Friday's Travel InsideOut

Hold onto your hats because Microsoft's take in the Yahoo deal may be less than meets the eye. And, anyway, as travel advertisers mull the value proposition, does anyone know how to spell d-i-s-t-r-a-c-t-i-o-n?

Advertising Age: Sorry, Microsoft Will Not 'Own 30% of the Search Market:' Now that the Yahoo deal is finally done, many observers seem to think Microsoft's new search business will be just like Google's -- only a bit smaller.

Specifically, they think that Google has 65% of the market and Microsoft will have 30%, so Microsoft's search business will basically be half the size of Google's. Read more

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TripAdvisor, like everyone else, realizes that organic is the trend in almost every supermarket that you see, but does it translate into a tasty growth strategy for TripAdvisor Flights?

Dennis Schaal Blog: TripAdvisor Answers Back, Infers Fly.com Who?: Brian Saltzburg, a former Travelocity guy who is general manager of new initiatives at TripAdvisor, took great umbrage at my post yesterday, Fly.com Toe-to-To With TripAdvisor Flights. Read more

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Orbitz Worldwide’s ebookers re-upped with Amadeus through the end of 2012 for global distribution system (GDS) services, complete with the usual array of incentive agreements and shortfall penalties.

Securities and Exchange Commission Item 1.01. Entry Into A Material Definitive Agreement: On July 28, 2009, ebookers Limited, a wholly-owned, indirect subsidiary of Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. (the “Company”), and Amadeus IT Group S.A. (“Amadeus”) entered into an amendment (the “Amendment”) to the Global Access Agreement, dated January 1, 2004 (the “Agreement”), extending the term of the Agreement to December 31, 2012. Under the Agreement, as amended, Amadeus provides certain of the Company’s ebookers websites with access to travel supplier content, including air, hotel and car reservation information. The Company receives incentive payments based on the number of reservation segments it processes annually through Amadeus. Read more

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So, with its bid for Frontier Airlines, Southwest Airlines not only would cross a new frontier with a bunch of additional routes, but an acquisition could also be a big headache for United Airlines.

USA Today: United, beware! Southwest's bid for Frontier spells trouble, analysts say: United, beware. That's what several industry observers are saying after yesterday's surprise announcement that Southwest would make a bid to acquire Frontier Airlines. If its bid is successful, Southwest's acquisition of Frontier would eliminate a pesky competitor and give it access to new domestic and international routes Southwest does not currently fly. Still, "the biggest impact of Southwest’s potential bid to buy bankrupt Frontier Airlines may fall on United Airlines," writes Scott McCartney, "The Middle Seat" columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Read more

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Segmentation and re-packaging are the names of the game, as Rentalo.com evidently believes with its launch of three lodging websites with varied twists.

Arthur Frommer Online: Rentalo.com Creates 3 New Websites to Deal With 3 Kinds of Accommodations: Time was when international travelers made their lodgings choices from among either hotels or guesthouses -- nothing more. That process of selection has apparently become far more complex, and the big accommodations website, Rentalo.com (www.rentalo.com), has this week split its internet services into three different categories of housing. Though they have retained an overall website of all their products for those who can understand it, they have created three different subsidiary websites, each one containing several detailed groupings of accommodations that fall under each of the three headings. So if you're still able to follow me, here are the three new websites for you to consult, apparently an improvement on the former single site. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

TripAdvisor Answers Back, Infers Fly.com Who?

Brian Saltzburg, a former Travelocity guy who is general manager of new initiatives at TripAdvisor, took great umbrage at my post yesterday, Fly.com Toe-to-Toe With TripAdvisor Flights.

Saltzburg didn't trash Fly.com specifically, but he made some pointed remarks about what he characterized as TripAdvisor Flights' organic-growth strategy versus those competitors which grow through unsustainable marketing spend.

Hint, hint: I think he was referring to Fly.com.

After all, Travelzoo reported this week that it spent $9.6 million in marketing in the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter, an increase of $2 million from the second quarter of 2008. And, Travelzoo attributed much of the jump to "a $914,000 increase" in Fly.com marketing.

But, first, here's Saltzburg's main beef.

Saltzburg, who heads up the TripAdvisor Flights metasearch effort, argued that the data which I used from Compete Inc. in yesterday's post "grossly under-represents" the number of searchers and visitors using TripAdvisor Flights and wrongly gives the impression that the gap between the TripAdvisor metasearch effort and Fly.com is surprisingly narrow.

The TripAdvisor official added that the Compete portrait of the metasearch market "doesn't accurately represent the trajectory of our business."

Michael Redbord , a travel analyst for number-cruncher Compete, told me yesterday that in an effort to get an apples to apples comparison between TripAdvisor Flights and competitors like Fly.com, Kayak/SideStep and Bing Travel, Compete measured traffic that came directly to domains like TripAdvisor.com/flights and TripAdvisor.com/cheapflights and didn't take into account searchers and visitors that arrived from "third-party lead generators."

Those lead generators, I believe, include Expedia Inc. units in the TripAdvisor Media Network, including SeatGuru, CruiseCritic and SmarterTravel etc.

Hence, that may be part of the reason behind what TripAdvisor perceives as a larger-than-advertised gap between TripAdvisor and Fly.com, both of which launched their metasearch offerings within a few weeks of one another in February.

Although TripAdvisor regularly boasts about its "more than 25 million monthly visitors," Saltzburg, citing competitive reasons, declined to disclose any numbers about TripAdvisor Flights.

However, Saltzburg did say that the number of searches conducted through TripAdvisor Flights in the second quarter was "significantly higher" than the 2.4 million that Fly.com disclosed.

Asked for Fly.com's take on the numbers and TripAdvisor's point that the gap is wider than Compete portrayed, Brian Clark, general manager of search products at Travelzoo, said: "Other data show Fly.com moving up the ranks as well. Hitwise shows Fly.com as the #18 most popular website under Travel – Agencies for June, which was only our 5th month of operation, and only slightly behind Bing."

Clark added: "I'm not sure where Hitwise puts TripAdvisor Flights. We’ve asked them where that site is in their rankings and they said they would 'look at the site.'”

Meanwhile, Saltzburg went on to show why he considers TripAdvisor Flights to be a different beast than its competitors.

"We are on a slow and steady growth trajectory that we feel great about," he said, adding that TripAdvisor measures itself against major OTAs and not against most of the metasearch crowd.

Saltzburg said TripAdvisor's strategy, unlike unidentified others (hint, hint) is to grow TripAdvisor Flights organically, to leverage the TripAdvisor Media Network, and to build the offering in a sustainable manner.

He claimed TripAdvisor Flights has used paid advertising to attract merely "a single-digit percentage" of its external traffic.

"We haven't had to invest negatively in our business," Saltzburg said, referring to companies who allegedly tear down profits to garner traffic.

Putting the TripAdvisor Flights-Fly.com faceoff into context, Travelzoo spokeswoman Mindy Joyce noted that "Expedia Inc. is a much larger company than Travelzoo Inc. -– over 35x larger ($2.9B to $80M annual revenues). They have many more resources which will help them drive traffic to TripAdvisor.

"With that said," Joyce continued, "we do have over 10 million active U.S, subscribers who receive deals from Travelzoo that drive traffic to Fly.com directly, and with recent fare calendar enhancements using Fly.com technology, Travelzoo e-mail subscribers have new tools that help finding airfares easier than with any other site. We are using the tools that we have very effectively."

Joyce pointed to Fly.com's 85 percent growth in traffic from May to June as evidence of Travelzoo's leveraging of its subscriber base.

"It does make us a highly relevant player in the space, only 5 months after we launched," Joyce added.

So, is Fly.com's growth strategy, replete with its marketing spend, a sustainable endeavor?

I went for an answer to someone renowned in the travel industry for having a point of view.

And, Steve Hafner, the CEO of Kayak, inferred that the jury is out on Fly.com's marketing strategy.

"I really wouldn't know if it's sustainable or not," Hafner said. "We spend a lot more and it's been sustainable."

Meanwhile, like TripAdvisor, Kayak has its eyes on other issues and competitors.

Said Hafner, "Overall, I'm not terribly interested in Fly.com, TripAdvisor or Bing. I'm much more interested in navigating a potential Google entry."

I blogged about where I thought Google was trending in The Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0.

Hafner has a somewhat different take on Google's possible entry.

Fodder for another day:)

Fly.com Toe-to-Toe with TripAdvisor Flights

Travelzoo's Fly.com is displaying surprising strength in metasearch when measured against TripAdvisor's flight-search tool in terms of unique searchers and unique visitors when you consider that Travelzoo is starting from a much smaller base.

TripAdvisor flights and Fly.com were launched within a couple of weeks of one another in February.

In dueling presentations with financial analysts this week, Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said TripAdvisor's flight metasearch offering is performing "extraordinarily well," with its searches exceeding the 2.4 million in June which Travelzoo attributed to Fly.com during the Travelzoo conference call.

Khosrowshahi said he wouldn't release TripAdvisor flights' numbers, but I will detail some. Please note that Travelzoo cited "searches" and I will detail "unique searchers." Here are some numbers that the travel team at Compete Inc. put together for me:

• Unique searchers in June: Kayak/SideStep 7,263,159; Bing Travel 1,525,604, TripAdvisor Flights 1,066,847 and Fly.com 913,637.

Compete travel analyst Michael Redbord puts Fly.com's strength in perspective.

"Compared to Fly.com, when you consider the pre-existing monthly traffic delta between respective owners Travelzoo and TripAdvisor, you're talking 4 million versus 12 million uniques (Compete June numbers)," Redbord says. "The opportunity for TA to leverage its existing engaged user base is probably at least 3 times as large as Travelzoo leveraging its own to drive traffic to Fly.com."

In terms of monetizing metasearch, the number of total searches is a more relevant metric than unique searchers or unique visitors. The number of searches that a unique searcher might conduct can vary widely from website to website.

But, Compete's unique searcher numbers, if they are to be believed, portray some better-than-expected Fly.com strength in relation to its competitors.

And, Compete's June numbers place Fly.com ahead of TripAdvisor flights in terms of unique visitors, 1,257,037 to 1,241,229. Again, that shows some unexpected muscle from Fly.com, a sort of David versus Goliath story.

Fly.com and metasearch is a key part of Travelzoo's growth strategy, along with subscriber growth for its deal newsletters. As part of that subscriber growth strategy, Travelzoo began publishing show and event advertising in its North America newsletters and is starting to do likewise in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

With the kind of unique searcher numbers and total searches that Fly.com is starting to post, it looks like Fly.com has the potential to fly.

Travelzoo reported that it spent $9.6 million in marketing in the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter, an increase of $2 million from the second quarter of 2008. And, Travelzoo attributed much of the jump to "a $914,000 increase" in Fly.com marketing.

Thus, Fly.com already is a player.

After all, the advertising/media business is hot.

TripAdvisor revenue accounted for about 10 percent of Expedia Inc. revenue in the second quarter.

Now, you know why the rise of metasearch start-ups seemingly is endless while the online travel agency business is saturated.

Expedia Mulls Negotiating with Hotels About New York City Tax Law

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said this morning that the online travel company is considering how to react to New York City's new law, slated to become effective in September, which targets hotel remarketers for occupancy taxes on their service fees.

Khosrowshahi told analysts that Expedia was considering:

• Passing along the higher hotel taxes to consumers, which “we think would be a really bad thing.”

• Talking to hotels about adjusting their margins to compensate for the tax.

• Or Expedia itself absorbing the cost.

With hotels facing their own pitched challenges in this economic climate, I doubt it is welcome news that Expedia, a powerhouse in online hotel sales, may attempt to push its increaesed tax obligations on the lodging industry.

Khosrowshahi said tacking on a new fee for consumers would hurt its competitiveness with hotel websites.

The Expedia Inc. CEO said no determinations have been made regarding which approach to take.

Khosrowshahi added that Expedia's hotel volumes in New York City are so substantial that any loss of business for Expedia in the city would hurt tourism dollars in New York City.

One "option" that Expedia is not considering is dropping out of the New York City hotel market as it, and other online travel companies, did in relatively tiny Columbus, Ga.

Khosrowshahi's statements came as the Business Travel Coalition released a "Dear Mayor Bloomberg" letter, urging the city to repeal the new law.

The letter stated: "Industry stakeholders were not given an opportunity to provide expert comment on this new law. The legal obligations, accounting complexities and audit and compliance requirements alone are overwhelming to contemplate. Add higher taxes to that and you have a recipe for economic disaster for NYC as a business travel and meetings destination. Organizations worldwide will drive business to other cities because of this new tax. NYC hotels will lose existing business during an unparalleled downturn in business travel demand; the city will lose jobs and revenues."

In other business travel news, Khosrowshahi said Expedia Inc. sees huge potential in corporate travel and has been running its Egencia unit as "a break-even business."

However, Khosrowshahi said he would be surprised if Egencia didn't become profitable in 2010.

Unlike the leisure travel business, where bookings come quick, Khosrowshahi said the corporate travel business is a protracted, drawn-out affair characterized by months of dealing with RFPs, wooing corporate clients and implementations in a "war of attrition" with competitors.

He added that corporate travel has "huge" strategic potential for Expedia, and expressed satisfaction that Expedia is successfully scaling the business.

Thursday's Travel InsideOut

Oh, those doubters. Both the street and TheStreet.com express doubts about the Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, pointing to the distraction factor and the lack of “boatloads” of dough up-front payment for Yahoo. As the process unfolds, will travel companies place their confidence in Yahoo/Bing advertising?

The Street.com: Against the Grain: Buy Google: Marek Fuchs tells traders not to punish Google reflexively. View It

The Wall Street Journal: For Bartz, Some Potential Pitfalls Arise: Yahoo Inc. confirmed it will replace its search and search-advertising technology with offerings from Microsoft Corp., a long-awaited deal that could help the companies more effectively compete with Google Inc. Read more

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Now that Microsoft and Yahoo are cozying up to take on Google, what will that mean for Yahoo partner Travelocity and Microsoft subsidiary Bing Travel? Will it lead to a clash of online travel agency versus metasearch engine?

Dennis Schaal Blog: Bing-Yahoo Alliance Could Be Long-Term Issue for Travelocity: The ink barely is dry on the Yahoo-Microsoft search partnership in which Yahoo will use Bing technology as the default search engine on Yahoo websites and will lead both companies' sales efforts on CPC advertising. Read more

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Was it overkill when American Airlines filed suit against a former middle manager who took a similar job at Delta? After an adverse opinion, American moved to dismiss its own suit.

Travel Weekly: American moves to dismiss lawsuit against former employee: American filed a court motion to dismiss a lawsuit against a former corporate manager who left the airline to work for Delta in a similar position. Read more

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In fallout from the swine flu mess, Mexico City is offering travelers an unusual perk -– medical coverage.

Los Angeles Times: Mexico City offers travel insurance for tourists: Officials in Mexico City hope to lure skittish tourists with unusual bait: complimentary health insurance. Under a new program, tourists who stay in the city’s hotels are eligible for free coverage for emergency medical care, hospital stays, prescription drugs and ambulance services. Read more

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IATA says the outline for airlines appears "bleak" as cargo loads fell even faster than passenger numbers in June.

Yahoo Finance/Reuters: UPDATE 1-Airlines carry less cargo, fewer people in June-IATA: GENEVA, July 30 (Reuters) - Airlines carried 16.5 percent less cargo and 7.2 percent fewer people in June than the same month a year ago, with no sign yet of the global recession lifting, an industry body said on Thursday. Read more

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Major carrier Continental Airlines, playing catch-up with its low cost carrier rivals, is channeling some new mojo by installing satellite TV in seatbacks.

USA Today: Continental installing live satellite TV on planes: Venturing where only low-cost carriers have gone before, Continental (CAL) has become the first big legacy airline to offer satellite TV, a move that could push its peers to follow suit at a time when competition is the fiercest it's been in years. Read more

Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Bing-Yahoo Alliance Could Be Long-Term Issue for Travelocity

The ink barely is dry on the Yahoo-Microsoft search partnership in which Yahoo will use Bing technology as the default search engine on Yahoo websites and will lead both companies' sales efforts on CPC advertising.

I have few solid answers at this point, but only questions about what this might mean for Travelocity, which is the air, car and hotel provider for Yahoo Travel.

As you know, when Microsoft launched Bing, it integrated Bing Travel (Farecast), the metasearch and advertising/media business that Microsoft acquired, into the Bing search engine.

A new Yahoo-Microsoft website outlines some of the terms of this new search alliance.

Among the key planks:

• "Microsoft's Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft's AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter's automated auction process.

• Yahoo! will innovate and 'own' the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology."

This latter element presumably is a key safeguard for Travelocity regarding what might happen to the Yahoo-Travelocity contractual relationship. That is, Yahoo will "own the user experience" on Yahoo sites and undoubtedly maintain its contractual home page link to Yahoo Travel, aka Travelocity.

But, in my opinion, this new Bing-Yahoo alliance greatly buffs up Bing Travel -- and also helps Bing Travel partner Orbitz -- because Bing-Yahoo will get about 30 percent of the U.S. search market compared to Google's roughly 65 percent.

So, six months or so from now, when consumers search for New York to San Francisco flights from the Yahoo home page using Bing search technology, one can only wonder how Yahoo will handle the display.

Will it be branded Yahoo but look like this with a link to Farecast's predictive technology?

Will the search display integrate Yahoo Travel in a way that is absent now?

Today, a New York to San Francisco air search on Yahoo displays Yahoo Travel as the fourth organic search result.

The prominence that Bing Travel gets in Bing search results is absent for Travelocity when consumers use the current Yahoo search box for travel queries.

As a company that specializes in metasearch and facilitated search, Bing Travel may have an edge over Travelocity through the Bing-Yahoo alliance because Travelocity, unless it enters travel search in new ways, focuses most of its efforts on its role as an online travel agency, although it, too, is trying to build its advertising/media business.

However, the Yahoo-Bing alliance may benefit Travelocity, too, in the short term, as advertisers welcome a viable alternative to Google.

As you may recall, there were some people who accused Travelocity of killing FareChase by offering Yahoo a sweeter deal a few months ago and convincing a restructuring Yahoo to drop its own FareChase metasearch offering.

So, I wonder if, a few years from now, we might look back at today's Microsoft-Yahoo alliance as a harbinger of the phasing out of the Travelocity-Yahoo relationship.

Nothing on this front is certain, of course, but I am sure that I am not the only person today who thought about this type of scenario.

Meanwhile, today's Microsoft-Yahoo news means that Google undoubtedly will be dusting off plans for the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0.

Along with Twitter yesterday introducing a search box of its own on a new Twitter home page, the past couple of days have ample potential for disruption.

Wednesday's Travel InsideOut

Does Twitter's new home page disintermediate deal publishers a tad? The entire travel industry -– airlines, hotels, car rental firms, cruise lines, wholesalers, and destinations eventually will take note of the change that Twitter made to its home page yesterday, putting “search” front and center. All of these sectors eventually will be searching for ways to respond.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Twitter Travel Search: the Start of Something Big: Twitter relaunched its home page to emphasize "search," and the impact will reverberate for travel, financial services, lawn mowers -- you name it. Read more

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It’s a busy news day with the Twitter news above and this Bing-Yahoo development, too. A search partnership, which instantly makes Microsoft Bing a player, may be welcomed by travel advertisers as a hedge against the Google behemoth.

TechCrunch: Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Imminent: Analysts Weigh In: As we first reported yesterday, Microsoft and Yahoo are on the verge of announcing a complicated search and search marketing alliance that will combine the no. 2 and no. 3 players in search into something that may have a chance of competing with Google (although combined they will still have less than half of Google’s 65% or so search market share). The deal will be announced shortly after signing, and could come as early as today (Wednesday). Read more

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Jay Witzel is out as president and CEO of Carlson Hotels Worldwide.

Finance and Commerce: Joly takes over Carlson hotels: Minnetonka-based Carlson, parent company of Carlson Hotels Worldwide, announced a reshuffling Tuesday that will give Hubert Joly, president and CEO of the lodging, restaurant, travel and marketing giant, leadership of Carlson’s hotel business. Read more

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Barry Diller, the man who controls Expedia Inc. and IAC, is up to something again in the media business, pledging to "bridge the gap between traditional television and the Internet." Expedia meets Home Shopping Network meets YouTube?

Business Week: Diller, Silverman: Expect the Unexpected: You can go blind trying to keep track of Barry Diller's many twists and turns. The 67-year-old former TV programming wunderkind started as the ABC (DIS) program executive who brought America the Movie of the Week; became a Hollywood mogul when he green-lit Steven Spielberg and his Indiana Jones franchise for Paramount Pictures (VIAB); bolted to the studios, where he correctly divined that the Big Three TV world order was falling apart and launched Fox Broadcasting (NWS), which began fracturing TV's viewing audience. Along the way, Diller had a hand in perfecting the notion of online shopping when he ran QVC and then put online travel and concert booking into a higher gear after buying Expedia (EXPE) and Ticketmaster (TKTM). Read more

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A lodging industry analyst compares current RevPar woes to the aftermath of 9/11 and the pundit is pretty glum about the pace of a recovery.

Yahoo Finance/The Wall Street Transcript: Lodging Industry RevPAR Declines Worst Ever: All Segments Down Significantly and No Upturn Until 2011: n the following brief excerpt from just one of the 10 detailed interviews in the 44 page report, Lodging industry expert Smedes Rose discusses the outlook for the Lodging Industry and for the REITs specializing in that sector and picks high return stocks with sustainable dividends for investors in this industry. Read more

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Is Orbitz a phoenix rising or a company rolling a rock uphill in its attempt to build a strong hotel business?

Dennis Schaal Blog: Is Orbitz Poised for a Priceline-like Comeback?: I reported yesterday how Barney Harford, the Orbitz CEO six months or so into his tenure, is stirring things up at 500 W. Madison St., Chicago, in trying to come to grips with building the Orbitz hotel business. Read more

Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Twitter Travel Search: the Start of Something Big

Twitter relaunched its home page to emphasize "search," and the impact will reverberate for travel, financial services, lawn mowers -- you name it.

Twitter announced the new home page on its blog today.

If you are a travel company and not on Twitter, the new home page may change your thinking fast.

If you run a travel company, whether you are involved in social media or not, this will impact your business.

If you are a deal publisher like Travelzoo, Smarter Travel, Cruise Critic, Travelscream, getaroom.com or Voyij, you have new competition because companies can post their deals without you.

I entered the term Cancun vacation into the Twitter search box and found the following tweets about packages, resort credits, contests and a lot of irrelevant clutter, too.

Here's a sampling:

bestcancuntrip Tell us about your best family vacation experience and WIN 8days/7nights in CANCUN in a five-star Resort! http://ow.ly/ip26 about 3 hours ago

bestcancuntrip Cancun Family Vacation Package! Stay in 5-Star beachfront resort Club Internacional for $599, 5Days/4Nights http://ow.ly/ioYM about 5 hours ago

DunhillVacation travel tuesday continues with another great caribbean vacation. Secrets Resorts & Spas in Cancun. $200 resort credit http://ow.ly/iod9 about 10 hours ago

bestfares Little Peso Vacation Deal Of The Day 4 Night, 4-star Hyatt Regency Cancun Weekend Getaway Airfare Included From $339 PP http://bit.ly/M1fnd about 10 hours ago

So, if you are a travel company seeking to push some deals or tout your brand, or you are a consumer looking for bargains that aren't stale, Twitter search gives you an immediate, fresh way to go bargain hunting and soothe your wanderlust.

The new home page, with its emphasize on search, is an unsophisticated test that undoubtedly will evolve and force changes at search engines like Google and travel metasearch engines, too.

Airlines, hotels, cruise line, tour operators, wholesalers, car-rental companies -- take notice.

Contrast the Twitter Cancun vacation search with a Google search of the keywords.

The Google search for Cancun Vacations is dominated by paid ads -- something the Twitter search hasn't dabbled with yet.

The Google local business results for Cancun vacation include a map pinpointing the locations of the relevant businesses. There are no maps in the Twitter results for now, but the tweets provide more of a sense of immediacy than the Google results.

To its credit, the first Google organic search result after the local business results is a link to Orbitz for Cancun packages and hotels, a relevant result.

I'm not saying that one search mode -- Google's or Twitter's -- is better than the other (although Google has had a lot more time and resources to define its search algorithms, of course). Twitter is a newbie in all of this.

But, what I am saying is that Twitter search will change Google, Bing, Facebook and Kayak, as well as Carnival Cruise Lines, JetBlue, Hertz and Mark Travel.

Make your own list.

With the introduction of Twitter's new home page, we witnessed the start of something big today.

Is Orbitz Poised for a Priceline-like Comeback?

I reported yesterday how Barney Harford, the Orbitz CEO six months or so into his tenure, is stirring things up at 500 W. Madison St., Chicago, in trying to come to grips with building the Orbitz hotel business.

I spoke to a handful of analysts about Orbitz's prospects and they agreed that a rebound would take a protracted effort.

The Orbitz situation, in its broad outlines, sort of reminds me of Priceline's struggles when its stock was trading at $1.31 on Dec. 29, 2000. Orbitz Worldwide stock, trending upward, sits at $2.41 before this morning's open, a lowly figure when compared with Priceline's stock at $122.72.

I speculated a few weeks ago, that some sort of Orbitz-Kayak combination could be in the offing because Orbitz, with all of the consumer traffic that it draws, needs to leverage its potential in the advertising/media business.

One of the parties called my idea "ludicrous."

Alas, my ideas have been called worse.

But, there indeed was something to my speculation because Orbitz recently relaunched Trip.com, a facilitated-search vehicle, to take advantage of all those lookers who don't book.

In researching this post about Orbitz, I also learned that there was speculation late last year and early this year that Orbitz separately had talks with Priceline and American Express about merger agreements.

A Priceline combination with Orbitz might have helped Priceline expand into European and Asian markets that it has yet to penetrate.

However, I'm told that an Orbitz consolidation with American Express, which didn't lead to a contract signing, was much closer to fruition than the Orbitz discussions with Priceline.

Amex has yet to distinguish itself in the online travel arena -- far from it, actually. Perhaps its rumored talks with Orbitz were a bid to jump-start that effort.

However, the feeling I'm getting now from speaking with a handful of analysts is that nothing is imminent on the Orbitz consolidation front, including other scenarios such as an Expedia-Orbitz merger, a Travelocity-Orbitz marriage or a Kayak-Orbitz joining of forces, although all of these players undoubtedly have pondered these strategic combinations.

Tom Botts, a partner in Hudson Crossing, says there would be too much conflict in an Orbitz-Kayak merger because Orbitz "has staked out a position as a friend to many," including its relationships with Bing Travel, FareCompare and Kayak, among others.

Botts believes Orbitz will pursue a go-it-alone strategy for now.

Along the same lines, Soleil Securities analyst Jake Fuller believes an Orbitz-Kayak combo is not on the table, noting that Orbitz buying Kayak "wouldn't work."

With the Orbitz balance sheet loaded down with $652 million in debt and a market cap of $200 million, Kayak would need to access hard-to-obtain external capital if it were to ponder an Orbitz acquisition, Fuller said.

It's also unknown, Fuller said, whether the Blackstone Group, which controls Travelport and Orbitz, are in a selling frame of mind.

Another industry veteran, who declined to be identified, suggested that an Orbitz-Kayak merger would be a winner in terms of its potential in travel search and the media business, but some sort of paradigm shift would have to occur to make it financially feasible.

"Something would have to happen," this analyst said, mentioning that perhaps Blackstone would forgive some of Orbitz's debt for the right kind of deal.

Forrester Research travel analyst Henry Harteveldt says he doesn't see Orbitz combining with another online travel company like Priceline, Expedia or Travelocity because of antitrust reasons, but he could envision OTCs picking off parts of Orbitz Worldwide, such as ebookers or HotelClub, if OWW conducted a fire sales of its pieces.

"I think the Orbitz franchise is solid," Harteveldt says. "The challenge for them is to rethink their user experience. The shopping experience hasn't changed much since they launched."

Another analyst, who commented anonymously, said Orbitz must focus on generating enough free cash flow to pay down its debt much quicker than it has been doing.

He doesn't believe Orbitz, under Harford, whom he termed "the smartest guy in the room," will become insolvent, but could face a protracted struggle with its "product not becoming very big."

The up-side, this analyst said, is that Orbitz could rebound, if some of its hotel initiatives take hold, in two to three years.

Several analysts said it was too soon to tell whether Orbitz can make the kind of comeback that Priceline began to pull off some seven or eight years ago.

All were awaiting some hint of Orbitz's prospects from the release of its second quarter financial results Aug. 5, and wanted to assess OWW's results for the rest of 2009 before taking a position on OWW's fate.

Said Botts of Hudson Crossing: "I don't know enough yet to say if it is the phoenix rising."

Tuesday's Travel InsideOut

Is Orbitz CEO Barney Harford rolling a rock up a hill in the face of recessionary headwinds or is he finally making good on the company’s oft-promised, but never delivered effort to build a viable hotel business?

Travel Weekly: Orbitz on new track under Harford: Barney Harford, who had helped craft Expedia’s Asia-Pacific hotel business and served as a consultant to Kayak, walked into the perfect storm in early January when he signed on to replace Steve Barnhart as president and CEO of Orbitz Worldwide. Read more

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Separately, and using different tactics, Delta and United are doing everything they can to retain the allegiances of their most loyal, if sometimes fickle, customers.

Wall Street Journal: Delta Woos Elite Travelers: Delta Air Lines Inc. is expected to change its frequent-flier program to let travelers roll over extra elite-qualifying miles and credits from one year to the next. By allowing customers to roll over miles and credits that aren’t needed to reach a status level, the airline hopes to discourage travelers from splitting their loyalty among multiple airlines. Read more

Hudson Crossing Travel Industry Insight: United Actually Reduces a Fee. Yes, You Read that Correctly: Today, United Airlines announced they were dropping last-minute fees for Mileage Plus frequent-flyer award ticket redemption. Yes, this is not a misprint but a case of an airline actually dropping an irksome fee. Currently, non-elite Mileage Plus members are charged $100 to redeem within six days of travel and $75 within seven to twenty days. Read more

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Starwood understands that even Luxury Collection guests, known to romp from “magnificent desert retreats to breathtaking seaside villas,” can benefit from some social media love. That’s why Starwood is unveiling a “private community” platform for this jet-set guest segment.

Travolution: Starwood brand unveils online community service: The Luxury Collection, part of Starwood, has teamed up with private community ASMALLWORLD to unveil a travel community platform. Read more

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The hotel tax issue continues to hound online travel companies, as evidenced by developments in San Francisco, and now New York City’s looming hotel remarketer law has drawn the ire of traditional travel agents and wholesalers, as well.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Travelocity Pays $2.7 Million Hotel Tax to San Francisco: Travelocity paid $2.7 million to the City of San Francisco on July 23 as part of its obligation to "pay first" before being able to appeal the city's hotel tax assessment. Read more

Travel Weekly: New York City enacts tax on all resellers of hotel rooms: Opponents of a recently enacted hotel reseller tax in New York predicted last week that the measure would discourage travel sellers from booking rooms in the city and thus exacerbate the deep slump the Big Apple is seeing in its hospitality sector. Read more

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There’s momentum in Congress to ensure that certain meetings’ destinations don’t become victims of AIG-backlash syndrome.

MercuryNews.com: Reid tells agencies to end travel 'blacklist': LAS VEGAS—Nevada Sen. Harry Reid wrote to cabinet secretaries and the heads of all federal agencies on Monday to ask them to not rule out cost-effective destinations for meetings just because they are popular spots for tourists. Read more

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Through disparate offerings ranging from pool parties to its meetings business, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Vegas has notched remarkable occupancy numbers as it makes a splash with its Paradise Tower expansion at the height of this recession.

UpTake Travel Industry Blog: Hard Rock Hotel Gambles all it’s Chips on Paradise Tower: The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is placing a massive bet on the successful opening of the 490-room Paradise Tower expansion. And surprisingly enough, it looks like their gamble might just pay off. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Travelocity Pays $2.7 Million Hotel Tax to San Francisco

Travelocity paid $2.7 million to the City of San Francisco on July 23 as part of its obligation to "pay first" before being able to appeal the city's hotel tax assessment.

The payment covers what the city argues was Travelocity's outstanding hotel-tax obligation on the retail rate -- as opposed to the tax recovery charges Travelocity previously remitted to hotels on its net rate under the merchant model. The payment covers the period from the beginning of 2000 to the third quarter of 2008, including taxes, penalties and interest.

As I wrote, Expedia and its Hotwire unit already paid the city $35.6 million and Priceline wired over $3.4 million. Orbitz is believed to be in the assessment process.

The payments -- some $42.7 million -- do not "prove" that the three online travel companies ultimately will owe the city the tax. Instead, a Superior Court in Los Angeles ruled that San Francisco's pay-first ordinance was proper, and thus it did not decide the merits of the tax issue.

So, the utlimate outcome of the case is undecided. It would be premature to count out the OTCs because they've recorded their share of victories around the country.

Still, this has not been a great few months for the OTCs.

As I reported , Expedia reached a proposed settlement with Washington State consumers in a class-action suit that revolved around the way the OTC presented its "taxes and fees" in merchant model hotel sales.

The judge in the case earlier found that $184.5 million in damages would be "warranted" in the case. The actual amount of the settlement has not been disclosed.

And, in another downer for the OTCs, New York City recently adopted a law that taxes the service fees of hotel "remarketers" -- a provision that not only targets the OTCs, but traditional travel agents and wholesalers, as well.









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Monday's Travel InsideOut

Twitter, the social media site with the nebulous business model, apparently is getting set to make good on its pledge to start charging for premium services, including business accounts. In a move widely interpreted as a step in that direction, every Twitter page now has a Business link on the bottom, leading to Twitter 101, a business guide to Twitter. The business guide includes case studies, including the following one tracing the evolution of JetBlue’s use of Twitter.

Twitter: @JetBlue: It's Fun, But Does it Scale?: When JetBlue joined Twitter in the spring of 2007, it was one of the first major brands to do so. Today, the company has nearly a million of followers, and its account is often cited as an example of smart corporate twittering. But the company started out on Twitter with modest goals. It wanted to help customers. Read more

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Getaroom.com’s unpublished hotel discounts over the phone sound like a great idea so I dialed for dollars, so to speak, and put its value proposition to the test.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Getaroom.com's Phone Rates and Manner Fall Flat: I briefly and unscientifically tested the getaroom.com call center experience and wasn't impressed with its unpublished rates over the phone and its customer-service style.

Hotwire offered much steeper discounts for properties with the same star ratings and city areas in two instances, while getaroom.com's phone rate bested Hotwire's opaque rate by a few bucks in a third test. Read more

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With their Star Alliance collaboration given the green light, United and Continental plan to get very cozy in their technology relationship.

Travel Weekly: Continental, United to seek shared technology platform: Continental and United plan to forge a common information technology system as part of their new relationship as Star Alliance partners, Continental CEO Larry Kellner said. Read more

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Yahoo and Microsoft reportedly are moving closer to a search deal, an alliance that could positively impact Bing Travel if the partnership makes Bing a stronger competitor against Google.

Advertising Age: Do You Bing? Yahooers May Soon Search With Microsoft: NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. Read more

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Times are tough for the airline industry. But is it prudent to gouge your customers a bit more during the height of a recession by increasing checked bag fees?

Yahoo Finance/Reuters: AMR raises bag check fees for domestic flights: CHICAGO (Reuters) - AMR Corp (NYSE:AMR - News), parent of American Airlines, said on Friday it would raise by $5 the fee it charges to check a first or second bag on domestic flights. Read more

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Global distribution systems have their developer agreements, enabling third parties to build applications to their systems. But Farelogix, in making its Hawkeye point of sale application available for public download, did something completely different -- it released the application’s source code. Here's an update.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Open Source Experiment in Travel Industry a Modest Success: I was reading about open source Mozilla's challenges now that Google has entered the browser market with Google Chrome, and that reminded me that it was time to get an update about the travel industry's own open-source experiment. Read more

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In some quarters, swine flu concerns have subsided, but the problem promises still to be a thorn in the travel industry’s side. Britain recorded “a huge rise” in cases and started screening cruise passengers.

Times Online: Swine flu screening at UK airports amid fear that NHS could be overwhelmed: NHS intensive care services could be overwhelmed by a huge rise in swine flu cases, researchers have warned, as Britain’s port authorities started screening incoming passengers for the first time. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Open Source Experiment in Travel Industry a Modest Success

I was reading about open source Mozilla's challenges now that Google has entered the browser market with Google Chrome, and that reminded me that it was time to get an update about the travel industry's own open-source experiment.

As you may recall, four months ago travel distributor Farelogix kicked off Project Hawkeye, an open source point-of-sale application and made it available for free downloads.

Farelogix stepped up to the plate and gave away the desktop application's code and documentation in the hope that developers would build applications to it that the travel industry can share.

So far, 450 entities have registered for the Hawkeye source code and downloaded it, says Farelogix CEO Jim Davidson.

It's not entirely a selfless effort on Farelogix's part, of course, because it would hope to gain some customers and revenue by supporting the application, if companies approach it for an assist.

But, this is not a requirement: Companies can download the code for free, run with it, and innovate the hell out of it, just as so many developers did with Mozilla.

Project Hawkeye, with its open-source effort, is a big deal in the travel industry, which has been stifled by proprietary technology and what might be called partisan politics in the geekosphere.

Because companies or individuals can take the Hawkeye code without any further obligations to Farelogix, it is hard to gauge what they are doing with it, if anything.

But, this is what Farelogix knows so far, according to Davidson.

• Farelogix is engaged with three travel management companies which are developing their own highly customized versions of the application, tweaked to their own workflows.

• Some 10 companies have pinged Farelogix back with questions or issues with the code.

• All of the GDSs, which hold onto their own code as if it were the key to Iranian nuclear technology production, have downloaded Hawkeye, as have some airlines.

• Farelogix is aware that "a couple of other technology companies" are developing the code in some way, but the details are unknown. Davidson surmises that the fruits of their efforts may be public in some form in six months to a year.

• Meanwhile, Farelogix, which has developed a few new versions of the code since it was released March 26, is readying another major release of the application in September or October.

So, is Project Hawkeye a success or a failure?

Too soon to tell, really.

Davidson says Farelogix would have considered Hawkeye a success even if Hawkeye had hit 100 downloads -- let alone, 450.

So, the travel industry will have to wait to see if Farelogix's release of an open source desktop application will light the industry's innovation fires.

Hawkeye, a business application, assuredly will not become another Mozilla.

But, maybe Hawkeye will lead to further efforts to tear down the travel industry's "walled garden" -- and that would be a good thing.

Getaroom.com's Phone Rates and Manner Fall Flat

I briefly and unscientifically tested the getaroom.com call center experience and wasn't impressed with its unpublished rates over the phone and its customer-service style.

Hotwire offered much steeper discounts for properties with the same star ratings and city areas in two instances, while getaroom.com's phone rate bested Hotwire's opaque rate by a few bucks in a third test.

That being said, I can see how getaroom.com's value proposition would be attractive to some consumers.

As you may recall, getaroom.com is the brainchild of hotels.com founders Bob Diener and David Litman and, as I reported, their business model has raised eyebrows.

getaroom.com offers published rates on its website and then, for certain properties, advises consumers to "call for lower unpublished rates." Alas, it is a means for properties to off-load distressed inventory without publicizing their discounts and diluting their brands.

However, the website pitch to phone for lower rates certainly is a tip-off that the brands have a penchant for discounting.

So, I tested the getaroom.com value proposition on three hotels: the 3-star Hotel Rex in the Union Square West section of San Francisco; Swisshotel in the Magnificent Mile area of Chicago; and the Regal Sun in the Lake Buena Vista-downtown area of Orlando.

I compared:

-- getaroom.com's published website rates;

-- getaroom.com's unpublished phone rates;

-- hotels.com's published rates;

-- and Hotwire's unpublished rates.

For the Hotel Rex in San Francisco, getaroom.com's website published rate for an Aug. 4-6 stay was $160.50 per night, the same as the hotels.com published rate. getaroom.com's unpublished rate over the phone was $146.40, but Hotwire offered an unpublished rate of $113.00 from one of its unidentified hotel partners in the same section of the city.

Incidentally, while getaroom.com listed the Hotel Rex as a 3-star property, hotels.com, Expedia.com and Priceline.com showed it as a 3.5-star property, so I went with the 3.5-star rating for Hotel Rex to come up with the $113.00 Hotwire rate. Hotwire's 3-star rate was even lower, $79 per night.

But, perhaps this getaroom.com-Hotwire face-off is a tad unfair because it is a bit of an apples to grapefruits comparison.

Here's the difference: I phoned the getaroom.com call center and the agent, Todd, went into a spiel about how getaroom has it all over Hotwire because with Hotwire you don’t know the identity of the hotel before you book.

So, with Hotwire the consumer must place some trust in the company that its hotel ratings are accurate and that you won’t end up in a fleabag property.

Regarding the face-off, I was measuring the getaroom.com unpublished rate for one property versus Hotwire's entire roster of properties with the same star rating in the same section of the city. Obviously, Hotwire would have an advantage of scale.

Hotwire gives you the price up-front, and the system is a bit different with competitor Priceline.com, where you enter a bid and wait to see if your offer is accepted. And, with both Hotwire and Priceline you select the star rating and city area, but learn the hotel's identity only after booking.

I’ve often taken advantage of great unpublished rates on Priceline and Hotwire and feel comfortable with booking on both websites.

But, I believe there is a large subset of consumers who would feel much more comfortable getting a sometimes-smaller discount with getaroom.com over the phone than gambling that Priceline or Hotwire will put them in a suitable room.

Although Priceline and Hotwire usually offer hotels from household-name brands, at least with getaroom.com there is no mystery about which hotel consumers will end up in.

And, I also think that some consumers may be unaware that the unpublished rate they can get over the phone from getaroom.com may be substantially higher than if they booked at Priceline or Hotwire.

I continued my rate-testing for the 4-star Swisshotel in the Magnificent Mile section of Chicago. getaroom.com's published website rate for an Aug. 4-6 stay was $206.10 per night, and the hotels.com published rate was $229. getaroom.com's unpublished rate over the phone was $150.81, but Hotwire offered an unpublished rate for a 4-star property in the Magnificent Mile area of Chicago for $92.00, or about 38.7 percent cheaper than getaroom.com's unpublished rate.

In contrast, getaroom.com's unpublished phone rate of $57.72 per night at the 3.5 star Regal Sun in the Lake Buena Vista-downtown section of Orlando was cheaper than Hotwire's $62 rate for a 3.5-star property in that area on the same dates, Aug. 4-6. hotels.com and getaroom.com's website both displayed the same published rate, $66.60 per night.

So, score two big wins for Hotwire, and one narrow victory for getaroom.com.

I'd also like to make a couple of points about my experience in phoning the getaroom.com call center, which I did twice today. I didn't identify myself as a journalist, and passed myself off as an ordinary consumer looking to book a room.

Hey, I'm sleuthing for you, but I digress.

The first agent I spoke with, Todd, was congenial, but a bit pushy.

And, I understand why.

After all, call center distribution costs are higher for getaroom.com than the online channel, especially if the consumer attempts to engage the call center agent in conversation or wants to do some comparison shopping.

I had informed Todd that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay in San Franscisco or take a quick getaway to Orlando instead. So, after quoting me the unpublished rate for Hotel Rex in San Francisco, I said I wanted to find out the unpublished rate for a hotel in Orlando.

"OK, which hotel quickly?" he replied.

So, I felt a bit pressured and certain that the agent, anxious to make a booking and move on to the next customer, wasn’t about to go out of his way to satisfy my deal-hunting desires.

getaroom.com's call center is not a place for comparison-shopping, but a venue for wham-bam-thank-you-mam bookings.

Todd warned me, as did a second agent, Tammy, who likewise had a pleasant manner when I called again later to inquire about Swisshotel in Chicago, that I'd better book now because the rates might not be available if I phoned back in a couple of hours.

Thus, a little more pressure, and not a leisurely shopping experience.

So, I think getaroom.com, with its website and call center propositions, might be an effective way for some properties, particularly smaller ones, to put some heads in beds during slack periods.

But, I think many consumers looking for real "deals" will probably stay online rather than phone and find greener pastures and more substantial discounts elsewhere.

Friday's Travel InsideOut

It's probably not that effective for its marketing reputation that Orbitz lost two top marketing executives in the past two weeks.

AdAge: Orbitz Loses Its Two Top Marketing Execs: CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- The top two marketing executives at Orbitz have left the company only weeks after it named a new creative agency of record, an Orbitz spokeswoman confirmed. Read more

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The guff that TripAdvisor has received about fake reviews hasn’t dissuaded a tourism promotional body in the U.K. from talking to TripAdvisor about a new review initiative.

Travolution: TripAdvisor and VisitEngland in talks over user review strategy: VisitEngland has held discussions with TripAdvisor as part of its strategy to review the current accommodation grading scheme. Read more

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In an earlier proceeding, a judge found that $184.5 million was "warranted" in an Expedia breach of contract case. If a proposed settlement is half of that amount, then we’re still talking substantial dollars in Washington State.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Expedia Reaches Proposed Settlement in Washington State Consumer Class-Action: Expedia Inc. reached a proposed settlement with a certified class of consumers in Washington State related to hotel taxes and service fees.

The amount of the proposed settlement was not disclosed, but in late May, Superior Court Judge Monica Benton found that $184.5 million in damages, allegedly covering "services fees" collected from Feb. 18, 2003, to Dec. 11, 2006, "based on Expedia's breach of contract is warranted." Read more

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Are leisure destinations like Las Vegas and Orlando on some sort of governmental-meetings blacklist? What happens in Washington stays in …. Well, this sort of policy would be ridiculous.

UpTake Travel Industry Blog: Congress calls for Investigation of Federal Travel Blacklist: US House Representatives from Florida and Nevada have asked for an investigation to find out whether a travel blacklist bans government agencies from holding meetings in certain leisure-oriented and holiday resort cities. Read more

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With traffic down amidst a capacity cut, JetBlue notched a second quarter profit and expects to remain flying in the black for the rest of the year.

ATW Daily News: JetBlue finds profitable formula, expects full-year surplus: JetBlue Airways yesterday reported a $20 million second-quarter profit, reversed from a $9 million loss in the year-ago period, and said it expects to remain in the black in both the third and fourth quarters. Read more

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The FAA proposed mandatory repairs to some Boeing 777 aircraft, many of which are operated by American Airlines.

Wall Street Journal: FAA Seeks Mandatory Engine Fixes on Certain Boeing 777 Jets: U.S. aviation regulators, prompted by the 2008 crash landing of a British Airways Plc jetliner near London, proposed mandatory safety fixes Thursday intended to prevent ice accumulation inside the fuel systems of certain Boeing 777 aircraft. Such problems can lead to dangerous reductions in engine thrust. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Update 2: Travelzoo Rejoins the Twitteratti

It's official: Travelzoo's Twitter account is back online and in Twitter's good graces after an almost four-day timeout.

All is well in social media land.

At around 6:15 p.m. EST today, Travelzoo tweeted: "Tweeps! Travelzoo is baaaack! Thx for your patience! Deals coming your way soon!"

And, a minute later: "Big thumbs up to Twitter for fixing what the hacker did! You guys rock!"

Twitter rocks apparently, and the hacker not so much:)

Related posts: Update: Travelzoo's Twitter Account Hacked and Just Try To Get Someone from Twitter on the Phone

Travelzoo's Twitter-Interruptus

Expedia Reaches Proposed Settlement in Washington State Consumer Class-Action

Expedia Inc. reached a proposed settlement with a certified class of consumers in Washington State related to hotel taxes and service fees.

The amount of the proposed settlement was not disclosed, but in late May, Superior Court Judge Monica Benton found that $184.5 million in damages, allegedly covering "services fees" collected from Feb. 18, 2003, to Dec. 11, 2006, "based on Expedia's breach of contract is warranted."

In that earlier proceeding, Benton, hearing the case in Washington's King County, found that Expedia had breached its contract in a previous version of its Terms of Use regarding the way the online travel company collects taxes and service fees in merchant model hotel sales.

The breach finding apparently led to settlement talks.

On July 8, attorneys for the plaintiffs and Expedia signed a proposed settlement, which would satisfy remaining claims in the case.

The court is scheduled to hear a motion for preliminary approval of the settlement on Aug. 10.

The development follows procedural setbacks for Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline and Travelocity in San Francisco, where they were required to "pay first" before challenging assessments, and in Columbus, Ga. The latter two litigations, however, were brought by municipalities, and not by consumers, as was the case in the Washington State.

Thursday's Travel InsideOut

It’s definitely a tough thing to hack when your company’s Twitter account gets hacked and the Twitter help desk screens its phone calls.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Update: Travelzoo's Twitter Account Hacked and Just Try To Get Someone from Twitter on the Phone: I reported yesterday that Travelzoo's Twitter account was suspended.

Travelzoo spokeswoman Mindy Joyce told me today that the account, which has some 8,000 followers, was hacked by an unknown party on Sunday. Travelzoo couldn't even get into its own account, and the deal-publisher on Monday asked Twitter to suspend the account, which it did. Read more

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Shout-outs to the Budget Travel Blog and TripAdvisor for taking decidedly different angles in their bids to stimulate travel.

Budget Travel Blog: Should you take a staycation?: NO. Your mind won't be refreshed unless you change your routine. So get away from it all! Read more

PR NewsWire/Yahoo Finance: Photos: As Temperatures Heat Up, TripAdvisor Bares All Revealing Top 5 Naked Events and Top 5 Nude Beaches: NEWTON, Mass., July 23 /PRNewswire/ -- In honor of the recent Nude Recreation Week, TripAdvisor is bringing opportunities to go "au naturel" out into the light, from a massive skinny-dip to relaxing sans suit on sunny shores. TripAdvisor®, the world's most popular and largest travel community, today announced the top 5 naked events and top 5 nude beaches according to TripAdvisor editors and travelers. Read more

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United Airlines purposefully sought to ease into its introduction of its new credit card policy, presumably to test its workings and to avoid creating a stir. But with much of the nonair segment of the travel industry miffed at its prospects and politics coming into play, United’s new policy may soon be in the spotlight.

Travel Weekly: United could be headed for congressional hearings: United’s plan to cut off a number of agencies from its credit card merchant accounts could become the focus of congressional hearings as early as September. Read more

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Meanwhile, United Airlines could be a company to watch -- from Standard & Poor's perspective.

Seeking Alpha: S&P Not So Friendly to United Airlines: Standard & Poor’s has placed United Airlines NYSE: UAUA) on CreditWatch with negative implications, due to concerns about its cash flow and liquidity. This despite the fact that the airline company reported a smaller-than-expected loss on Tuesday. Read more

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The decline in leisure and business travel, coupled with adverse publicity about an AIG junket, contributed to the forfeiture of a St. Regis-managed property in Dana Point, Calif.

Wall Street Journal: Resort Where AIG Held Sales Junket Is Foreclosed: The owners of the 400-room St. Regis Monarch Beach resort, the site of a maligned retreat last fall for top sales performers of bailed-out insurer American International Group Inc., turned over the beleaguered property to its mezzanine lender, Citigroup Inc. Read more

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Expedia took a step to expand its footprint, striking a deal with an airline consolidator in India.

TravelBizMonitor.com: EAN signs deal with Travel Boutique Online: Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) has announced a partnership with Travel Boutique Online (TBO), India’s airline consolidator. The Expedia global hotel portfolio consists of more than 100000 properties, which includes an extensive choice of one to five-star properties, individual guest houses and Bed and Breakfast units. The organisation’s size and scale enables EAN to offer the broadest spectrum of accommodation options at best prices, both in popular and emerging destinations. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Update: Travelzoo's Twitter Account Hacked and Just Try To Get Someone from Twitter on the Phone

I reported yesterday that Travelzoo's Twitter account was suspended.

Travelzoo spokeswoman Mindy Joyce told me today that the account, which has some 8,000 followers, was hacked by an unknown party on Sunday. Travelzoo couldn't even get into its own account, and the deal-publisher on Monday asked Twitter to suspend the account, which it did.

"You are basically locked out of your own account and you are seeing tweets that are not even you," Joyce said.

And, that's a nightmare for Travelzoo and any other company or individual interested in brand protection.

High-profile Twitter accounts get hijacked all the time, according to Mashable, and Twitter's ability to service its users, the Twitterati, is severely limited.

Joyce said Twitter, which is investigating the situation involving the Travelzoo account, was quick to suspend the account at Travelzoo's request, and Twitter's online help desk has been responsive.

However, as of this writing, Travelzoo, a public company with a market cap of $215 million, has been unable to get anyone from Twitter to answer the phone to discuss and possibly speed any resolution of the issue. Voicemail messages have not been returned, Joyce said.

"It's not like Twitter has a huge help desk and they are ready to talk to you," Joyce said.

The Travelzoo spokeswoman said the company was using its network of contacts to try to reach someone on the phone at Twitter. After all, Twitter says that its research into these sorts of matters can take up to 30 days.

Joyce said the hacker was tweeting inappropriate material and a link to a sweepstakes that had no connection with Travelzoo.

"This is something we take very seriously," Joyce said.

Joyce said Travelzoo was not guilty of any transgressions regarding its Twitter account, and wants to resume tweeting "quality travel deals" as soon as possible.

She noted that hackers are very sophisticated these days and that perhaps the only thing that Travelzoo -- and other companies might do -- would be to change their Twitter-account settings and password more frequently.

Meanwhile, will someone from Twitter please pick up the phone for these folks?

Trip.com Revived and Will Lodging.com Be Next?

Orbitz has resuscitated Trip.com for facilitated search in a bid to build its fledgling advertising/media business.

I'm betting that Lodging.com, which was part of Cendant Travel Distribution Services and now is part of the Orbitz Worldwide portfolio, will be next.

Trip.com was relaunched in the context of Orbitz trying to leverage under-utilized or unused assets.

Today, if you surf to Lodging.com, you are redirected to Orbitz.com.

In a Cendant 10-K report, published in 2004, Cendant said of Lodging.com: "Lodging.com provides consumers access to specially negotiated rates at more than 10,600 economy, mid-level and luxury hotels in markets around the world. Lodging.com customers also have access to Galileo's entire published hotel rate inventory, and can book vacation packages through Neat Group's packaging engine on the Lodging.com site. With a network of nearly 4,300 distribution affiliates, Lodging.com also offers hoteliers access and control over their pricing and yield management."

As with Trip.com, I believe that Orbitz soon will tip its hand about a relaunched Lodging.com, which arguably is a very valuable domain name.

Perhaps it will be a hotel booking site or maybe a hotel metasearch or facilitated search offering?

I don't know the details, but as Orbitz does everything it can to build its hotel business, allowing Lodging.com to languish wouldn't be prudent.

A multi-brand strategy pays dividends for SEO, becomes another driveway for consumers entering the Orbitz mansion, and also enables a company to bid on more Google keywords than it would be allowed to do if it were limited to one brand.

In principle, a reinvigorated Lodging.com makes a lot of sense.

Travelzoo's Twitter-Interruptus

As of this writing at around 4:12 p.m. EST, Travelzoo's Twitter account has been inaccessible for at least three hours.

If you try to access the account, you navigate to a message from Twitter which says: "Who goes there? Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity. Mosey along now, nothing to see here."

In general, Twitter says accounts can be suspended for these reasons, which include breaches of terms of service, technical abuse and investigations into spamming. The investigations can take up to 30 days.

Here is a link to the Twitter Rules.

A Travelzoo spokeswoman at around 1:30 p.m. characterized its account status as: "Just a little bug with our account. We are working with Twitter to fix it and should be up and running soon."

And, a second spokeswoman said: "Twitter is working on our account now. We will resume our tweets once they finish."

I hope Travelzoo is being forthcoming because the worst way to deal with any potential negative news is to try to spin it.

Twitter gives the following advice to companies or individuals with suspended accounts:

"Our Spam/Abuse or Support team researches suspended accounts. If you feel your account has been wrongly suspended, please visit Twitter Support and file a request. If you're logged into Twitter, you can visit Twitter Support by clicking the help link directly from your Twitter account.

"Submit a request: your ticket will be submitted to Twitter Support and we'll email you a ticket confirmation. Accounts may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days for research. Check on your ticket status anytime by visiting your Twitter Support home page and clicking Check on your existing requests.

"If you're unable to submit a request through our help form, please send an email to suspended@twitter.com."

Wednesday's Travel InsideOut

Navitaire, which accommodates instant fare updates by JetBlue, AirTran and Spirit Airlines, among others, has been raining on the Airline Tariff Publishing Co.'s parade. So now, ATPCO and its major airline customers, are striking back.

Travel Weekly: ATPCO to boost fare updates from three times a day to 15: Beginning in November, the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. plans to dramatically increase the frequency of its fare updates domestically and internationally.

ATPCO, the primary fare-data collector and distributor for the travel industry, sent a notice to subscribers that it plans to transmit domestic fare feeds 15 times per day in the U.S. and Canada, a 400% increase over the current three feeds, and to blast international feeds on an hourly basis. Read more

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Put down your BlackBerry or iPhone for a second, or don't if you are reading this on your aforementioned PDA. I don't need to tell you that mobile is coming into its own. Last week, I referenced Hyatt running concierge services through Twitter, and now Hilton has launched a mobile-booking tool.

HotelMarketing.com: Hilton launches innovative mobile booking solution: The new solution has full booking capability, offering travellers the convenience to select and book a hotel, access and change bookings and view hotel images and information, whilst away from their PC. Read more

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Will it be called Troogle, as Stuart MacDonald tweets, perhaps tongue in cheek, or will Google's next step in travel be refinements of apps like City Tours and Flight Links? What kind of trip is Google on in travel?

Dennis Schaal Blog: Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0: With Google’s recent introduction of City Tours and Favorite Places, speculation is rife that Google will 1) enter the travel market, 2) launch an online agency and become another Expedia, or 3) develop or acquire a metasearch engine to compete with Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Read more

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Wall Street has keen interest in whether United Airlines -- and the airline industry -- can be successful in off-loading credit-card fees to travel agents and consumers.

BusinessWeek: Fee Fight: United Airlines vs. Travel Agents: As U.S. airlines seek to cull every last cost from their operations, travel agents are gearing up for what one agent calls a "battle royal" over a recent decision by United Airlines (UAUA) to pass along credit-card processing fees to 28 travel agencies. Those costs, which amount to 2% to 3% of the price of an airline ticket on average, are currently paid by airlines as part of the ticketing process. Wall Street is eager to assess whether United's move will prove successful, given that shifting such costs to agents and fliers could represent billions in savings across the industry. Read more

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Marriott International faced its financial challenges in the second quarter, and continued a drive to cut costs and benefit the environment through a sustainability program. Some companies realize that green will mean more green.

The Street.com/Reuters: Marriott Aims for Eco Friendly Hotel: The Marriott Hotel chain is focusing on greener accommodations in effort to meet the demand of environmentally conscious visitors. View it

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Here is Alex Bainbridge's enlightening, yet somewhat contrarian view on travel industry brand management and social media.

Musings on Travel Ecommerce Blog: Brand is what people say when you are not in the room: I love this quote via @hugoburge @craignewmark @jdlasica [yes I try to source everything correctly!]

"Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room." Great quote… but comes down to 2 key definition issues:

• Who is in the room?

• What happens if you never leave the room? Read more

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The financial industry, too (and not just us), has a love-hate thing going with the airlines.

The Motley Fool: Bumpy Earnings Disrupt Airline Investors: The airline industry would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. Check out these two headlines:

• "Airline stocks up after United's quarterly profit"

• "Airline stocks fall after Continental's report"

You'd have found both at MarketWatch yesterday, posted just hours apart. How's that for irony? We love you, airlines! Wait. Read more

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Most online travel companies are attempting to drive bookings online and getaroom.com is trying to push phone bookings? What is the proper balance? A U.K. travel agency is experimenting with an answer.

Travolution Blog: Is hi-tech shop design enough for retail travel agents?: Coop Travel is the latest to unveil its vision of the future with its two concept stores.

The seamless joining together of shops, call-centres and website is the Holy Grail everyone is chasing to make best use of existing shops and their related overheads and the more cost effective online distribution - if you can get consumers to convert. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0

With Google’s recent introduction of City Tours and Favorite Places, speculation is rife that Google will 1) enter the travel market, 2) launch an online agency and become another Expedia, or 3) develop or acquire a metasearch engine to compete with Microsoft’s Bing Travel.

Of course, travel and advertising insiders know that Google already is a huge travel industry player, having become a king-maker ever since it debuted Google AdWords in 2000 and acquired Applied Semantics and its AdSense product in 2003.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president of product management, spoke publicly last week about how Google intends to make its travel advertising, and advertising in other verticals, more effective.

“I think it is the case on the vertical side that there is a lot of opportunity to get incremental monetization gains where you can further qualify the leads better for the advertisers,” Rosenberg told analysts. “So for example, the finance area and the travel area are areas where there’s a lot of opportunity to do that, so that you end up putting more information in the ad and then incrementally getting more information from the customer so that you can further qualify whether or not the customer in the finance area is interested in a particular type of mortgage, and then you send them to an advertiser with whom they are more likely to consummate a specific transaction that that advertiser is willing to pay for. So there’s a lot of opportunity there.”

But, clearly the early, but too-soon-to-call success of Bing and Bing Travel, may have caught the Googlers in Mountain View a tad off guard.

However, any Google further foray into travel is not just about Bing Travel, the metasearch and fare-prediction engine formerly known as Farecast.

After all, Google quietly unveiled Flight Links, a BookingBuddy-like flight-search engine, in October 2005 and at the time Google officials were adamant that Google would not enter the travel metasearch arena.

The prevailing thinking among Kremlin -- I mean -- Google-watchers at the time was that Google would not expand its presence in the travel industry because it would then be competing with its largest advertisers and that would crimp its AdWords program. Expedia, Marriott and American Airlines would be very angry.

But, as one industry wag reminded me yesterday, that was then and this is now.

The world has changed -- as it has a tendency to do.

Consider that in addition to Microsoft’s integration of Farecast into Bing Travel:

• Orbitz has relaunched Trip.com for air, hotels, cars, packages and cruises, featuring booking engines from Expedia, Hotwire, hotels.com, Priceline, Travelocity, Kayak, fly.com, Holiday Inn, Orbitz, CheapTickets and many more.

• Expedia’s TripAdvisor introduced flight metasearch.

• Travelzoo, which long has published deals and operated SuperSearch, entered the metasearch fray with fly.com. (A comparison of SuperSearch and fly.com is a good illustration of the differences between multi-booking-engine search and classic metasearch.)

• And, travel firms like TripIt, Kayak’s TravelPost, TripAdvisor and FareCompare, with its more than 170 Twitter accounts, are getting their social-media game-faces on.

The days when Google had to be overly concerned that entering the travel sphere in a deeper way would alienate its advertisers are long gone. Just look at Trip.com, BookingBuddy, igoUgo, BingTravel, TripAdvisor -- the list is endless -- to see incestuous travel industry advertisers participating in their competitors’ products and playing click arbitrage.

So, with a huge proportion of vacation planning and booking beginning with Google search, what will Google do next in travel?

I don’t think it will launch an online agency and become another Expedia. After all, the online agency business model is under pressure and that’s why we now call them online travel companies.

They are edging away from over-reliance on the needle-in-a-haystack endeavor of trying to convert hordes of travel lookers into bookers and are ratcheting up their media/advertising businesses. See Trip.com as the most recent effort.

Google could buy a Kayak or another metasearch company to bring Google's travel offering up to speed to compete against Microsoft’s Bing and Bing Travel.

But, with all of that brain power in Google Labs, it might not need to buy anything. After all, Google has operated Flight Links for years, and certainly has the know-how to do something special on its own in travel or travel metasearch.

A third path for Google would be to accelerate the development of its travel apps like Flight Links, City Tours and Favorite Places, monetize the hell out of them and roll them up into something new, as-yet-undefined and very Web 3.0-ish.

Whatever path Google takes to further develop its travel offering, one thing is certain: With apologies to Kayak and Bing Travel, there will be no debate that Google's offering indeed will have its own "look and feel."