Priceline on Metasearch, Hotel Reviews and Mobile

My first blog post, Travel Metasearch: Frenzy or Finale? on March 12, took up the question of whether metasearch was "done." (By the way, it's not.)

Priceline.com President and CEO Jeffery Boyd weighed in on the issue at the 2009 Citi Technology Conference last week, arguing that metasearch "didn't live up to the hype."

Boyd has been a persistent metasearch critic, but Priceline long has participated in its advertising channels.

The Priceline CEO conceded that Kayak "has done very well," but he believes its success is more a testament to its user interface and technology than to metasearch having a superior business model when compared with that of online travel agencies.

With all of the OTAs having eliminated flight-booking fees, there now is "no magic bullet" when shopping at 100 websites for airline tickets, Boyd said.

He acknowledged that metasearch represents some threat to OTAs, but the key test for metasearch websites, in general, and for Microsoft's Bing Travel, in particular, will be whether they will be able to continue to deliver qualified leads to OTA advertisers.

On the advertising theme, Boyd said Booking.com, Priceline's Europe-based lodging business, has probably left some money on the table by refusing to initiate a media business and adding a lot of non-hotel products.

Booking.com has avoided these distractions because the upside of expanding hotel inventory for European travelers in Eastern Europe, Asia and North America is so "great" and "important" that dabbling with cross-selling these non-hotel products would be unwise, Boyd said.

Booking.com, Boyd said, doesn't have exclusive hotel deals across-the-board with independent hotels, but in practice it often has exclusive availability for many properties as a distribution channel of choice because of the demand it can generate for a property in far-flung countries and because of the advantages of the retail model.

Turning to other issues, Boyd said travelers' hotel reviews, after they completed a stay at a property, are "an element of social networking that is very helpful," and he sees the scope of reviews expanding with photos and videos that will make them "more engaging."

Looking into his crystal ball, Boyd sees several other areas ripe for increased attention, too.

Trip planning and trip organization, as is the focus of TripIt, is an "open playing field," Boyd said.

In addition, mobile will be among the "most-impactful innovations," Boyd added.

Boyd argued that over time mobile offerings and consumer behavior will change so that some travelers will feel comfortable booking hotels "on the fly" with a mobile device once they arrive at a destination.

He said Priceline and others will introduce technology, which would ensure that travelers would find great inventory and deals once they pick up their bags at a destination airport.

I'll interject here that with the expected proliferation of Wi-Fi on board airlines, shopping for last-minute hotel deals may give on-board entertainment whole new meaning if Boyd is correct that a segment of consumers will be open to very-last-minute hotel offerings. Anyone for Verylastminute.com? Oh, sorry, it already exists.

"I'll get the hotel when I get there," is how Boyd envisions the new -- as yet unproven -- impulse.

But, Boyd has confidence in the shift.

"If you are there ready with a product to support it you will win," Boyd said. "If not, you are going to lose."

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On Orbitz: Is Flight Metasearch Even Dead-er?

Orbitz Engages in Media-Network Building with Lodging.com Rebirth

Orbitz Worldwide recently brought Lodging.com out of mothballs and is engaging in some nation-building.

Or, should I more aptly say, some media-network building.

To understand what Orbitz is attempting, think the TripAdvisor Media Network, which has been clicking its way to success on a global scale for its Expedia Inc. parent.

Lodging.com, founded in 1995, acquired by Orbitz ancestor Cendant in 2002, and all but retired as a URL until recently, is part of the OWW Away Network. That network is part of Orbitz's hoped-for answer to TripAdvisor's gains in the media business.

"The relaunch [of Lodging.com] reflects Orbitz Worldwide’s focus on monetizing under-utilized assets in its portfolio of travel brands and better monetization of its non-transacting traffic," said OWW spokesman Brian Hoyt.

That "non-transacting traffic" element is key as Orbitz, like other online travel companies, is hoping to monetize the legions of lookers who don't book. The solution, as the OTCs see it, is facilitated search or even metasearch.

The soft relaunch of Lodging.com, which uses facilitated search to promote the booking engines of Travelocity, hotels.com, Expedia.com, Kayak, Mobissimo, Priceline, OWW brands and others, follows the relaunch of another retired OWW brand, Trip.com.

Also part of the Away Network, Trip.com is a travel search/media site for flights, hotels, cars, vacation packages and cruises.

While Trip.com offers the full gamut of travel inventory, sister brand Lodging.com has a hotel focus.

In addition to providing facilitated search for hotels through partnerships using the booking engines of all the aforementioned OTCs and metasearch companies, Lodging.com partnered with Vast.com, a vertical search company, to offer vacation rentals, bed and breakfasts, inns and campgrounds, Hoyt said.

"The relaunch of Lodging.com will test how consumers respond to various travel search offerings, and its user interface is likely to change over time," Hoyt said. "The site will remain in beta until its functionality has been thoroughly tested among consumers."

Asked whether OWW was considering a metasearch launch, in addition to the one-booking-engine-at-a-time approach inherent in facilitated search, Hoyt replied: "For now, we are focused on beta testing a facilitated search platform blended with Vast.com's listings for vacation rentals, campgrounds and B and Bs."

The "for now" part is important. Certainly the strategic thinkers at Orbitz have pondered the launch of metasearch, as Expedia has done through TripAdvisor flights and Travelzoo has done with Fly.com.

Orbitz has a long way to go to compete with TripAdvisor. Other than the Orbitz brand itself, OWW doesn't have a brand, in its Away Network or elsewhere, that can compete at the moment with the TripAdvisor brand.

But, the resurrection of Lodging.com and Trip.com are huge steps in the right direction for OWW. Together with OWW's emphasis on building its hotel business, the Away Network initiative is another signal that Orbitz, under CEO Barney Harford, is beginning to get its act together.

RELATED POSTS

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Is Orbitz Poised for a Priceline-like Comeback?

Google: We Won't Be a Copycat in Travel

After writing Kayak's Hafner Awaits Google Hotels and the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0 , I spoke with Google's managing director of travel and learned a lot more about what Google won't do in travel.

Here are some headlines from my conversation with Rob Torres, who emphasized that all options -- including the build versus buy equation -- are on the table. Torres said:

• Google monitors all competitors, regardless of their market share, but "we are not going to copycat. We will only do something if we can do it 10 times better than what's happening today."

• "Microsoft made a great acquisition in Farecast," but Google likely would take another route. "We don't have anything like that," Torres said, referring to Bing Travel, "and we don't intend to do something like that."

• Asked whether Google would acquire a company like Kayak or FareCompare, Torres said: "Would we acquire a Kayak just to be a Kayak? Probably not."

• "If anyone can come up with a game-changing opportunity" in travel, it would be Google, he said.

• Torres doesn't see Google introducing metasearch as an aforementioned game-changing opportunity. "The reality is that Kayak and others already are doing that very well."

• Kayak CEO Steve Hafner was being "highly speculative" and started from erroneous assumptions when he said Google doesn't care about flights and would bolster its stance in the travel business in the hotel sector. "We don't look at it as one versus another [air versus hotel]," but view the travel vertical "wholistically," Torres said. "I think our flight partners are very important. That's where they [most trip-planning queries] start."

• Asked why then Google did not further develop it's one-box flight search , launched in late 2005, Torres said "it has taken time to figure out the next step."

• Torres said Google's recent introductions of City Tours and Favorite Places, two travel applications leveraging Google Maps, were "nothing really big" in terms of the big picture and "not necessarily driving a travel product."

• A widely held view, Torres stated that the possibility of Google introducing a "transactional model" like an online travel agency are remote.

• Rather than attacking things piecemeal, Torres said Google looks to improve search across specific verticals and industries, including travel. He said Google has tremendous relatively untapped assets, including Google Maps, Google Base and YouTube.

So, now we know some of the things that Google likely will not do in travel.

Torres said that "time will tell" what steps Google would take.

Of the travel business, Torres said: "Certainly our interest hasn't waned over time."

Related Post

Google travel is coming… could it be a hotel PPC system?

Kayak's Hafner Awaits Google Hotels

Kayak CEO Steve Hafner thinks "it's only a question of time" before Google begins displaying hotel pricing, a move that could change the online-travel ecosystem.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, Hafner says he is much more concerned about how Kayak, the leading travel-metasearch player in the U.S., would navigate Google's souped-up role in facilitating hotel transactions than about the maneuverings of rivals like TripAdvisor, Fly.com, Bing Travel or Mobissimo.

"Google is by far the biggest source of travel information for consumers," Hafner says.

That point was confirmed for me last night when I drilled down a bit into what Google has been doing on the hotel front.

When I performed a Google search for Chicago hotels and then selected Hotel Allegro reviews, I accessed a link that produced:

• The property location in Google Maps;

• Overviews of the hotel and property details;

• Some 619 user reviews and ratings of Hotel Allegro from the likes of TripAdvisor, Priceline, HotelGuide and others;

• 50 photos and videos from the hotel itself and other content providers;

• 683 Web pages about the property, and

• Advertisements from Expedia, DealBase, Travelzoo and Hotelsmax.net.

The "look and feel" of this compilation is not very attractive, but that can be improved. And, with so many consumers launching their trip-planning through Google searches, you could argue that Google already is the most comprehensive "hotel website."

With speculation rampant about Google's next move in travel, Hafner believes he knows where Google is headed.

"Google doesn't care about flights," Hafner contends. "Hotels is where they'll enter."

He continues: "Hotels are a comparatively easy entry point and yield the highest margin for Google."

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0, arguing that Google may continue to build out its apps, from flight links to Google Maps, to put a heavier stamp on its travel offering, now that Bing Travel has raised its profile with its prominent integration into Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Hafner's theory on Google's evolution in travel is consistent with that line of thinking.

As it already does for products ranging from books to digital cameras, Google might display hotel price points in default displays and then advertisers could use Google Checkout to drive hotel transactions, Hafner says.

"So imagine a list of OTAs [online travel agencies] and suppliers, with Google Checkout to help facilitate conversion," Hafner says. "Pretty powerful."

And, Google already has another app, Google Base, featuring a data API, which perhaps could accommmodate hourly hotel pricing updates, Hafner says.

Some have argued that Google, with its market cap of $143 billion, doesn't worry about relatively little things such as Bing Travel.

But, I think with travel being such a large part of Google's advertising business, Bing's deft integration of Bing Travel in Google's own backyard has been an embarrassment to Google.

So, how would implementing hotel pricing -- and this could merely be Google's opening shot in travel-inventory pricing -- impact Google commercially?

"My guess is that it would be cannibalistic since many advertisers run their SEM [search engine marketing] campaigns on a same-session loss," Hafner says. "And, Google's opportunity to increase search share is relatively small (since it already owns 70 percent of queries in the U.S.) But, they'll probably need to move to this approach anyway to counter Bing etc."

In travel, as in other sectors, when Google bobs, the entire industry weaves.

There are lots of issues to sort out.

How would this impact the hotel-direct channel?

Who would be the winners and losers?

"It's an open question what role players like Kayak would have in a new ecosystem like this," Hafner says.

Google, by implementing hotel pricing (and who knows which travel segment after that), could certainly be disruptive.

Why would consumers navigate to TripAdvisor to read hotel reviews or to Kayak to compare prices, if they could do it all and get a more comprehensive look through Google?

Why go directly to a hotel website or to an online travel agency if you can get user reviews, maps and pricing on Google?

I received an inquiry from a business publication in Japan several months ago, asking me for answers when unfounded rumors were swirling that Google was going to launch "another Expedia."

Don't look for that sort of scenario. Google isn't going to become a travel agency.

Instead, there is plenty of room(s) for Google to expand its reach as a hotel kingmaker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Mega, Not Meta, Move: Orbitz Enters Search Business

I wrote several weeks ago that Orbitz would attempt to maximize all of those lookers perusing its shop, take its media business a leap forward and get into the search business, possibly through a merger of some sort with Kayak.

Well, Orbitz, has entered the search business on its own, for now, by relaunching Trip.com as a search business. This fairly huge development was brought to my attention by Tom Botts of the Hudson Crossing Travel Industry Insight blog.

All of the online travel agencies, who rightly refer to themselves as online travel companies, are attempting to ratchet up their advertising/media businesses because trying to make consumers complete a transaction sometimes appears to be as easy as finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

So Orbitz, through Trip.com , will attempt to garner meaningful revenue through all of that traffic.

Perhaps one day Orbitz's search business may eclipse its transaction business.

Tim Hughes blogged the other day about the differences between online travel agencies and metasearch companies.

One difference that he didn't talk about in any detail is that metasearch and other companies that facilitate searches of other booking engines, which is Trip.com's tack, are sprouting up faster than you can keep track of. Meanwhile, launches of new OTAs are rare.

The reason is because search and metasearch is where the money is at, and the OTA business, with looker-to-booker ratios climbing every second, is under increasing pressure.

After all, Expedia Inc., with Expedia.com as its jewel, recently launched flight metasearch through TripAdvisor.com.

It is interesting that although Orbitz and Kayak haven't merged -- and such a game-changing move may be far-fetched or in the cards -- Kayak and sister brand SideStep are participating in Trip.com.

And so is everyone else, including Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline, Travelocity, Bing and fly.com, among others.

Of course, Orbitz's Trip.com is now in competition with many of these companies in the search business. Expedia, after all, has TripAdvisor, Travelocity fields igoUgo, Bing has Bing Travel and fly.com belongs to the Travelzoo portfolio.

This is a huge move by Orbitz, and more proof that Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford was serious when he said the company would push hard to ramp up its advertising/media business.

With air booking fees gone, the media/search business is looking so much more important.

Critics to Founders of hotels.com and getaroom: TakeAHike

A raging debate has broken out on this blog about the launch of getaroom.com, the brainchild of hotels.com founders Bob Diener and David Litman.

getaroom.com has a back-to-the future approach to travel distribution. Consumers see published rates and some rotating specials on the website, but then have to phone a call center to get steep discounts.

Hotels thus get to distribute their rooms and put heads in beds without brand dilution, and consumers get these semi-opaque deals, but know the identity of the property and its location before they book. For more more background, see my interview with Diener here.

A chorus of getaroom critics on this blog chimed in that Diener and Litman, who helped put hotel discounting on the map before the days of rate parity and best-rate guarantees, again are taking hotels down a slippery slope to the bottom of the fiscal heap.

"Sorry, I am struggling to understand where the innovation is here," said one anonymous observer. "Allowing a 4-star hotel to compete on PRICE with a 3-star hotel, is this what you call innovation? This is definitely not benefiting the industry. Hotels have fought for years to get to Rate Parity, Brand Protection, and to be able to sell direct on their own website. All I see in this new 'innovative' business is someone trying to make money quickly, but while doing that they are bringing the industry to the dark ages."

And, another getaroom.com basher wrote: "What isn't noted is what getaroom.com is taking as its cut. Hotels.com took 25%, money up front, and payment in the month following the stay. If this is their model for their new enterprise, it will only include the most desperate hotels during the worst periods of time. No one wants to be in that race to the bottom and get raped along the way."

However, a helluva lot of hotels obviously disagree as they vote with their feet. Look at all the properties that feed Hotwire and Priceline.

And plenty of properties see the value in getaroom.com. For example, Boston properties dabbling with getaroom.com include: the Colonnade Hotel, the Lenox Hotel, Wyndham Boston Chelsea, Copley Square Hotel and many more. Pick a city, you'll find plenty more.

If they weren't getting some distribution love from getaroom.com, they wouldn't be there.

What others see as another fatal flaw for getaroom.com is that consumers, finally accustomed to metasearch, online travel agencies and various trip-planning websites, will be very reluctant to dial for savings.

"In the age of the Internet why would people pick the phone to make hotel reservations?," another anonymous critic writes, taking up the theme. "I don't understand. People have moved away from offline a long time ago, and tomorrow's bookers are today's kids who do not even use email. They communicate on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc..."

getaroom.com certainly will not be the be-all and end-all for a lot of consumers, but why wouldn't a segment of savvy consumers, in this era when online-travel booking is so complex, phone a call center for a deal, especially when they know the name of the property and the location in advance?

Mary Song, the president and CEO of Propel Media, writes: "I think it's a brilliant idea given that hotels don't want everyone to know how low they are discounting, hence the success of Priceline and Hotwire. I agree with Dennis and would add that the subset of people who pick up the phone to make the final booking is quite large, but also that the site needs to make it more obvious that the best price to be had is actually over the phone and not online."

One anonymous defender of getaroom.com believes advocates of online-booking only aren't taking a broad enough view. "In my mind, the appeal of the getaroom.com model is the fact that it is the equivalent of saying 'Let me talk to your manager.' A website is not a decision maker and doesn't offer you a different price from Jo-Shmo next door because you pulled some strings or talked to the right person. This model subconsciously offers customers that value of a 'negotiated, rare rate' because of the strings they pulled, and frankly I think the value a consumer sees in that is currently being underestimated."

The anonymous comment-writer adds: "I think this model will be interesting to watch... Let's see what these 'kiddos' can do. If nothing else, it will be entertaining."

These kiddos, Diener and Litman, made a few pennies selling hotels.com -- now in the Expedia fold -- and own getaroom.com outright, with no VC funding. With deep pockets, Diener said they have "several million dollars" for marketing.

We're obviously comparing a few apples with acres of bananas here, but look at the strides Bing is making with, albeit a cool $80 million or so, as it seeks to blunt consumers' seemingly-automatic impulse to surf to Google.com to search.

Might not some consumers learn to halt their browsing for a bit, and dial that getaroom.com call center in Dallas?

Sounding like someone with inside knowledge, another person who commented on this blog wrote: "Getaroom.com is investing millions of dollars in promoting the site and the new way to book. By being on the site, it is massive free publicity for the hotel. The hotel controls the inventory. When a hotel needs more business they simply add inventory to the unpublished program, which they can take out anytime. Getaroom.com is being promoted now on many online sites, satellite radio, major newspapers and will soon begin a large television campaign. This all means free exposure for those hotels that participate."

The pushback to getaroom.com has been fairly heavy. Let's hope that critics aren't adverse to a company trying something new -- or should we say, something old?

As Mike Redbord tweeted to me, seemingly tongue in cheek: "Haters haters everywhere, give innovation a chance."

How FareCompare Uses 170 Twitter Accounts, ITA Software for 'Dramatic' Uptick

FareCompare, the metasearch site, has more than 170 departure-city based Twitter accounts and it is using them to leverage a calendar-based search, powered by ITA Software, for what CEO Rick Seaney claims is a "dramatic" increase in ticket-sale percentages.

FareCompare, of course, doesn't handle any bookings, but passes off consumers to sites like Orbitz and CheapTickets for reservations.

In the last two months or so, FareCompare began tweeting fare drops using 170 Twitter accounts, such as flyfromEWR, based on the 170 cities in North America with the highest outbound passenger traffic. You can read more here about what FareCompare is doing on Twitter.

The vast majority of the tweets are automated, but FareCompare occasionally has some real-life humans toss in breaking news or other morsels.

So, when flyfromEWR tweeted yesterday "$511r/t Newark to Moscow, fall or winter down 20% [http://bit.ly/40SxBr] #EWR, the #fare," the link starts a flexible, calendar-based search after you enter the month, desired length of stay and number of passengers.

A calendar-based search, powered by ITA Software in the background, checks for seat availabilities using 180 queries (30 days and six lengths of stay), saving the consumer all that "hunting and pecking" that they would have to do to find a seat with a particular fare otherwise, Seaney says.

"We do all of that typing in one shot," Seaney adds.

Using a proprietary algorithm to cull ATPCO pricing-departure data to find fare-drops in tandem with the calendar-based search from ITA, Seaney terms the process "a culmination of four years of work."

"We think this is the right way to shop to save time and money if you have the flexibility," Seaney says.

FareCompare has embedded links to the calendar-based search in its e-mail alerts for around three months, but he views Twitter as more effective than e-mail marketing because the fare drops are tweeted in real-time.

The calendar-based search currently is in a soft-launch phase on FareCompare, and will be getting some home page presence within a week or so.

"Using Twitter as a real-time communication backbone that can touch people in a social network with relevant, actionable information instantly -- is absolutely the next generation in air travel bargain-finding," Seaney said.

Of course, all of that searching using ITA Software is expensive. In addition to referral fees to suppliers, FareCompare makes money, like everyone else, through the advertising around the rails.

Seaney wouldn't provide any precise figures on how significantly ticket sales for FareCompare's suppliers actually have risen, and the company only has been using the 170 Twitter accounts for about two months.

flyfromEWR only had 170 followers today; flyfromLAX had 338 as of this writing.

Still, from the tweet sound of it, it appears that FareCompare is onto something.

Bing Travel Outage a Real Downer

As of this writing, Bing Travel (a.k.a. Farecast) has been down for almost a day-and-a half.

Various news reports, including this one, indicate a fire in a downtown Seattle data center, probably caused by a blown transformer, took down Bing Travel and a host of other nontravel websites.

A photo depicts an unidentified person from one of the impacted websites hauling a server out the door of Fisher Plaza, the site of the fire.

A notice on Bing.com/travel stated:

Sorry, Bing Travel is currently unavailable

A fire occurred at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle just after midnight on Friday morning, July 3. A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event and appreciate your patience.

In the meantime, you may use Microsoft's travel partner, Orbitz, for your travel needs.

The usual travel link on the Bing homepage was removed, but the outage seemingly doesn't impact other services on Microsoft's new search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"), Bing.

The Bing Travel outage, however, does impact Bing's slew of travel industry partners, including technology providers, airlines and hotels, and certainly won't inspire consumer confidence.

However, the reputation hit may be short-lived. After all, there are few customer service issues involved because Bing Travel, as a metasearch site, is not a travel agency and doesn't book any travel.

There's no further detail yet from Bing Travel about what happened and why a back-up system, if there was one, didn't kick in. Bing Travel is a relatively small company, but Microsoft would certainly have the monies and resources to power a solution for such outages.

There will be lessons learned from this fiasco about data center security and redundancy. Many large travel companies, including Amadeus, have back-up data centers. Amadeus's data center is located in Erding, Germany, and a clone of that one is positioned 30 kilometers away.

TechFlash reported that a fire occurred at the same data center in June 2008, and a Redfin official outlined some of the steps the company took to avoid what author James Baldwin might have characterized as "The Fire Next Time."

Especially since 9/11, data center security is paramount.

Meanwhile, it was interesting this morning that a Google search for Bing Travel retrieved Bing Travel's outage announcement as the top organic result.

Conversely, a Bing search for Bing Travel produced no word of the Bing Travel unavailability, at least on the first page of results.

And, the second-highest Sponsored Link in a Google search for Bing Travel was from Kayak, which reportedly has accused Microsoft of copying Kayak's look and feel.

The other day there was a Twitter debate about whether some of the underlying technologies that help make Bing Travel and Kayak go dictate the allegedly similar GUI. I'm no expert on that question, but I tend to doubt it.

Both metasearch sites use ITA Software to power the bulk of their air searches so they can largely avoid scraping airline websites.

And, both Bing Travel and Kayak count Orbitz as a key online travel agency partner.

No, for conspiracy theorists out there, I don't think the Bing Travel outage was the result of a foray by a Kayak hit team.

Seriously, Kayak and Bing Travel, while ardent competitors, have a lot of respect for one another and both have great products.

I was just about to write that both Kayak and Bing have great tech teams, too. Well, for Bing Travel this weekend, the jury has to be out on that question.

Orbitz and Kayak: Perfect Together?

Several people whom I respect have approached me -- independently -- in recent weeks with speculation that some sort of combination or merger of Orbitz and Kayak would make sense.

The speculation speaks to the power of travel search.

I say the following only somewhat facetiously, but the travel industry is almost getting to the point where almost nobody will be selling travel anymore -- all of the travel businesses will be building platforms to enable consumers to search for travel instead as part of their ever-growing advertising/media strategies.

Think of Google, which sells huge amounts of travel advertising, but doesn't own a travel business.

Which brings me to Orbitz and Kayak, already close partners in Kayak metasearch. Orbitz is Kayak's exclusive online travel agency partner in Kayak metasearch.

Speculation has been rife that Orbitz, the weakest sister among the online travel agencies, is in play. When Expedia eliminated flight-booking fees, taking away a huge chunk of Orbitz's revenue, the prognosticators offered a scenario that perhaps Expedia would buy Orbitz or maybe Travelocity and Orbitz would join forces.

But, the Orbitz-Kayak merger theory posits that Orbitz could build a profitable search business in tandem with Kayak's metasearch platform if Orbitz downplayed its transaction business and leveraged the huge amount of air and hotel searches that consumers already are conducting on its global websites.

For Kayak, a merger of some sort with the larger and search-query-rich Orbitz brand would give Kayak even greater scale, including in markets like the U.K., where Kayak's effort have been sluggish.

I wrote in this blog recently, how Pegasus Solutions found that its system gets 1,900 hits from travel lookers for each booking conversion.

In this regard, travel businesses across the spectrum are trying to grow and monetize their advertising/media platforms as an alternative to their fickle, competition-laden transaction businesses.

From a financial standpoint, I don't know how a Kayak-Orbitz merger would work.

Orbitz, saddled with debt and struggling, has limited options. And, although Kayak acquired SideStep for around $200 million in 2007, an outright purchase of Orbitz would seemingly be cost-prohibitive, given Orbitz's huge debt load.

Still, wiser heads than mine are telling me that the financial folks can figure out a formula for getting an Orbitz-Kayak combination done.

Such a deal would speak volumes about the evolution of the travel business.

The Bing Travel Experience: So Far, So Good

In advance of Microsoft releasing its new search engine, Bing, I took Bing out for a brief test drive.

Bing has some features that are very cool, but I didn't see anything that makes me believe that Bing will significantly rain on Google's parade. (Although the impact of Microsoft's planned $80 to $100 million marketing campaign for Bing can't be dismissed.)

But, one area where Bing really sets itself apart is in the travel user experience (or UX, for you geeks out there) because Bing, unlike Google and Yahoo, has a travel innovator, Farecast, in its portfolio.

To be more precise and newsy, Microsoft has Bing Travel, a melding and rebranding of Farecast and MSN Travel (including Farecast for flights and hotels, and Orbitz for vacation packages, cars and cruises), at its disposal.

By the way, a side note to Yahoo: You decided to kill metasearch engine FareChase, but think how you might have leveraged it to enhance the travel-search experience within Yahoo search had you not been beholden to Travelocity and given the FareChase team some resources and clout in this post-Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel and MSN Travel era.

About Bing generally, one of its most appealing features is that when you move your cursor to the right of a search result, a box opens summarizing that search result.

This feature is huge because users can avoid all of those unproductive, back-and- forth clicks and decide up-front on an informed basis about whether they should click on a result.

However, I don't see this mouse-over feature as something that Google or Yahoo couldn't quickly emulate if they choose.

And, Bing has nifty Images, Videos, Related Searches and Search History features running down a left-hand column alongside the search-results page in an easily accessible, very clean-looking manner.

And, like Twitter's Trending Topics, the Bing homepage offers Popular Now links, which today featured French Open Tennis, Desmond Hatchett, Christina Aguilera and Jay Leno. (Meanwhile, Twitter's top two Trending Topics were #myweakness and, ahem, Google Wave.)

OK, so here's the travel angle.

The Bing preview version lists travel as one of only six categories or verticals (Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Travel) on the Bing homepage in a bow to the primacy of travel as a key Web category.

And, at least for flight search for now, Bing's deft use of Bing Travel, including Farecast's predictive technology, sets it apart from flight searches on Google and Yahoo.

For example, a Google search of EWR to LAX retrieves a Google flight-search box as the top result with a link to Flights from Newark, NJ to Los Angeles, CA, which defaults to an Expedia search. However, users can input their departing and returning dates and also conduct traditional, if unexciting searches of CheapTickets, Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity in separate windows.

Ho-hum.

A Yahoo search of EWR to LAX offers no such shortcut at all. Kudos to Yahoo for its agnosticism, but users would have to scroll down to the relative boondocks of the seventh organic search result to access any reference to Yahoo Travel, powered by Travelocity.

And, now, Bada-Bing. (For international readers -- ha -- James Gleick defines the term as "American slang “suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably; ’Just like that!’, ’Presto!’"

OK then, Presto.

A Bing search of EWR to LAX produces a much richer and more informational experience than do the Google and Yahoo searches.

The first result in the Bing search is what Bing Travel General Manager Hugh Crean refers to as an "instant answer." It comes with a link to "Cheap tickets from Newark to Los Angeles" and a "Fares Predicted to Rise or Hold Steady" graphic, both of which take the user to a wealth of tools from Farecast, I mean, Bing Travel.

Other links within the Bing instant answer resulting from an EWR to LAX search include:

$239 EWR>LAX
All deals from New York
All deals to Los Angeles
30-Day Outlook for EWR>LAX

Clicking on the graphic or main link in the instant answer brings the Bing searcher to an integrated Bing Travel page where the prospective traveler quickly finds out that Farecast predicts with 80 percent confidence that the fares will rise or be steady over the next seven days.

Users can then get details about Farecast's fare predictions, view fare trends on a calendar, search for flights (while filtering in or out their preferences) using Bing Travel metasearch or conduct one-window-at-a-time searches using booking engines from Hotwire, Expedia and Priceline.

There is just much more meat on the bone in travel searches using Bing in contrast to Google and Yahoo, largely because of Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast in April 2008.

Bing's introduction is an important development for the travel industry.

Big bad Microsoft (and it almost pains me to say this, given its legacy of Windows and Internet Explorer bullying) paved a new path when it put a travel search engine, Farecast, as the lead of MSN Travel.

And, now, Microsoft has given added weight to travel as a key vertical and has integrated it into part of its overall search strategy and not, to borrow a phrase, albeit out of context, from AOL, as some sort of "walled garden."

In the Bing preview version at least, travel has primacy on the Bing homepage. Consider that it has that prime real estate while the following are absent as standalone verticals: autos, real estate, movies, music and finance etc.

"Now we are part of an overall search strategy that will be in front of all consumers, coming through Bing and Bing Travel," Crean told me.

In fact, Crean is now part of the Bing search team, helping to develop overall search strategy, and he reports to a vice president of search.

Although Google is too, well, big and bad to admit it, I expect Bing's on-time arrival will hasten efforts in Google land to improve the travel-search experience.

And, that increased attention can't be bad for travel.

Bada-Bing.

Holy Pegasus! Ratio of Travel Lookers To Bookers Is Off-the-Charts

Do you want to know why online travel agencies are doing everything they can to enter the media/advertising business?

Do you want to understand a key reason why Expedia eliminated consumer fees on airline bookings?

Do you want to comprehend in a concrete way why airline, hotel, car rental and OTA websites don't appreciated metasearch screen-scraping?

Then consider these statistics from hotel-room distributor Pegasus Solutions, with 86,000 hotel properties in its global portfolio:

• As of March 2009, the average number of looks per reservation on each website in the Pegasus network was 1,900 to 1. That's a 26.7 percent increase in the past year.

• A Pegasus spokeswoman explained that "we have some sites whose ratio is in excess of 10,000 to 1 or more. The trend is certainly indicating substantial growth in shopping activity."

• Pegasus stated that the look-to-book ratio was 1,100 to 1 in March 2007 and 1,500 to 1 in March 2008.

What this means is that increasingly few consumer-shopping inquiries lead to actual bookings. One can only speculate on the reasons: Increased bargain-hunting given the current economic woes; increased Internet adoption by travelers; heightened competition; and perhaps the complexity of the travel-planning and travel-booking process.

So, when you see Expedia allocating huge sums of money into TripAdvisor's media business and its global expansion, you can better understand why an OTA would pursue a high-margin media business given the increasingly fruitless quest to close a hotel transaction.

In fact, TripAdvisor's strategic value was apparent in Expedia Inc.'s first quarter results. TripAdvisor's operating income before amortization of $48 million accounted for 36.9 percent of Expedia Inc.'s OIBA. And TripAdvisor's $48 million contribution represented a 37 percent jump over the $35 million it produced a year earlier.

Orbitz Worldwide, too, sees building a media/advertising business as an imperative.

And, after Expedia eliminated -- at least temporarily -- booking fees on flights in March, officials explained that it was losing too many lookers to airline websites so it erased the fees to stem the tide. With pricing parity on flights with airline websites, Expedia hopes to diminish its look-to-book ratio.

And, with look-to-book ratios soaring, it is understandable why supplier and OTA websites would be angered by screen-scraping, even if new metasearch entrants like Voyij.com engage in screen-scraping lite.

There is a cost associated with each one of the 1,900 searches required to bring home a booking.

Holy Pegasus!

The Deal About a New Metasearch Site's Scraping Ways

Voyij.com is putting its claim down on a metasearch niche as it focuses on aggregating "deals" from users' home airports.

But, as I wrote in my post, "SideStep Dream Team Launches Voyij, but Parts of the Voyage Appear Shaky," the self-funded start-up, which launched last week, risks earning the wrath of online travel agencies and suppliers by its Web-scraping tactics.

A Voyij spokeswoman conceded that the metasearch site is not using ITA Software, as do several other metasearch sites, for aggregating airline information directly from the carriers' reservations systems because it would be relatively expensive. And, using ITA for these purposes also might not be especially helpful because Voyij primarily is interested in deals inventory and is not conducting more comprehensive, real-time searches of airline fares.

And indeed, the spokeswoman said, Voyij has yet to form relationships with the wide array of sites -- including most of the major OTAs, major airlines and hotel chains -- that it is collecting data from.

For example, Voyij gets data from Travelocity, which told me that it has no partnership with the new site.

On the screen-scraping issue, the Voyij spokeswoman said: "Yes, old-fashioned, but based on the content we are going after, specifically 'deals' and 'sales,' this is currently the best, if not the only, way to get it."

"The main point here," the Voyij spokeswoman continued, "is that we're doing something new and unique in the industry by focusing on this specific content and, as hopefully you can appreciate, we'll certainly have some of the growing pains associated with any start-up doing something new."

Indeed, despite some of the search glitches on Voyij that I referenced the other day, a tech guy at another online travel company told me he likes the clean look of the Voyij GUI, especially the way the search for deals from the departure city takes place on the home page and further decisions are pushed off to the next page. The techie also likes the way Voyij integrates Twitter.

Regarding partnerships, the Voyij spokeswoman said: "We needed to launch to get credibility and to get someone to pick up the phone at an OTA. We will be looking to formalize our relationships with the OTAs as well as other suppliers now that we are live."

It is shocking to me that Voyij management, with all of its experience at SideStep, can't get OTAs to answer their calls.

But, I have the feeling that the OTAs now will be answering Voyij's calls -- or will be making their own calls or writing formal letters to complain about the scraping.

Speaking of SideStep, Kayak bought the company in 2007 for around $200 million.

The SideStep expatriots who now are running Voyij feel "bitter sweet" about SideStep's imprint in Kayak because you'd be hardpressed to see any trace of it other than in the Kayak Deals section these days, the Voyij spokeswoman said.

"We are very happy with the sale, but do wish we could point to a site and say, 'see that's what I spent so many years of my life building,' the Voyij spokeswoman said. "Given the choice between the two, I think everyone at SideStep would pick 'exit.'"

Kayak CEO and co-founder Steve Hafner had no comment.

SideStep Dream Team Launches Voyij, but Parts of the Voyage Appear Shaky

Well, I guess flight metasearch really, really isn't dead.

Case in point is that a few of the key players in SideStep, which was sold to Kayak for around $200 million in 2007, this week debuted travel-metasearch site Voyij.com.

They even baked a cake, or ordered one, to mark the occasion.

Among the SideStep alum taking the Voyij are Brent Stewart, Nick Atkins, Paul Kim and Brian Barth. And Voyij even recruited Rob Solomon, ex-SideStep CEO and formerly head of Yahoo Travel, for the kickoff press release.

The team of ex-SideSteppers now playing for Voyij reminded me of the Kayak "Dream Team" press release of October 2004. (Has it been almost five years? Sheesh! Time flies in metasearch.)

Voyij has some interesting twists.

But, some warning flags were flying high for me this morning.

Voyij has a dazzling array of suppliers and online travel agencies appearing in its search results, but I wonder how many of them have agreed to be there, and whether Voyij is engaged in some old-fashioned -- yes -- screen-scraping.

I know ITA Software, which helps Kayak, TripAdvisor, Farecast and FareCompare avoid scraping because of ITA's direct airline tie-ins, has no relationship with Voyij.

And, one of the travel companies that appears in Voyij's airfare results told me this morning that it did not authorize Voyij to use its inventory, and that the newbie metasearch site isn't even displaying the intermediary's correct logo.

I reached out to Voyij's public relations firm about this and other questions, but haven't heard back yet.

After a cursory look, I found the following cast of characters appearing in Voyij: Travelocity, TripRes, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Expedia, Farecast, SaveOnResorts.com, BookIt.com, Orbitz, US Airways, Perfect Escapes, JetBlue, Continental Airlines, American Airlines, Virgin America, United Vacations, Cheap Caribbean, Funjet Vacations, Southwest Vacations, TravelWorm and Apple Vacations.

It is very unusual to see Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia appearing together in one metasearch engine. Again, it points possibly to some scraping, which leads to all kinds of problems, from earning the wrath of suppliers to availability weaknesses.

You would think that Voyij's team, with all its experience, wouldn't go down the scraping road. Tell me it ain't so, Voyij.

Voyij's search-results displays have a supplier-friendly -- but not necessarily consumer-friendly -- feature, in one respect. It appears that each fare or room rate appears in its own box. In other words, although a JetBlue fare may appear higher in the display grid than an American Airlines fare, they don't compete side-by-side for consumer attention in the same box.

This is the kind of treatment that American Airlines has insisted upon in other metasearch engines.

Also, concerning the displays, I don't like the way icons from suppliers and OTAs appear in the search results. For example, an American flag icon appears in some search results, but you wouldn't know it is supposed to signify US Airways unless you clicked on it or looked elsewhere in the display grid to identify it. I found it confusing.

The Voyij Price Challenge may be another feature that might give suppliers pause.

Here's how it works: I searched for a flight and found a $75 base fare for New York-Boston on US Airways. When you opt to select the Voyij Price Challenge connected to that display, it tells you that the US Airways fare saves you $96, or 56 percent, off another unidentified "airfare."

And, in this example, when I selected "airfare" to see which fare the US Airways flight beat by 56 percent, it directed me to Expedia.com for the more expensive -- are you ready -- US Airways fare.

And part of the discrepancy was that Voyij was comparing the base fare on USAirways.com to a US Airways fare through Expedia.com that included the taxes and fees.

Actually, there are a lot of confusing and not-ready-for-prime time aspects to Voyij -- it's almost as if the company launched the site prematurely.

For example, when I selected "the best sales and offers from your city," and I selected Newark Airport, and then clicked on hotel deals, the hotel that appeared first in the display was the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Yes, I can get to Las Vegas or, in fact, any hotel in the world from Newark Airport, but I was expecting to see deals from local hotels.

So, Voyij is off to a shaky and apparently scrapey (it's a new word) start.

The capable Dream Team of SideStep expatriots that Voyij drafted needs to huddle and get its act together.