"How did they do this?" fun with Gizmoz

Ran across this site early in 2007. It reminded me of the Wedding Crashers movie trailer flash promo...

Me on my blades....

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

Me and the wife at the Royal Dance

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

Just for fun....

Millennium & Copthorne Online Performance in 2008

Well 2007 has come and gone and we are well into 2008.

For Millennium & Copthorne Hotels' eCommerce initiative, the results speaks for themselves:

Region: Change Booking Revenue (2007 vs 2006)
=====================
USA: +43.2%
Asia Pacific: +85.9%
Europe & M.E.: +47.2%
New Zealand: +93.2%
=====================
Global Total: +49.6%

This is for our direct to brand website bookings and does not include any OTA or TPI internet bookings. Graphed to scale, the monthly revenues for 2006 vs 2007 looks like this:


Needless to say (but I am saying it anyway), we are very please with the results. This was a very eventful year for us with extensive PPC campaigns, major initiatives in SEO, and a huge ecommerce platform upgrade (along with a redesign!). We are still trawling through the data to figure out which part contributed to the increase and by how much.

2008 is going to be an eventful year as well since we have many plans that we want to execute. Hopefully we will get a good increase this year as well over 2007!

Hotels.com Launches iPhone App

This is not new news as the application was first launched on 10th December '08 (see here). But it seems to be getting picked up by hotelmarketing.com and others (and now me!).
It's not big news, but it is at least interesting to me since I have my own hacked iPhone. With the iPhone's browser being the one of the fastest and most popular mobile browsers, this is certainly interesting. It is getting almost 0.1% which is a big deal:

View Trend Windows XP	78.37%
View Trend Windows Vista	9.19%
View Trend MacIntel	3.59%
View Trend Mac OS	3.22%
View Trend Windows 2000	2.97%
View Trend Windows 98	0.76%
View Trend Windows NT	0.63%
View Trend Linux	0.57%
View Trend Windows ME	0.43%
View Trend iPhone	0.09%
View Trend Windows CE	0.06%
View Trend Hiptop	0.02%
View Trend Windows 95	0.02%
View Trend Web TV	0.01%

I tried to access http://www.hotels.com/iphone from my iPhone but I get redirected to an Asian page of hotels.com.... sigh....

Anyhow, mobile access for hotel bookings is a tricky one. I have a proposal from a vendor to take my millenniumhotels.com site and build an interface for mobile. I just can't get an ROI calculation for it. How many bookings do I have to do to get my money back? OR should this be mostly for branding? Would it help for SEO as well?

Well those questions don't have any immediate answers, but at least for now, my investment my iPhone seems to be ok (despite hotels.com not letting me view their iphone app... yet!).

Kayak Buys Sidestep (part 2)

So within a few hours of my last post in which I mentioned I thought the meta search market was small when you look at the revenue and the players, hotelmarketing.com puts out a positive spin on this news:

"The combined company will be profitable with $3.5 billion in transaction volumes and will be the fifth-largest online travel operator."

This echos Kayak's own release: "This transaction combines the two biggest brands in travel search, which would make Kayak.com and its affiliate sites the fifth largest travel brand, with more monthly unique visitors than Priceline, every airline except Southwest, and every hotel and rental car brand"

See full article here.

My first thought was "Wow! They do that much volume? I must really have misread this industry. I need to rethink what I said in my last post." But the more I thought about it, the more I stand by my initial opinion...

Yes the Kayak.com and Sidestep.com merged entity will have USD 3.5 billion in volume through their site per year. But their business model is primarily pay-per-click advertising plus some commission sharing deals with OTAs and travel suppliers. You can not compare that model to an "online travel operator". It is NOT an "apples-to-apples" comparison.

If you were to do that, then Google should also be an "online travel operator". Yes THE Google. The same Google that handles 60% of ALL searches worldwide.  So that would mean Google would have transaction volumes in the travel industry of something like USD 500 BILLION.   That's one hell of an online travel operator!

And consider the path of a user when making a booking via a metasearch:  Google to meta-search to OTA to supplier.  This same "volume" is counted two or three times.  Which is another problem.

We just need a reality check.  Meta-search engines are neither an OTA nor are they search engines.  They are just something in between.  So you can't throw out "Billion dollars in volume" and hope that people take that at face value.

Kayak Buys Sidestep!

Alright so this not new news but it did happen just before Christmas when most of us have "turned off" for the holidays. Quick summary: Kayak raised $196 million from a bunch of vulture caps then used the money to buy Sidestep for something like $180 million. See here on TechCrunch.

What's interesting to me is this:

Kayak's revenues is supposed to be around $50million a year and that of Sidestep is $35million. They are the two largest metasearch engines and are followed distantly by Mobissimo and Yahoo's Farecast. What does this tell you?

1) The meta search engine market is not that large. Right now it must be around $120million a year. Compare this to other OTAs like Expedia and Orbitz with billions of dollars in revenue each, this industry is but a small sliver of the pie.

2) And this sliver of a pie is actually consolidating with the two LARGEST players merging. So what is going to happen to the smaller players?

3) Get acquired or die is what it means. The smaller guys want to get bought. The larger guys also want to get bought. So Kayak-Sidestep's new investors are hoping that they can sell their $100million revenue beast to the likes of Expedia, Orbitz or InteractiveCorp for something like $1.5billion (15 times earnings). Or perhaps Google might decide to get in the game.

4) But these guys are google's clients as they buy a lot of PPC keyword ads. Google may not want to be seen as a monopoly if they own both the advertiser and the medium.

Anyhow, good luck to all the smaller travel meta search engines out there like bezurk.com and sprice.com and qunar.com....