooms Head of Marketing

AsiaRooms is one of the region's largest online hotel retailers. With 81, 908 hotels and counting (according to the site today) and a parent company that is the largest travel company in Europe (TUI), AsiaRooms is clearly a player that the BOOT should be paying attention to. Historically the company has made this hard as it has been very secretive with its numbers and plans and (to be frank) was not a company we wanted to pay attention to. Prior to TUI buying the company, AsiaRooms built up an unwanted reputation on online customer care forums for complaints and among the trade for scoffing at rate parity and associated price guarantees. Rumours of wholesale group rates being market up $5 and sold online became the standard trade fair post-session beer story when AsiaRooms came up in the conversation. The brand buzz was all bad. In fact the customer and industry complaint forums became the only source for profile information on the secretive company.

John Fearon the (relatively) new Head of Marketing for the Pattaya based AsiaRooms is determined to change all that. Determined to build on the TUI brand and infrastructure support to change the market perception of AsiaRooms and to bring the company out from behind the secrecy curtain. As John told me “we are not the AsiaRooms of 2005”. I had a chance this week to (virtually) sit down with Fearon and hear his plans for changing the reputation of AsiaRooms, overhauling their marketing plans, ditching meta-search and taking on all comers in a press to be number one in Asia.

In marketing, John's first target is to change the approach to paid search marketing. SEM and SEO is the frontier that John believes will sort out the winners from the losers in Asia (I agree). Is also the place he was happy to share numbers and metrics with me. After only three months of work Fearon is claiming to have doubled the amount of business coming form the search engines on the same level of spend. Not much of a metric to share but an indication of his marketing plans. He had a lot less praise for and desire to continue to invest in meta-search. Has pulled AsiaRooms out of Kayak and has no plans to go with hotelscombined. For the moment is sticking with Wego but as general rule does not believe that meta-search builds a brand or helps the business. Claims it forces you into “killing yourself” on pricing at the expense of the consumer experience. This is an interesting point. I am working on a separate post on my thoughts on the meta-search model but from what I am seeing the arbitrage gap (difference between price meta-search players buy traffic from Google and sell it to suppliers) is narrowing.

In supply the plan is to continue to gain access to cheap inventory - but with less (he did not say none) of the rate rule breaking.

Asia is a tough place to play but Fearon is not worried. AsiaRooms claims that profitability and support from the rest of the TUI nline Destination Services (ODS) group will prove another important factor. [FYI the TUI ODA group includes the UK based LateRooms and Spanish Hotelopia].

They will need more than good paid search plans and mothership support to make it in this market. Fearon says he is aware of this, especially with the Global F’n Crisis hitting Asia hard. He predicts the GFC will bring down a number of smaller brands (we off the record speculated which ones). But for Fearon this is the opportunity to bring AsiaRooms out and take competitors head-on. He has not been impressed by any of the marketing activities of competitors from the big four (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline). "There is nothing they have done that made me say Wow".

Was interesting to finally hear a (confident) voice from AsiaRooms and one not afraid to admit to the reputation. He acknowledged that AsiaRooms broke a lot of the pricing rules in the past (and maybe that they still do) but is now looking to invest in brand and customer satisfaction (heck they even have a facebook fan page now!).

So what do you think? The consumer forums still don’t paint a pretty picture for AsiaRooms but the company is claiming a lot of changes since 2005. Either way the Asian online travel market war has moved to a different level.

He said, she said using Google ads part II

Yesterday I posted about the fight between online hotel seller Asiativ and meta-search player Hotelscombined being played out on through paid search war of words. Via a comment on that post I looked at the Google results for the search Asiativ. Check out the results in this screenshot

In case you can't read it, the top paid search result says

Please Read
www.Asiativ.com Clarification on Negative Ad Done By Hotels Combined

and the second one says

Do not book with AsiaTiv
www.HotelsCombined.com Fraud alert : Asiativ.com Read customer reviews first

Again I am just passing on their words. I have none of the background here so cannot comment on either of the views from the Asiativ or HotelsCombined. But what the hell is Google doing allowing these things to go on in their search results!

UPDATE - Google have stepped in (or a truce has been called). See shot below. Though there is now a good SEO battle as you can see from the seventh organic link on the search term Asiativ. If this is Google action then they have moved quicklyThe below shot is only fours hours after this post went live

Buying brand terms of Google as part of litigation

I received some traffic today from the someone that searched in Google "hotelscombined wego". This often happens to me that combinations of competitor names results in traffic to the BOOT as I am one of the few places that regularly talks about competitors in the same post. I followed the referring link to see how high a ranked. Below is a screenshot of the Google page I came to. Have a look at the top sponsored link


In case you can't see, it says

"Warning Hotelscombined: www.asiativ.com Read legal procedures running Currently against Hotelscombined"

I have never seen anything like this. I know that Google has loosened the restrictions on bidding for brand terms. But I have never heard of a company buying a brand term so they can put up a link accusing another company of "defamation, fraud and falsification" (their words not mine). Here is the full text of the Asiativ accusation against Hotelscombined. I don't know Asiativ (do you?) so can't give any background on them. I do know Hotelscombined. They are an Australian based meta-search company headed by some guys that made their start in online travel working for HotelClub.

I also know Google and I am very surprised to see that they are allowing this ad to stay on the site. Anyone out there ever seen anything like this?

UPDATE - here is a later post with more on this including how Hotelscombined is bidding for Asiativ's brand.

TRAVELtech: Hotelscombined - bringing meta-search and affiliate marketing together

TRAVELtech continued. Yury Shar gave a little more insight into meta-search and his company Hotelscombined. My earlier profile of them is here.

The interesting point from his speech today is not that he is generating good traffic - though he is with 450,000 visits per month. The interesting story is that his number one source of traffic is affiliate program. He shared that 38% of traffic is coming from a network of 1,500 affiliates (here is an example bellhop.com.au). Search is still critical with SEM ranking number two at 34% and SEO third at 20%.

I was working on the assumption that paid search and to a lesser extent SEO would dominate the traffic feed for meta-search. With no data backing it up was assuming that these would be responsible for 80% of traffic for a meta-search provider, not the less than 65% that Hotelscombined generates. Congrats to Yury of building this great affiliate network.

Yury also passed on this four tips for search engine optimisation marketing efforts:

1. Give yourself time - it takes 18-24 months for a start up to "prove" itself to Google as a legitimate content provider;
2. Design the site - design the site for both consumers and search engines. The site needs to be specifically designed to be shopped and indexed by Google. As he puts it - it is easy to design a site with great content that Google cannot be "seen" by Google;
3. Register and open a Google Webmaster account; and
   
4. Design a long term link strategy - Does not mean building fake links or becoming a hard core "black hatter" but working on links and traffic generation through content optimisation has to be part of marketing plans. For example making sharing of and imbedding of links by customers and easy thing to do.

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.