Google, Amex, UpTake Point To An Opportunity for Travel Agents

Research from Google, Uptake.com and TIA/American Express makes me feel that traditional travel agencies, namely those we sometimes refer to as off-line agencies, can seize an opportunity in all of the complexity in online trip-planning.

Sure, airline commissions are gone, the Web and the marketing clout of online travel agencies have helped put traditional agencies under tremendous pressure, but there are business opportunities for agencies that engage consumers in new ways and take advantage of the pain-in-the butt that online-travel planning has become.

Consider this:

In a presentation at the recent TravelCom conference in Atlanta, Rob Torres, Google's managing director for travel, said Google research found that travelers spend 6.7 weeks searching for trips and they visit 8.1 websites on average before booking.

And trip-planning site TravelMuse recently cited statistics from UpTake.com that consumers visit 25 websites on average "when planning a single vacation."

TravelMuse also cited an August 2008 study by TIA and American Express which found that 20 percent of travelers put in more than 10 hours of online-travel planning in researching their trips.

Who has that kind of time?

It's a jungle out there, whether it is researching a safari vacation or any other kind of getaway.

When researching a trip, consumers looking for deals have to wade through search engines, metasearch sites, supplier-direct websites, consolidators' offerings, opaque auction sites, online travel agency sites, trip-planning sites and hotel-review sites in a prolonged and confusing trip-research process.

It all reminds me of Priceline CEO Jeffery Boyd's appearance at a PhoCusWright conference in
2004 when he facetiously called for the formation of a new website, which he dubbed FarePile.com, to aggregate the offerings of metasearch aggregators like Kayak, SideStep, FareChase and Mobissimo.

And, the complexity of the trip-planning process isn't getting any easier with the advent of ancillary services and sometimes-hidden fees for checked bags, premium seats and lounge access.

In contrast, I emailed a traditional travel agency the other day about a trip to Israel, and the agency emailed me back letting me know that I could fly out of Newark and return to JFK for $897 on El Al, or I could take Austrian Airlines out of JFK with a stop in Vienna for around $777.

Simple as that. It probably would have taken me hours of frustrating searches and price comparisons to find these fares on my own. And, that's even before considering lodging choices and a car rental.

So travel agents have an opportunity if they can better market themselves as experts, traveler advocates and simplifiers of the trip-planning process.

Will they do it in new and creative ways?

Most probably won't, but the smart ones will. I see plenty of travel agencies promoting themselves and getting involved with consumers on Twitter and Facebook.

For example, here's an unofficial list, managed by Matt Parsons in London, of "the travel industry on Twitter."

I wrote about one way that travel companies might get involved in social media through A Twitter Summer Travel Stimulus Package.

That's the key. If travel agents want to tap into new audiences, then they have to frequent social media sites where the online bookers are.

Otherwise, with the trip-planning process getting more complex by the minute, we'll have to renew Boyd's call for the ultimate aggregation site, FarePile.com.

The Kayak Style and Other Mumbo Jumbo

Sockless Steve Hafner, the Kayak co-founder and CEO, can be brash, insightful and a laugh riot. At the recent TravelCom conference in Atlanta, for instance, he said metasearch is a lousy business because of its thin margins, that Kayak's TravelPost hotel-review business had an even worse business proposition, and that gaining global traffic and scale is the whole ballgame.

"Any donkey can build a metasearch site," Hafner said.

One can debate the pros and cons of Hafner's style.

But, I am definitely a fan of the Kayak.com website's style.

Consider that its privacy policy and terms of use are listed under the heading, Mumbo Jumbo.

On a Kayak Blog post about the launch of a Kayak iPhone app, Kayak writes: "That’s the most important part of this post. We have an iPhone app, if you have an iPhone and you travel, you should download it. The rest of this article is the story of how we made the iPhone app. If you are not a software developer, the intense boredom rays emitted from the information herein is likely to melt your temporal lobe. You’ll wake up in two or three hours with a face full of keyboard and a keyboard full of drool."

And, what really inspired me to write my post about the Kayak style is the site's description of its team. Kayak is known for the filters it offers consumers, giving them the ability to select or deselect individual airlines, airports and layover durations etc.

And, the page depicting Team-Kayak.com also has its filters. Among other choices, you can filter in and out the Nerds and the Capitalists among the leadership team.

Looks like the team is bereft of Nerds because no team members showed up using that filter.

However, if you select Capitalist, then the pics and titles of Keith Melnick, executive vice president of business development, and Hafner are displayed.

Well, let's hope that Hafner and Melnick and chief of geekdom Paul English can build up those global volumes that they've been working on.

Otherwise, Hafner's Capitalist status would be in jeopardy.

Well, probably not, but ...

Anyway, the site's verbiage is irreverent and refreshing. In that regard, I like Kayak's style.

And, incidentally, for those companies just starting to delve into social media, I think it is this sort of style that is the most compelling in a bunch of situations.

Continental, Houston Astros' Airline, Hits Foul Ball with HGH-Releaser Ad

Continental, the official airline of the Houston Astros baseball team, hits a foul ball, in my opinion, with a print advertisement in its in-flight magazine topped with the headline: "Grow Young with HGH."

Human Growth Hormone, after all, is banned in Major League Baseball and condemned by MLB Commissioner Bud Selig.

I saw the ad yesterday when I flew Continental home to New Jersey from the TravelCom conference in Atlanta.

The advertisement, from BIEHealth.US, is not for synthetic HGH, but for GHR (Growth Hormone Releaser), which is said to be a natural supplement that prods "your pituitary to secrete extra HGH and then accentuate them to full potential with a proper diet and HGH-releasing exercises," according to the website.

Some of these anti-aging products, with their hyperbolic claims, have been condemned by the Federal Trade Commission, although I couldn't find a specific complaint about GHR.

Still, the ad in Continental's in-flight magazine refers to GHR as "the Reverse Aging Miracle" and goes on to say how HGH reverses hemorrhoids, arthritis and angina.

Wow, if only all those professional baseball players, believed to be weaned from steroids and possibly taking HGH, would opt for this natural HGH-releaser instead and perform workouts heavy on the "HGH-releasing exercises."

We'd have a whole new meaning for "The Natural."

C'mon Continental. You are a damn good airline. You are sending the wrong message and you are better than this.

UPDATE: As a commentator below pointed out, Continental doesn't publish its in-flight magazine. It is published by The Pohly Company.

However, Continental is responsible for its own brand, and associating the Continental brand with an HGH-like "natural" supplement, is a screwball move.

Orbitz May Be Close to Booking-Fee Decision

Orbitz Worldwide President and CEO Barney Harford told participants at the TravelCom conference in Atlanta yesterday that the company didn't want to be rushed into a decision about booking fees and was still evaluating the situation. "Stay tuned," Harford said.

I'm hearing from a non-Orbitz insider that some kind of Orbitz announcement, in the wake of Expedia and Travelocity killing booking fees on flights, had been imminent yesterday, but didn't materialize.

Orbitz's fence-sitting and condundrum is so pronounced, I'm told, that in its deal-making overtures with at least one metasearch company, Orbitz's proposals include one with booking fees and one without.

What would it mean if it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reorganized, and dropped booking fees? That could be one radical option being mulled, although I have no idea how seriously that might be being vetted. That wouldn't be a very pleasant option as far as building consumer trust, but Orbitz, reliant on the booking fees, is in a very tight spot.

Orbitz is loaded down with debt, dependent on booking fees, and locked into disadvantageous agreements with Big Brother Travelport.

There has even been some speculation about some kind of Orbitz-Kayak combination, which doesn't make much sense to me.

Meanwhile, Orbitz, the exclusive online travel agency participating in Kayak, would be hard-pressed to compensate Kayak, which gets a chunk of revenue from Orbitz, if Orbitz decides to toss its booking fees.

Kayak CEO Steve Hafner indeed predicts that Orbitz has no choice but to drop booking fees.

I think we will be hearing something on this front soon.

No rush, Barney, but we are awaiting your next move.

Will Airline Fees Pinch Business Travelers?

Joe Sharkey wrote an interesting story in yesterday's New York Times, speculating that frequent flyers with lower levels of elite status may see some of their perks evaporate as airlines try to merchandise everything bolted and not bolted-down on the plane.

If these road warriors get priority boarding or exit-row seating as part of their elite perks for free, will the airlines ditch the freebies they give business travelers in favor of a non-elite traveler who may want to pay $15 or $20 for the premier seat, Sharkey wonders.

He even speculates that some of these new pay-as-you-go ancillary products, as they are known, may go up for auction, with the exit row seats going to the highest bidders.

Will we see a sort of Priceline system for priority boarding, premier seats and lounge access?

In that regard, I like a tweet I saw this morning written by Gregg Brockway, CEO of TripIt, from the TravelCom conference in Atlanta. He tweeted: "Enjoying #TravelCom. The upstarts generally seem happy and the establishment pained. Creative destruction at work?"

Brockway wasn't referring to airline merchandising, but I like the "creative destruction" reference.

In the next few years, airlines' souped-up merchandising efforts are going to bring a lot of disruption, altering the way travel is bought and sold on the Web and offline, too, for business travelers and just plain folks.