Category — 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.