iPioneer: Mark Johnson's Blog

Kayak the Best Travel Search Engine?

This week has been pretty exciting for travel search.  First Kayak got injected with another $11.5M to fund their marketing campaign and international expansion, then AP released an article entitled "Review: Kayak Best Travel Search Engine," and then Kayak released a feature that's been missing on travel search sites for a long time: flexible date search.  I'll talk about the article first and then review Kayak's flexible date search feature.

I think there's certainly an argument that Kayak is at the top of the pack, in terms of travel search engines, but I'm not sure what criteria the author used in determining that.  Picking 11 O/D pairs is not exactly an objective way to determine who has the best fares and I didn't see an objective chart of features.  A proper analysis would have many different dimensions with a lot of different searches.  Consider this: I just did a search on all three engines from SJC->TPA.  Kayak's cheapest fare was $356 on Frontier/United at Cheaptickets, but it was SFO->MCO->SFO.  SideSteps's cheapest fare was $355 on Delta/Continental at Orbitz, but it was OAK->MCO->OAK.  For those of you who don't know, driving from TPA to MCO is a long, long drive, because I4 is a bitch of a road, so I'd hardly consider MCO an alternate airport.  Mobissimo didn't search alternate airports and got a cheapest price of $433 on American with the proper SJC->TPA itinerary.  Thus, a proper analysis would have taken into account direct itineraries vs. cheapest itineraries.  One might even separate the cheapest "reasonable" itinerary, e.g. one that departs and leaves from the same airport that's within an hour from the original airport.  Also, one should consider groups of flights, like US->US flights, US->International Flights, and International->International flights.  I'll bet that Mobissimo kicks butt internationally, for example.

Anyway, the point of that diatribe is that you don't know who has the cheapest flight from just a couple of searches.  You need to fiddle around with the parameters to get a more objective view.  Therefore, one should take the AP article with a grain of salt.  One of these days, I'll get around to doing the analysis myself.  If anyone wants to pay me for my time, I'll generate a really nice report =)

Onto Kayak's flexible date search.  Kudos to Kayak for releasing a feature that's been sorely missing in the travel search world!   I usually use Orbitz to find the cheapest date to fly, then head off to the travel search engines to find even better rates.  I tried a search for a trip to Buffalo (note, you need to be logged in for this to work) and found an extremely cheap fare on Delta.  Wow!  Only $200 bucks! Granted, the interface isn't nearly as good as Orbitz's Calendar Matrix display.  It's impossible for me to see what the cheapest fare is for a given departure/return date pair.  Also, Kayak clearly isn't returning all fares that it could be searching. The Buffalo search returned 835 results, even though it was showing 2 departure dates and 7 return dates; a Buffalo search for specific dates returned 576 results, for comparison.  This makes sense from a business perspective, because Kayak couldn't run 14 different full searches for each pair without destroying their look-to-book ratio. Nonetheless, I think it's great that Kayak has implemented this, because it's a very useful tool for finding ultra-cheap fares.

I hope the entire summer is a series of volleys among the travel search engines.  This could be fun!

Technorati Tags: kayak sidestep mobissimo flexibledatesearch travelsearchengines 

Kayak Raises $11.5M from Accel

Kayak raises its funding to a total of $30M, with another $11.5M of cash from Accel.  Kayak's press release notes that they'll be using their war chest for their upcoming marketing blitz and expansion into Europe.  I'm interested to see how their advertising campaign turns out.  Traditionally, the Travel Search Engines have relied on search engine marketing, PR, and word-of-mouth to drive traffic.  Whether a couple of million dollars from Kayak can make a dent in the marketing power of Orbitz, Hotwire, Expedia, and Travelocity (I've seen/heard advertising from all of the above in the past month) remains to be seen.  My hope is that the money that Kayak pours into the consumer's mind will legitimatize the entire travel search category.  As a wise man once said, "A rising tide lifts all boats."  More interesting in the deal is the suggestion of Kayak's European expansion.  Mobissimo has been leading the pack in terms of sheer number of airlines searched; and SideStep has an extremely slick UK interface.  My guess is that Kayak will need to simultaneously expand internationally and grow their domestic market to justify whatever absurd valuation they were able to wrest out of Accel (anyone want to take a guess?).

From a consumer perspective, it seems to me that Kayak has been stagnating 2006, compared to their watershed 2005.  Kayak's been releasing a lot of features for Buzz, but I don't see Buzz taking hold as a product.  Even with a Virgin Atlantic contest to entice people to create trip ideas, the number of trips is mediocre (only about ~5000 trips) and the content is usually sparse.  Additions to the Hotel search are nice, but the interface is still very geeky-looking and not as pretty as most online travel agents.  On the other hand, Mobissimo launched a very interesting activities search that allows users to search for places based on what they want to do.  And SideStep released an awesome activities search that allows users to search for activities--like parasail rides and Las Vegas shows--at their travel destinations.

From my limited view into the business perspective, Kayak has made a couple of smart moves.  Even though I distrust distribution deals, Kayak is the leader of the pack in terms of number and volume.  More importantly, Kayak has been operating its own self-serve ad network for almost a year now. That asset could be very imporant, though it's hard to tell from the outside.

Overall, I think that any investment in travel search is probably good, since it's an active disruptive technology that's gaining legitimacy  And, Kayak is a very strong player, which has grown from nothing to become a major player in less than 2 years.  I'm sure there will be more on which to comment this summer!

AOL+Travelocity: Where was Kayak?

According to this article in the Motley Fool and in other places on the Web, Travelocity and AOL have renewed and expanded their long-standing marketing agreement for another two years.  Most articles have focused on AOL's battle with Google.  I'm standing around wondering: where is Kayak?

As background, in November 2004, AOL made a minority investment in Kayak and agreed to promote the young travel search engine on its network.  On AOL's comparison shopping site, Kayak still powers the sleek-looking Pinpoint Travel.  However, darned if I can find a link anywhere from AOL.com promoting Pinpoint Travel!  Industry rumor suggests that a large portion of Kayak's traffic came/comes from Pinpoint.  So what's up?  Why did AOL sign a partnership with Travelocity instead of their bargaining chip?  Or, for that matter, why does Yahoo, who bought travel meta-search company Farechase, still have an extended partnership with Travelocity?

I've always thought that the aggressiveness with which TSEs pursue partnerships is completely misguided.  Who thinks of Amazon or About for their travel needs?  Consumers know the right places to look for travel; and when they don't, they go to search in Google.  AOL is signing this deal as a marketing agreement, not as a play to dethrone established online travel agents.  Travelocity has a fat ad network and AOL has a 747-load of traffic.  Kayak's pipe is too small: they have a tiny ad network and still rely on Google for many ad placements.

I hope that Kayak and others abandon their hot pursuit of "big deals" and focus on the real opportunity identified by the article: even though 75% of users search on Travelocity, only 5% book.  Build a better travel application for travelers and the travel search engines won't need to worry about distribution partners.

FlySpy?

For some reason, this article about FlySpy popped up on my Bloglines today, even though it was posted in February.  No matter. [Thought I must post about my love/hate relationship with Bloglines soon]

Unfortunately, the FlySpy Web site has no information on it, though I signed up for updates.  I'm not sure what FlySpy will do that's interesting.  The Travel Search Engines--SideStep, Kayak, and Mobissimo--have all of the data to make an application like this, since they have the broadest picture of fares.  However, even one of the OTAs could do a decent version of a FlySpy.  Also, I'm not sure how FlySpy will get this data long-term.  I can assure you that the airlines will shut him the heck down as soon as he starts to gather a decent amount of traffic.

Nonetheless, the concept itself is very interesting: I'd love to see data across many days to make a decision when it's cheapest to fly. Who knows, maybe FlySpy will turn out to be somethin' way interesting.  I'll let y'all know when I get the invite to the Beta =)

Mobissimo releases Activity Search

Thanks to VerticalSearch.net, I noticed today that Mobissimo has added an Activity Search.  Mobissmo does an excellent job of keeping on the cutting edge: they're the only travel search engine (TSE) with a blog, they pioneered the One Box Search, and MobiCombo does some neat things by combining fares from different airlines.  Of course, to create all of these neat features, they've sacrificed on the user interface side: SideStep, Kayak, and even FareChase all offer superior filtering capabilities.  Activity Search is much like their previous features: whereas the spirit of the offering is good, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

Activity Search Homepage

From the homepage, you can select your origin, choose an activity type, supplemented by a keyword.  So far, so good, although I bet user testing would have shown that users didn't understand what the "keyword" box means.  I assume that it's to narrow down your results, but I bet people type in the darndest things.

Activity Search Intermediate Page

Once you press enter, you get a page like this.  It shows you wine tasting destinations from around the world and what regions are nearby.  Clearly there are some serious problems with data, as "Cleveland, USA" is the choice for the Niagara Valley, even though both Buffalo, Rochester, and Toronto are much closer.  Also, both San Francisco and Oakland show up for Sonoma/Napa.  A user from JFK might not know that these airports are right across the Bay from each other.  It would have been nice if I could have used something to narrow down my choices.  For example, I'd like to see wine regions only in the United States.  Or, I might only want to see beaches in South America.  Such a long list, especially with bad/repeated data, suggests that I'm still going to have to look somewhere else to supplement my data.

Activity Search Results Page

 

Now this is cool!  Mobissimo is the only TSE that will display results to multiple destinations simultaneously!  Of course, I can't filter out the results, so the result list is completely unwieldy--it was bad enough with one location, let alone three different metro areas!

So, is my life any better than this, being a wino from the East Coast?  I don't think so.  I probably know where all of the top wine tasting locations are.  What I don't probably know is: what are the nearby cities, what are the good hotels to stay in, should I rent a car, are there other cool activities like balloon rides I should look at, do I need to book tastings at my favorite wineries in advance?  All Mobissimo has done is given a glorified list of activities associated with locations.  The real challenge is to build an activity trip around the air, hotel, and car.  A true activity search would show travelers what they can actual do in a region and suggest activities.

Now, I do think that there is some value to the social aspect of activities tagging, especially for the long tail (did you know that there are lots of wineries popping up in Minnesota?)   However, in order to make it truly useful, Mobissimo would have to build other community features to allow users to share stories, reviews, etc.

In the end, Mobissimo's heart was in the right place: it's very difficult for users to find the right kind of information they need when they only have a general idea of where to go (e.g. "I want to go somewhere warm in February and I only want to spend $2000.")  The travel search company that gets it right will be the one that looks at user problems on a high level and drills down into applications that solve specific component problems.  I disagree with Brian Smith: we're still a long, long way from having someone developing a true online travel agent.

And finally, I have to ask: what's the deal with the sperm in the Mobissimo Logo? =)

World163.com: Imitation is the sincerest form of identity theft

World163.com has launched a travel search engine in China.  Unfortunately, the site is a complete rip off of SideStep -- everything was copied, including the About Pages, sections that don't work (like Deals and Vacations), and even the graphics for internal ads.  Crazy stuff!  Clearly World163.com made the right decision in choosing SideStep, the most visually attractive search engine, but this kind of imitation seems to be wrong.

Personally, I'm very liberal on all aspects of intellectual property: I think patents (in general) are bad, that companies (like Google) spend too much time protecting dubious trade secrets, and that modern copyright law has gone awry.  In my utopia, there would be no reason for IP laws of any sort and ideas would flow freely.  But, instances like this suggest that in the practical world, there must be at least some check on direct identity theft.  If SideStep ever wanted to launch in China, they'd be competing with. . . well, themselves!  Time to send them lawyers in.

Kayak & SideStep Updates

This darn company launch and move has eaten into my blogging time.  A couple of important updates:

• Kayak last week released some neat new features to Buzz (plus a new logo).  They're also making some noise today about inking deals with Pegasus and Otedis.  I don't find the hotel deals super interesting, as the primary value proposition of meta search engines is to disintermediate the evil intermediaries and bring consumers direct to suppliers.
• SideStep has announced their move into the UK market.  I haven't been able to find a press release and I don't really know what the official URL will be yet.  I look forward to seeing the country-specific implementation. Yay!  Entering new markets is a key to sustained growth.
• Herr Smith at ComparisonEngines.com reports that SideSteps's implementation at Amazon Travel has been completed.  I don't see them getting a ton of business for this deal, but scoring the biggest name in online shopping certainly won't hurt.

At some point, I'll comment more on all of the above at some point.

Recommendations for SideStep's New CEO

As previously reported here, SideStep (officially) has a new CEO: Rob Solomon, former GM of Yahoo! Shopping. As a shareholder of SideStep and a big fan of their service, I'm excited that they've finally got a captain at their helm, who seems to have comparison shopping experience.  Brian Smith of ComparisonEngines.com has a nice write-up, so I won't rehash the obvious.  I'm going to be a bit precocious and make three recommendations, plus a bonus, for Mr. Solomon to consider when he starts his new job. 

• Focus on company-building, not liquidity - God knows a liquidity even would be great, but I'd rather see SSTP go public and buy Cendant than the other way around. To that end. . .
• Build a customer experience - all current travel search engines act like third-page companies. They buy customers from AdWords and resell them to their partners, siphoning some profit off the top. I don't believe you can scale link arbitrage for hyper-growth. SideStep should differentiate itself from its competitors -- Kayak, Yahoo, Orbitz, etc. -- with a mind-blowing customer experience. With a higher-lifetime value for customers, a company can bid higher on keywords and get into a very profitable virtuous circle.
• Act like a rules-changing startup - travel search changes the rules.  Traditional companies worry about converting browsers into buyers; Web companies built around CPC must help browsers find things.  The difference is subtle, but important.  SideStep has already dabbled with the AJAX-enabled SmartSort.  Do some other useful AJAX tools.  Play around with blogs and wikis.  Incorporate tags into the search.  There are a lot of neat toys to play with: see what works!
• Bonus (just for SS) - Do something with the SideStep Toolbar - the Toolbar is a unique asset with tons of (very happy!) users.  Do something awesome with it.  (Maybe connected to my first point?)

Congratulations, Mr. Solomon!  I look forward to seeing what you'll do with SideStep.

Technorati Tags: SideStep, Rob Solomon

SideStep will name Rob Solomon as new CEO

According to Comparison Engines, Travel Weekly reported that SideStep has a new CEO, Rob Solomon, the GM of Yahoo! Shopping.  I couldn't find an official press release, but I've heard the rumors from several people now.  From the Travel Weekly article:

SideStep usually completes searches in seconds, but it took eight months for the travel metasearch engine to complete its search for a new CEO.
...
The search-engine firm began its CEO hunt at the end of April, when founder and then-CEO Brian Barth left the post. In the interim, Russell Lemelin handled those duties on an acting basis when he moved up from the CFO post.

When Barth stepped down last year, the company stated that it was time to take SideStep to the “next level” and there has been speculation that privately held SideStep might be considering entering the IPO market.

Mr. Solomon seems like a solid choice for SideStep, with great experience in online shopping and a brief stint in travel at Cendant.  There's an informative interview with him here.  I look forward to seeing how he'll transform SideStep.  Of course, I have my opinions on what he should do.

Technorati tags: SideStep.com, Rob Solomon

Kayak Updates Buzz

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Kayak about how they updated Buzz to include e-mail alerts.  The Kayak Buzz Alerts are essentially self-created e-mail deals.  In their own words:

Consumers can now receive personalized Kayak Buzz Alerts via email by clicking on the get fare alerts link on the homepage or by visiting your Kayak Profile. Register alerts by specifying departure airport or city; region (World, US, Europe, Caribbean, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia/Oceania); theme (ski, golf and gambling/casinos); maximum price; and frequency of emails (daily or weekly).

From a business perspective, this seems like a great sticky feature: it keeps people using your site as their hub to find deals.  From a user perspective Buzz has its pluses and minuses.