It’s not just about the price.
As the hint of summer vacation emerges on the horizon, wanna-be travelers begin sifting through travel guides, both real and online, to concoct just the right vacation getaway. Price matters hugely, especially for travelers heading overseas with anemic dollars. But just as important is getting the best value out of a trip.
That means before they plunk down thousands on a trip, travelers are craving real reviews and recommendations from others who have been there, eaten that. And online travel companies are snapping to attention.
A flock of relatively new online travel companies offer myriad ways to compare airfares and hotel rates and of course, book reservations. Others are promoting unpolished–and unvarnished–reviews contributed by fellow travelers. Still others promise to help keep us organized.
You can call it WebTravel 2.0–or you can just pull out what you need to plan your vacation.
“The influence of social networking and community services is growing significantly for online travel,” says Douglas Quinby, senior director of research at PhoCusWright. “Seeking information and looking for perspective–like-minded experience and judgments–are currently trumping the straightforward hunt for the best price. Services that facilitate a purchasing decision by aggregating or filtering content make [online travel information] relevant to the user.”
Online travel companies, including Travelocity and Expedia (nasdaq: EXPE – news – people ), are now some of the oldest Internet brands. But they’re buffing up how they serve vacationers by acquiring social networking sites that focus on travel. Travelocity’s parent company, Sabre Holdings, acquired social travel site IgoUgo in 2005. The following year, IgoUgo–which hosts user-generated reviews of travel destinations and hotels, photos and maps–was folded into Travelocity.
Travelocity wouldn’t say how much IgoUgo has helped boost bookings, but President and Chief Executive Michelle Peluso believes that social networking features are “democratizing.”
Such features “break down the hierarchy between users and Travelocity,” Peluso notes. “Consumers care about value and experience more than they care about finding the cheapest price.”
Expedia owns a social travel site called TripAdvisor, which is considered the premier site for user-generated travel reviews. IAC/InterActive, Expedia’s former parent company, acquired TripAdvisor in 2004 and rolled it into Expedia the following year.
Social travel sites can also foster real-world socializing. Some members of Travelocity’s IgoUgo, for instance, strike a rapport online and then make plans to meet in person at different places around the world.
Online travel agencies aren’t just investing in social networks to appease consumers, however. They also need to offer services that airline Web sites, which handle the majority of online bookings, don’t have. “There’s been a critical need for online travel agencies to differentiate their service from travel suppliers,” Quniby said.
Despite their efforts, some experts say online travel agencies have a long way to go. “The industry is sadly lacking in innovation to make the shopping experience better,” says Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR – news – people ) analyst Henry Harteveldt. “A big reason is the back-end that travel sellers rely on. It’s going to take two to three years to make the necessary changes. It’s a multimillion dollar capital expenditure, and it will take hours of planning and [software] coding.”
But if the big travel organizations are moving slowly, little Web 2.0 start-ups are zipping in to fill the gap. Kayak, a so-called meta search engine for the travel industry, has come out of nowhere and grabbed market share from the big online agencies. The company, which was founded in 2005, saw the number of searches on its site double to 33 million last year.
The breadth of its searches makes Norwalk, Conn.-based Kayak a standout. The company crawls travel agency sites and hundreds of airline and hotel sites to find the best rates and compares them. Kayak is also different from online travel agencies because it makes money from advertising, while agencies make money from marking up discounted inventory from airlines and hotels. (For a more detailed peek at Kayak, see “The Gap In Google’s Defenses.”)
Seattle-based InsideTrip aims to come up with a “quality score” for flights based on a host of criteria other than price. For instance, InsideTrip awards different scores for the duration of a flight and the airline’s on-time performance, its lost-luggage track record, even the amount of legroom aboard planes. The higher the score, the better the overall value of the trip. For instance, InsideTrip gave a $386 round-trip flight from Seattle to Newark, N.J., a quality score of 62, but a slightly more expensive $395 flight had better overall value and received an 88.
Other Web 2.0 travel companies aim to offer concierge-like services. TripIt, for instance, calls itself “an online manila travel folder.” Travelers can send their e-mail confirmations for hotels, airlines, restaurants and so on to TripIt, which then neatly consolidates the information into one file. TripIt, which is based in San Francisco, will also send your itinerary to friends, family and co-workers–if you’d like. “E-mail us your plans, and we organize a master itinerary,” says founder Greg Brockway. “Once we’ve got this information in one place, we let you share it as little or as much as you want.”
After all, traveling should be a social experience.
Via: Forbes