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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TripCase: Sabre's Case for Disruptive Mobile Strategy

Sabre's TripCase, already available as a downloadable app on iPhone and Blackberry smartphones, could be a disrupter in the trip-management, itinerary-swapping sphere.

As you probably know, TripIt is a leader in the field and Sabre is a minority investor in TripIt. Despite differences, of course, TripIt and TripCase have a lot of overlapping functionality in the trip-management domain.

And, to make matters more incestuous, Traxo just put its feet on the ground in a beta launch, and several Traxo execs have a lot of years at Sabre's Travelocity on their resumes.

So, we're seemingly in store at some point for a Wild West shootout or perhaps some consolidation as things play out and other players emerge, as well.

Industry veterans have seen this sort of dynamic kick around over and over again as new, innovative solutions emerge and vie for market share.

I wrote in Travel Weekly how tension between TripCase and TripIt likely led to a changing of the guard on the TripIt board.

In January, John Samuel, an exec in Sabre Travel Studios, which developed TripCase, gave up his seat on TripIt's board and was replaced by Chris Kroeger, the president of Sabre GetThere.

In my opinion, Samuel was in an untenable position.

Meanwhile, Sabre is positioning TripCase as both a consumer and corporate tool. For now, it has one big advantage over TripIt, Traxo and other emerging players which are not affiliated with a global distribution system.

If a TripCase user books their travel through a Sabre GDS-connected agency, then their itineraries get automatically updated on their iPhone or Blackberry. On the other hand, users can still keep their itineraries up to date with non-Sabre bookings. If the consumer books a hotel themselves on a hotel or car-rental website, for example, then they can manually enter the reservation information in TripCase.

In contrast, TripIt users have to manually e-mail all of their reservation confirmations to TripIt. And Traxo, armed with consumers' user names and passwords for supplier websites, is engaged in what could be the dicey game of scraping those supplier websites for reservations updates. Although Traxo says it scrapes very lightly, off-hours and once daily.

I plan on speaking with Sabre next week to hear more about its mobile and social-networking strategy. Sabre Travel Studios' cubeless product, a business to business social-networking solution, also seems worthy of some more ink.

So, what is going on with Sabre TripCase versus TripIt?

Norm Rose wrote about the tension several months ago in his blog.

Rose, a senior corporate and technology analyst at PhoCusWright, believes Sabre is employing a typical second-mover strategy in sorting out its position in the mobile arena. [Full disclosure: I recently became a PhoCusWright analyst/contractor.]

"Going back to the early days of corporate booking, the innovators were Internet Travel Network [it became GetThere), TravelNet [no longer around] and eTravel [purchased by Oracle and then sold to Amadeus]," Rose recalls. "In those days, Sabre quickly recognized the innovation and came out with BTS as a competitor. A few years later Sabre acquired GetThere."

So, as a second-mover, Sabre may be able to learn from TripIt's experimentation, attempt to steal its thunder and market share, or eventually buy it.

Rose points out that Sabre long has offered Sabre VirtuallyThere, a co-branded Sabre-agency product that overlaps in its role with TripCase and TripIt, too.

He believes Sabre could decide to blend TripCase and VirtuallyThere in some fashion or let them to co-exist.

Of course, I think if TripCase takes off perhaps Sabre might choose to phase out the VirtuallyThere brand.

At any rate, there is much potential for Sabre and its travel agency customers to leverage TripCase, Rose believes, by upselling things like tours and other destination-oriented products, similar to how airlines are enhancing their bottom lines with ancillary services. Technologies are emerging, including the OS 3.0 operating system for the iPhone, that facilitate such purchases within third-party apps, he adds.

One source, a travel executive who has no dog in the TripCase-TripIt-Traxo fight, speculates that Sabre's mobile strategy and TripIt investment collided because Sabre tends to display a "not-invented-here" mindset. And, since Sabre can't control TripIt as a minority investor and mold TripIt to fit Sabre's mobile strategy, the company indeed decided to build its own.

The strategy also has parallels to the practices of some Web players when they partner with a provider, develop their own solution and then dump the vendor. Rod Cuthbert, founder and chairman of Viator, forever will remember his experiences with Expedia on that front.

As a second-mover, but first-mover among GDSs in mobile trip-management, it might be a nifty move for Sabre to consider making TripCase an agnostic device -- namely offering connectivity to and itinerary updates from multiple GDSs.

Travelport tried to do that with its universal-agency desktop in Canada, but I don't believe it has received much love from Amadeus and Sabre on that front.

As likely will be the case with Sabre's TripCase and its mobile strategy generally, we've seen repeatedly, much to the detriment of innovation in the travel industry, that leading companies prefer to retain their walled gardens.