Comment and analysis of online travel

I just read an interesting post over at the Travolution blog. Basically, it says that the major flight and hotel companies are worried about screen scraping (like some meta-search engines use) as opposed to paid for API and GDS methods. 

Does anyone else think that paid for access to flight and hotel availability is ridiculously old fashioned? To me, its like Google charging visitors to use their web search! Surely the point of distribution is to distribute your product to as many people who might want to buy it as possible? Why charge? Oh yes “offering the availability search functionality incurs a significant infrastructure cost”. Rubbish. These days servers are cheap, its just a question of achieving the right economy of scale.  

There must be one GDS company out there with the nerve to open up and offer free access? Watch out, if you don’t Google will do it and blow you out of the water!

Recently Google has been in the firing line for a change to the terms of use to their Ad Sense advertising network that will allow people (possibly competitors) to bid on other people’s trade names. Indeed, at the Travolution Awards, one poor chap from Google practically got lynched despite coming to talk about something completely different. I found that very annoying as what he was trying to talk about was quite interesting. 

I really dont see what all the fuss is about. Its early days for this change, and yes some bidders are paying as much as £2.50 per click on trademarked names. So what? If you think you can make money by paying £2.50 a click for visitors who were looking for someone else, then go ahead and try! Good luck to you. However, I suspect that most will find it not cost-effective and in a couple of months, things will be back to normal.

A long and fascinating day at the Travolution Awards 2008 in the Royal Garden Hotel in London, hosted by the irrepressible Kevin May. Plenty of pointers and opinions as to the future of online travel from a procession of movers and shakers - highlights of which were:

- Philip Wolf from PhoCusWright and his parable of the rusty nails and the red apples.

- Two new buzz phrases bandied about: the ‘perfect storm’ of travel website and consumer convergence; and the ‘mass premium’ market.

- A wonderfully arrogant Steve Hafner from Kayak who said he was going to blow all those poxy European competitors (competition? Hardly) out of the water. Travelsupermarket? Not bothered. The big news was that he is planning to launch a travel search vertical advertising network to rival Google adwords - and that he didn’t believe in buying companies. “The morsels that we would find tasty,” he purred “would be technologies, teams or audiences.”

- A sleepy BA presentation which came to life once the visuals broke down with a glimpse of a breathtaking new beta interface for inspiring users where to go next on holiday, based on Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology. Marianne Sammann from Lufthansa appeared bemused as what that had to do with being an airline website.

- Brent Hoberman flapping his arms and ‘winging it’ and lauding the virtues of risk, chaos, and not knowing anything.

And then the awards, after hefty helpings of Malteser Parfait with chocolate beignets - awards for a number of the usual suspects like Trip Advisor and Kayak, but also one for Dorling Kindersley’s DK Travel, Small Luxury Hotels, BA.com (running jokes about T5 all evening), Voyages Jules Verne and many others - including the delightful and blinking Darren Cronian who looked like he’d just emerged from some bloggers lair deep underground, to our own World Reviewer in the best newcomer category. Mind you, it was right at the end of the evening and I had to wait until 11pm for it. But what a worthwhile wait! A kiss on the cheek of Claire Balding…

I walked home from the awards clutching the heavy glass phallus thing that was my trophy, willing for the first time in my life that a prospective mugger - if they exist in my part of Kensington - would just try their luck.

It’s 2.52am. And now I’ve got indigestion.

Al and I and the third James are off to the Travolution summit tomorrow. I am betting that one of the main themes will be what I call ‘decision assistance’ - helping the user navigate through the reams of online guff to make an informed choice. Profiling, user recommendation, segmenting of email campaigns - all are geared towards pushing people choices that are relevant, by knowing something about what they will like.

It occurs to me that the people who own the best and most useful profile of you are your friends. If you can harness them as part of your distribution platform - then that will become very powerful. Trip Advisor have made a start linking friends recommendations together - and that is absolutely the right direction to go in. Dopplr too. Much as the rest of Trip Advisor’s UGC reviews provide useful background, we know little or nothing about the people who have posted them, their likes and dislikes (air conditioning in scotland anyone?).

What is the most powerful stimulus to making a holiday decision, one that will have you scribbling on random bits of paper after late night parties, scaps that will reappear a year or two later, stained and dog-eared, to be acted on? The little finca recommended by a friend - or even just someone you sat next to at dinner…

For what seems like forever (well at least that last 4 years, which is practically forever in the world of the Internet) the ‘Mobile Internet’ has been pitched as the next big thing. Many startups have launched ideas centred around mobile web access, but so far, mass adoption has failed to materialise. The biggest barrier has been the cost (or at least the perceived cost), but this is changing. In the UK, competition amongst the major networks has reduced the cost of all inclusive data plans drastically, so not only is it becoming cheaper, advertising is also getting this message out to the average customer. I recently managed to talk Vodafone into giving me unlimited data access on my phone for only £3.50 a month (hint: tell them you are thinking of switching to 3 mobile).

With this in mind, the travel Internet industry is a-buzz with talk of mobile travel being huge in the following year. True, there have already been some great innovations, such as SilverJet offering entirely mobile check-ins. But surely the real potential of ‘mobile travel services’ is accessing destination information whilst on your trip. Imagine being able to roam the world armed only with your mobile phone, and getting maps, hotel information, sightseeing and peoples recommendations without needing a stack of guide books. Not to mention the appeal of being able to easily stay in touch with people at home.

Sounds great hey? Unfortunately we find ourselves up against the same pricing barrier that all mobile web access was up against a few years ago. Even if you have cheap (or inclusive) data access in your own country, its unlikely that you will have that whilst abroad. Indeed, on my package it would cost about £8/mb to access the web, prohibitively expensive. I will be needing to reserve room in my baggage for Lonely Planets for a little while longer.

There is one chink of light. In a recent conversation with the founder of backbacklife.com, he pointed out that many backpackers who spend a significant amount of time in one country actually buy a local SIM card, giving them cheap data access and calls. So it may be that long term travellers do access the web on their phones (he pointed out that having a mobile on the web is much better than spending half your trip in an Internet cafe), but I think it will be a while before travellers on shorter trips do so.

At World Reviewer, we would love to roll out great mobile content for travellers, but at the moment at least, we honestly dont think anyone would use them. Can anyone prove me wrong? I hope someone can!

If you talk about search or search engines to anyone in the web industry, they will normally assume you are talking about organic search as a means of generating traffic. Indeed, ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) is often at the top of everyone’s list of requirements when planning a web project, and rightly so. But what about your own site search? Does it allow those visitors your have enticed onto your site to find the right pages?

There is a view that site search is a last resort, your visitors will only use it if the primary navigation fails them. Designers often tend to believe that users will flow through the site in the way they plan them to, and that if they use the search feature the interaction design is faulty or the users a stupid (at least one designer has told me that!). But in this age of Google dominated Internet, people are not only becoming likely to use search as a primary interface, they are also becoming more demanding of the quality of the search experience.

I find it immensely frustrating when a site’s search gives irrelevant results. Indeed, more and more, I find myself using Google to search within a site instead of the site’s own search. What a tremendous waste of opportunity for these sites. Ok, Google’s collective brainpower is pretty amazing, but its also a general purpose search engine. The rules that decide which pages should appear at the top of the search results for a query on the entire Internet are not necessarily the same for a search on a specific site. If Google can do a better job at routing user queries to your pages than your site search, something is wrong.

With this in mind here are 5 tips to improve your search, in increasing order of difficulty (and expense!) to implement.

• Know where the sticking points are. These days, everyone and their dog has powerful web analytics at their fingertips, allowing them to monitor things like traffic sources and goals. But in my experience, not many people bother to analyse how users are using their site search. Google Analytics now offers powerful site search analytics for free. You can monitor what people are searching for, success rates (did they spend a long time on the site after the search and did they trigger a goal?) and lots of other stats. At the very least try the common search phrases and keywords out in your own site search. Do they take you to the pages you expect?
• Log searches that produce no results. If users are searching for something that does not exist on your site somethings wrong. Are they stupid? Are you using the wrong terms? Do you need to rewrite a section to introduce alternative keywords? You should log every query that produces an empty result page.
• Offer suggestions of misspellings. Fact: 99% of your visitors can’t spell. Its relatively easy to match misspelt words onto suggested correctly spelt ones. Also consider things like accent (Louvre v Louvre) and word stemming (boats, boat, boating).
• Handle special case queries intelligently. For most travel websites, queries such as ‘hotels in paris’ should rank hotels located in paris more highly than other things. You will need to pull out special cases to parse ‘X in Y’ queries and have the ability to set a search term and a location in your search system.
• Cross reference categories and other attributes. Offer jumping off points by showing the most likely category (or whatever) for the given query in your website. 

This is an exciting time to be involved in online travel - especially at the cutting edge, where many of the new web 2.0 start-ups are. The costs of entry have never been lower, and the opportunities greater - not just because of the technology and new low cost marketing platforms - mash-ups, widgets, blogs, social communities etc - but also because the established players by nature are slow to innovate, built as they are on legacy systems that are expensive to manage and adapt. There is also core of internet entrepreneurs out there who have been blooded by experience.

This blog is a place for two of us - and others if they will join us - to share our experiences, to keep track of new developments and opportunities, and to try and predict the the possible futures of online travel.

Meanwhile, we rely on old school thinking to let us stay ahead of the game. I just received an email from Abercrombie & Kent promoting new ‘Women Only’ journeys. Here’s their pitch:

“An afternoon in Jaipur is filled with Henna painting, astrology readings, and shopping at Johari Bazaar. And the art of perfume comes alive with an invitation to participate in a workshop at the Fragonard Perfumery in Grasse.”