Steve Sherlock of Oodles: the search for funding and the deal with Wotif that almost happened

car rental search site Oodles is part meta-search, part travel agent and part loyal program deal search site. The classic meta-search part is the ability for consumers to search multiple sites in one go. The travel agent part is that Oodles collects commission on paid bookings (when customer pays car company) not on a per click meta-search basis. The interesting loyalty program part is that if you give your Airline or Car frequent flyer number to Oodles, then they will add to the search results specialist loyalty program deals. Means that a person who is both a Velocity frequent flyer (Virgin Blue), Qantas Frequent Flyer and Hertz Gold Club member will see an integrated display including special deals from Europcar (Virgin partner), Avis (Qantas) and Hertz as well as other deals from Thrifty. This is a great and - as far as I can tell - a unique offering in car rental and meta-search generally.

I was talking about Oodles today with Founder and MD Steve Sherlock. Steve and Oodles are in the middle of a search for a new round of funding. In a true web 2.0 fashion Steve is blogging his way through the experience in series of "diary of an entrepreneur raising capital" entries over at the anthill website. Included is a story about how Oodles was almost acquired by Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. It is an interesting series of diary notes and a recommended read.

I like the different angle that Oodles has taken from others. Allows consumers to see a display of a combination of inventory (loyalty program discounted and regular) that I have not seen on any other online travel site. Oodles already have the car rental traffic lead in Australia so appear to be executing well. The challenge for them is the constant start-up problem in Australia - finding the funding to continue to feed the growth.

801 not out

Another 100 posts are live on the InterTubes. Time again for my regular "not out series" recap where I go through the last 100 posts and remind you of the themes that have been dominating the blog. I started almost three years ago with 101 not out and continued with 201, 301, 401, 501. 601, and 701 not out. This comes at a time that the BOOT passed the 100k visitor mark.

Two new segments for the Blog

• Seat Reviews including Qantas Economy, Qantas Premium Economy, JAL Business, BA Business, Singapore Raffles and United Business ; and
  
• Business traveller tips - what to pack, what to wear and getting through security.

Meta search action a-plenty which I tried to summarise in my post "Meta-search vs Online Travel Agents: the three main differences and why they matter"

• TripAdvisor launching air meta-search and received criticism (including from me) for allowing too many reviews from non-travellers
  
• Travelzoo launching Fly.com
• Kayak branching into content and review meta-search through expanded Travelpost
• Yahoo! went the other way and euthenased FareChase
• Cheapflights launched in Australia with a sub-par product
• Car meta-search company Oodles topped the car traffic numbers in Australia
• Sidestep founders came back with the oddly named Voyij
  

While also having time for Travel Discovery and Inspiration sites such as:

• event based search site Joobili
• the high profile Triporati
• data loving Tripbase

...and we found out how much Expedia paid for VirtualTourist and OneTime

BOOT interview mania with start ups and industry shakers

• Alfonso Castellano of TripSay (part 1 and 2)
• AsiaRoom came out of the closet, launched direct contracting and the BOOT found out more about them and their TUI ODS stable-mates including revenue numbers
  
• Jim Hornthal of Triporati
• Yen Lee of Uptake
• Reuven Levitt of Tripbase (part 1 and 2)
• Steve Hafner of Kayak
  

oh...and...a plane actually landed on water

Car meta-search Oodles tops traffic for car in Australia but Twitpic doesn't care

Saw a tweet this afternoon from top BOOT commentator and Oodles boss Steve Sherlock that for the second month running the car meta-search site has topped the Hitwise traffic ratings in the Car Hire category. Beating out budget, Avis, Hertz, Thirty and a host of local competitors. Big snaps for Steve and the team for the result. Their team has worked hard for this with a great product.

Like any good Web 2.0 exec, Steve celebrated by posting a twitpic in his twitter feed. Only downside is that the twitpic ad alongside his celebratory photo was for arguscarhire, a competitor powered by CarTrawler. Photo below. Nonetheless great job by Oodles. As far as I know they are the only meta-search company that are number one in traffic in a category. Do you know of any others?

Have you seen how bad things are in car rental? Avis, Hertz, Dollar all down 80%+

The crash test dummy in this photo maybe smiling but the car rental industry has smashed into the recession/global financial crisis wall with such force that dramatic industry changes are inevitable. I usually spend my time ranting about airlines, hotels and online agents such that I often forget to watch other sectors like cruise and car.

I received an enormous shock yesterday when I was surfing around Yahoo! finance and decided to see how the Avis/Budget stock price was doing. I have soft spot for the Avis Budget Group Inc (CAR) stock ticker (to the extent you can ever have feelings for a stock ticker) for two reasons. Firstly because CAR is such as great ticker for a car rental company. Mainly though because it is the successor to the once public and once amalgamated Cendant Corporation. Back in Sept 2006 CAR took over from CD and Cendant was no more.

Anyway what I found was that Avis stock is now trading at less than $1, has a market cap of less than $85million and is on notice to be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange unless it can find a way to trade above a $1 per share. This is a company that has some 28,000 employees (after a cut of 2,200 in Dec last year) and at the time of the spin off in Sept 2006 had a stock value of nearly $20. The stock reached highs of $30 in mid 07. That said back in 2006 analysts were already saying that the company was in trouble. I have not been tracking enough to speak definitively but clearly the crash to a US recession straight after all of the pain and suffering of high gas prices and credit being squeezed has just been too much for this company.

It may not give the Avis execs much comfort but their competitors in car rental are also in terrible trouble. Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTG) stocks are trading at less than $1.50 off a 52 week high of $27 and a two year high of $50 - only just staving off breaches of debt covenants. Unimaginable drops. Hertz (HTZ) - the market boss - seem to be holding steady at $6 off a 52 week high of $15.32. Standard & Poor's are expecting at least one of these players to disappear into bankruptcy - with Dollar Thirty their lead tip. The other big player is Enterprise - but they are private so I can't find word on how they are coping. [tips welcome]

The other side of the industry is the intermediaries and car dedicated meta-search players. The biggest global online car rental broker is the Lastminute.com/Travelocity owned HolidayAutos. Travelocity has been a private company for a year and a half now so it has been very difficult to get any news on how parts of their business is performing. There was word last Sept on the turnover at Lastminute being in the region of Euro 2 billion per year but September was an age away in this crisis and there was not split out in the announcement for HolidayAutos. [tips welcome]. My thumb in the air guess is that intermediaries should be able to take advantage of this industry pain and secure fantastic rates and deals. Down here in Australia you would think that this could be good news for two of main car intermediaries, the meta-search provider Oodles.com and consolidator Vroomvroomvroom. More info on Oodles is here including a bio on long time BOOT commentator and Oodles MD Steve Sherlock. Smart Company have a profile on Vroom inc Founder/CEO Peter Thorton here.

If you thought the air and hotel industry was in trouble, then spare a moment of industry reflection and concern for our brothers and sisters in the car industry.

Thanks to anthena1970 for the photo over at flickr

PhoCusWright and Viator Meetup in Sydney

Rod Cuthbert of Viator was kind enough to invite me to a drinks event with PhoCusWright CEO Phillip Wolf. Wolf was in Australia to attend the Tourism Futures conference on the Gold Coast. I talked all the attendees into joining in for a group photo. Rod had managed to put together a very influential group of attendees for this event - and I wanted to capture the moment. Not least of all because the photo includes local senior execs for each of Travelocity (Zuji), Expedia and Orbitz in the same room as well as me playing nice with people from Qantas.

Phillip gave an brief but interesting speech. Two things he said particularly stuck with me.

Firstly he put an new spin on how to think about the battle between the big OTAs and meta-search/content companies. Rather than defining sites such as Kayak and TripAdvisor by their business model and functionality (meta-search and user generated content) he described them with reference to their control over content. He calls them "zero percent sites". That is sites where zero (or near zero) percent of the site content is controlled or produced by the owner. I like that as a descriptor because it goes to the heart of the difference with online retail sites. In telling the story of the battle between the zero percent sites and the OTAs he mentioned a stat I had heard before by is worth repeating. Currently Kayak is generating more air fare searches than Travelocity. Not to say that Kayak is selling more air that Travelocity but more people are clicking the search button on Kayak and generating a search result. Why is that so amazing? Well says Wolf, "Kayak has 58 employees, Travelocity 5,000". Four of the top ten online travel sites by traffic are zero percent sites.

He then took this analysis a little further through taking us through PhoCusWright's current Perfect Storm thesis (The Perfect Storm: Search Shop Buy). It is one thing for us as an industry to have better means for classifying the models and categorisation for each competitor but do our customers care. We as an industry think about supplier sites, OTAs, Hotel Only, Meta/Zero, Affiliates, white-label, last minute, etc etc. But the consumers don't do any of this. All they think about is buying travel. On the whole the distinctions between the models and methodologies are meaningless to the consumer. Wolf encapsulated this through this comment "In our study of consumer behaviour a statistically significant number of consumers actually believe that they buy their travel from Google".

This resonated with me. No matter how much we want consumers to see the market segmented like with think it is and no matter how much with want to believe that brand and model distinctions are being understood by consumers, in the end the average customer types in what they want into Google and are not at all certain who they are booking on in the end. Frightening stuff.

Back to the photo. Here are the attendees from left to right: Fergus Kelly (Qantas Holidays), Rod Cuthbert (Viator), Grant Swinbourne (Qantas Holidays), Peter Smith (Zuji), Arthur Hoffman (Expedia), Me , Philip Wolf (Phocuswright) , Vicki Potts (Viator), Steve Sherlock (Oodles), Carol Hutzelman (Phocuswright) & Mike Thompson (Stella)