In Q3 results, the distribution giant says Beyond Air, which includes its eNett payments business, helped it deliver a 2% increase to net revenue of $623 million for the quarter.

The company’s EBITDA also increased 2% to $139 million while net income was up 25% to $6 million.

The Travel Commerce Platform saw a 2% revenue increase to $598 million, 32% of which is attributed to Beyond Air which saw a 14% increase to revenue of $24 million.

Air revenue declined 3% to $13 million for the quarter which Travelport attributes to a dip in air reported segments following the loss of a large agency in the APAC region and “other travel agency headwinds.”

The eNett payments business delivered a 58% increase to net revenue of $86 million.

In a statement, Travelport president and CEO Gordon Wilson refers to “specific customer headwinds” which are affecting the company.

He adds that the company is in a good place for “longer term profitable growth” based on deals, such as with Air India and Jet Airways, and technology and content investment around merchandising, mobile, data and payments.

Travelport believes full-year 2018 net revenue will come out at the lower end of its 4% – 6% guidance range.

REGISTER NOW! Corporate travel execs, tech vendors and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

Testing is underway of a system involving various checkpoints from check-in to lounge entry and on to boarding and trials with passengers are planned for the near future.

The carrier is using a mix of facial and iris recognition technology for the project.

The Smart Tunnel immigration element, a collaboration with the General Directorate of Residence and Foreigners Affairs in Dubai, clears passengers without the need for human intervention.

Emirates believes that the “biometric path”, which is initially for first class and business passengers, will speed up and improve the airport experience.

Going forward, the technology could also be used to locate passengers who might miss their flight.

The plan is to extend the system to all passengers in the near future as well as potentially to other airports.

Separately, biometric boarding has just started at Montevideo Carrasco International Airport with LATAM Airlines’ passengers boarding without having to show a passport or boarding pass.

The development, which uses facial scanning, builds on the airport’s use of biometric border control since 2016.

It also marks the start of a plan by airport operator Corporacion America and technology provider Vision-Box to bring seamless travel to 50 airports.

In a further development, the World Travel and Tourism Council is testing biometric technology to enable travelers to pass through not only airport controls but also applying the technology car rental, cruises, tour operators and hotels.

Various industry partners, including American Airlines, Hilton and MSC Cruises, are working with the WTTC as part of its Seamless Traveller Journey initiative.

A first pilot in 2019, which involves travelers on round-trips between Dallas Forth Worth and London, will see passengers using biometrics through the airport as well as for car rental and hotel check-in.

WTTC has also asked the relevant border agencies from the two countries to participate in the trial.

REGISTER NOW! Corporate travel execs, tech vendors and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

Booking.com vice president Olivier Grémillon, who leads the brand’s home division, says the company developed the tools based on input from professionals that manage some of the 5.7 million listings of homes, apartments and other private accommodations available on the site.

One tool created based on such feedback allows property managers to set filters that determine which Booking.com users will be able to book their properties – such as only guests with verified phone numbers or only guests that have made a reservation on Booking.com in the past. Partners can also now instantly report guest misconduct and block those guests from making future bookings.

“The instant booking model, we really believe that it’s actually what the customers want. They want to be able to book an apartment as easily as they book a hotel,” Grémillon says.

“The partners understand the instantly bookable model gives them more bookings as well. But one thing they told us, though, is the fact that they want to … be able to filter some of the guests that are coming to their place.”

“We think it’s the best of both worlds, because it gives control to the hosts on one side, and it’s still a very frictionless experience on the guest side because they can book instantly any property that they see.”

The system is starting with a few filters, but Grémillon says it may enable more in the future.

“These are strictly created by Booking,” he says.

“Obviously one of the things we want to avoid is that some partners do filtering based on criteria we wouldn’t necessarily approve of. So we are the ones deciding on the filters.”

Property mangers can also use a new Group Connect feature that streamlines communications with guests through message templates and automated scheduling.

Another time-saver is a new bulk action capability, enabling property managers to create cancellation policies, promotional offers and house rules across all properties at once. The system also now has a new profile page where partners can add personal messages about themselves, their properties and the neighborhoods where properties are located.

All of these new features are available on all of the platforms professional managers use for their portfolio of properties, including Booking.com’s extranet, its mobile app for partners called Pulse or a connectivity provider.

Next steps

Looking ahead, Grémillon says Booking.com is focusing its expansion efforts for the home division on the United States, “because we have some catch-up to do there,” he says. Asia, primarily China, is another region in his sights.

Along with growing the rental property inventory, Grémillon says it will continue to develop connections between Booking Holdings’ tours and activities business – boosted by its acquisition of Fareharbor in April – and its accommodations brands.

“Right now if you book an accommodation in Booking in some selected markets we actually propose you some of these activities – it doesn’t matter whether you book a hotel or a home or an apartment,” he says.

“The thing we are actually doing as well for some of our accommodation partners is if they actually provide experiences themselves, they can list that on our platform not only to their guests but to additional guests.”

And while, in the past, Booking Holdings has acquired businesses to provide software and tools to its hotel partners, Grémillon says that is not the current plan for alternative accommodations.

“I would never say never, but I would say our strategy is to partner with tools that exist that our property owners are using because the market is very fragmented,” he says.

“We are more in the strategy of partnering with a lot of them and having deep discussions on how to make the technology better for the partners, for the hosts and elevating the technology by providing them better connectivity and by also telling them what we need from their side.”

REGISTER NOW! Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Ctrip, MakeMyTrip and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

The report, prepared by H2C, is based on a survey of executives and technology managers from 110 hotel chains representing nearly 40,000 properties and 4.9 million rooms around the world.

The project was sponsored by eight technology companies that serve the hospitality industry, including Oracle, Sabre, Shiji and Pegasus.

Property management systems can vary greatly from one hotel to another, but the report notes that hotels should address service and functionality gaps since “today’s guests increasingly expect hotels to recognize and meet their needs in a more proactive way.”

Based on the results of this study and its 2017 Global Central Reservation System study, H2C says it sees “a confirmed trend that PMS and CRS systems will increasingly merge in the future, either in the form of hybrid solutions or as entirely new hotel management platforms.”

Top issues

When asked about their biggest concerns with their existing PMS, 30% of respondents say lack of support from their PMS vendor – mentioning it nearly twice as often as any other pain point.

More than half (57%) of hotel chains rate their PMS vendor as average or poor for their support services.

Technology deficiencies such as integration with third parties, functionality issues and lack of updates are also mentioned as concerns, while cost is at the bottom of the list (7%).

When asked what improvements they would like to see in the PMS in the future, 58% of all chains rank a deeper integration with their existing technology landscape as most important, followed by improved mobile functionalities (41%) and a more intuitive graphical user interface for operations (36%).

Close behind is enhanced business intelligence (34%) and personalization functionalities (33%).

And while 87% of respondents say they use their PMS to manage guest profiles, the majority expect that, within five years, guest profile management will shift to CRM systems and third-party integrations via open APIs.

When asked who should provide guest-facing technology such as in-room streaming, mobile keys and voice controls for lighting and temperature, respondents are split, with 53% saying it should be handled by the PMS vendors and 47% preferring third-party suppliers.

H2C says increased demand for cloud solutions, which offer flexibility and integration capabilities, will drive a shift in PMS strategy in the next few years. Chains based in Asia Pacific express the greatest interest in changing their PMS setup (39%), follow by European hotel groups (34%).

And as they consider new options, three in five hotel chains say they would prefer a “pay-as-you-go” license model, rather than paying for a complete suite of PMS services. Respondents say they expect “better cost efficiency, increased flexibility and customization” from a pay-as-you-go model.

REGISTER NOW! Hilton, AccorHotels and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

And the past 365 days have so far paid off, according to Victor Tseng, Ctrip vice president of corporate affairs, who says the Silicon Valley-based travel brand has been able to leverage Ctrip’s scale and access to products in niche categories and price ranges.

Trip.com, as a brand, has a fairly unusual history. It was founded in Silicon Valley in 2010 by Travis Katz as a travel social network under the name Gogobot – it rebranded to Trip.com in late-2016 and, for a number of reasons, then caught the attention of Ctrip.

The acquisition in November 2017 led to a two-fold strategy: Ctrip got the brand name Trip.com, and Skyscanner got the trip planning services behind the scenes. Katz joined Ctrip-owned Skyscanner as its vice president of product.

Ctrip’s version of Trip.com is a very different proposition to the site that hit the scenes and raised $39 million in funding.

“I think for such a young product, Trip.com has been growing quite well,” Tseng tells PhocusWire in an interview at WIT Singapore 2018. “In the markets Trip.com is in with a lot of consumers – like Korea or Singapore – a lot of the travel spend is outbound, and that plays to its strengths as well. … Anywhere around the world there’s flights, there’s hotels, there’s cars, there’s in-destination [activities] for consumers.”

Currently, Trip.com has services available in 13 languages; it has more than 1.2 million hotels in 200 countries and regions and more than two million flight routes connecting 5,000 cities.The deal to buy Trip.com

Tseng says flights are anchoring Trip.com’s growth, particularly in markets such as Korea, where market share has been growing “quite fast,” as well as Hong Kong, where market share is over 10%.

Flights are more scalable than other products, he continues, because Ctrip has been investing in flight technology and how to link up with global distribution systems and low-cost carriers, thus creating a “vast, comprehensive flight inventory and fresh data.”

Local matter

Ctrip has also been investing in localization efforts in Trip.com markets, Tseng says, because each region needs to present unique value propositions to its local user base.

In Singapore, for example, where a lot of travel is outbound, Trip.com has been promoting “staycations” to residents to help local hotel chains grow bookings.

In Japan, meanwhile, Trip.com launched a co-branded credit card with the bank Sumitomo that allows users to log loyalty points with purchases.

There has also been a concerted effort to assist local users in making payments and contacting customer service. “Ctrip has been in the travel business for almost 20 years, and part of our DNA is service capability,” Tseng says. “We’re really investing in the human touch with call centers.”

He estimates there are as many as 14,000 call center people who pick up the phone within 20 seconds available 24/7, and a call center recently opened in Korea in response to the volume of calls coming from the area.

“I think there’s a lot of value in having a human-touch service that can really differentiate the experience, but it’s not to say we’re not automating,” Tseng says. “We’ve invested massively on artificial intelligence, massively on data; they need to go hand in hand.”

Building a “super app”

Tseng believes Ctrip has succeeded at becoming a one-stop shop, or “super app,” for consumers looking to book or manage multiple parts of a trip, and it’s a blueprint Trip.com can follow – with some local tweaks.

For example, for Chinese Ctrip users, there’s a 20 to 30% natural attachment rate of booking other travel products in the same itinerary, which he says presents a lot of opportunity for Trip.com to leverage.

“It’s a win-win: A more seamless user experience and better conversions for suppliers, as well.”

Travel, Tseng says, is “already time-consuming and pressure-packed,” and Trip.com’s ability to function as a one-stop shop helps differentiate it from the OTA competition.

To that end, Trip.com added Ctrip’s car rental service in March and its tours and activities inventory in August, giving travelers more booking options beyond flights and hotels.

“One-stop-shop capability is something we’ve done tremendously well through Ctrip, and there is a recipe and formula in some ways that Trip.com can adopt,” he says.

“But not absolutely; they need to also balance with the local element.”

REGISTER NOW! Ctrip, Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, MakeMyTrip and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

It was, for many years, the errant child of the industry – sites that got a lot of traffic (and some brands raised a lot of investment money), but its inherent usefulness as a consumer tool was purely, some argued, to compare prices.

Metasearch engines obviously served a purpose but didn’t really close the loop on the growing of trend of services for the broader ecosystem that wanted to be part of the inspiration, search, booking and post-trip elements of travel.

But the market started to evolve at the turn of the decade.

First of all, Google nailed its colors to the mast when it bought ITA Software – a deal that was the basis for its Google Flights platform.

The search giant also started exploring how metasearch could be a cornerstone of how it wanted to become a key player in the market for consumers looking for accommodation – on this occasion also combining with how users interact with maps.

The travel industry took notice, with a succession of deals that have continued to this day: Kayak sold to Booking Holdings; Skyscanner went to Ctrip; and, more recently, both Momondo and HotelsCombined have also ended up in the Booking Holdings stable of brands.

But has the concept of metasearch altered particularly over the years?

Our series of articles during October have suggested that the metasearch model is also, like many other sectors in the industry, at a fascinating point in its evolution.

Google is hell bent on continuing its strategy, for example (there’s some associated analysis here), yet the concept of meta-book is where many believe the market is heading next.

The idea of multimodal (covering multiple transportation options) is gaining ground, not least with a huge round going into GoEuro this month.

The market is perhaps not as closed to new entrants as some may have believed, as well, with startups still making a mark in their own way (and some noisy challengers have figured out another path).

We’ve also heard how some of the brands that have worked to figure out a different role are still there in the market, such as HomeToGo, plus how some think the entire metasearch concept for hotels is coming to an end.

So, metasearch is actually at a critical point.

Issues for metasearch brands

Some key areas for discussion at The Phocuswright Conference:

• Differentiating against the rising influence of Google’s metasearch strategy.
• The length to which will meta-book will go.
• Sectors that are still ripe for the model.

REGISTER NOW! Skyscanner, Kayak and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

And, of course, metasearch has tried to become a part in the process – with some big investment rounds going into startups and, unfortunately, some fairly high-profile casualties along the way.

Phocuswire spoke to Dr. Patrick Andrae, chief executive of HomeToGo about current trends and the need for metasearch in the vacation rental industry.

Why do you think vacation rental needs a metasearch platform?

The vacation rental market is extremely fragmented – much more so than the hotel or flights market. There are hundreds of websites offering vacation rentals – it can take users hours of searching to discover the perfect accommodation for their needs.

From our own experience with this dilemma, and hearing our friends complain about the pain of trying to find a vacation rental, the need for a solution was clear. Thus, HomeToGo was born.

With HomeToGo, you can search for exactly what you need, at the best price, and still book with your preferred website -fast.

Google has made forays into hotels, flights, tours, and activities – do you see it going after vacation rental as well?

Google is a search engine, so it makes sense for them to aggregate travel inventory like flights and hotels. However, flights and hotels are easier to aggregate.

From a coverage standpoint 90% of the inventory is the same for all hotel metasearch engines. None of the big vacation rental providers have more than 20% of the market. This puts HomeToGo at an advantage as aggregation goes well beyond simply price comparison.

How will the OTA giants decision to divert marketing spend away from metasearch affect their development going forward?

Many metasearch platforms with a lower quality product will be negatively impacted by this. If an OTA is not getting value back from the metasearch, it is inevitable they will stop spending with them.

Our 300 partners work with us for a variety of reasons – one of which is that we are able to provide a new stream of highly qualified “ready-to-book” traffic to their sites and listings.

For smaller vacation rental websites, we help them gain visibility (we send over 20 million users per month to our partners). In general, this might harm platforms that rely on a low number of partners.

Can you share what you customer acquisition strategy is as you go up against much larger companies with deep pockets?

We aggregate and compare more websites, and therefore more vacation rentals, than anyone else. This provides the user with a faster, easier, and more cost efficient way to find the best accommodation for their specific needs.

We are also the technology leader in metasearch for vacation rentals. HomeToGo is based on a complex search technology that integrates, combines, and deduplicates the data of hundreds of partner websites to make the world’s vacation rentals easily accessible and comparable for everyone.

With this technology we give users the largest choice with one quick search, while machine learning based sorting technology guarantees the results are ranked by relevance for the needs of the individual user that searches.

In such a competitive vertical, that is very cost intensive when it comes to marketing, we spend wisely and with purpose. Our growth in the US market demonstrates that we are making the right decisions with our share of TV ads, retargeting, and other marketing efforts.

Additionally, our advanced technology provides the user with a lot of benefits while performing their search. We see this reflected in the large amount of return and direct traffic that continues to increase each month.

How do you see metasearch platforms evolving in vacation rental and more widely especially in light of the challenges faced by Tripping?

Inevitably, less robust products will drop off. The winner will have the best tech, user experience, and partnerships. In the end, it will be a “Winner takes all” situation and we are on a very promising path.

For HomeToGo, the future involves expanding our offering and localized product while enhancing our search functionality even further to continue to provide the best results no matter the search.

In general, metasearch will have to continue to evolve to accommodate users seamlessly across devices, including voice search technology.

REGISTER NOW! Airbnb and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

As OTA giants such as booking and expedia race to add vacation rental inventory to their offering – with the belief that consumers want to compare traditional accommodation and rentals – how does vacation rental metasearch make it’s mark?

The vacation rental market is extremely fragmented. There are literally hundreds of websites offering vacation rentals. For a user, finding what they are looking for quickly, efficiently, and at the best price, is key.

While there are many big players out there, a provider is limited to only their inventory. By offering an aggregation of many providers at the same time, vacation rental metasearch makes life easier for users.

As people get more and more used to the idea of a vacation rental as a beneficial accommodation, they are more likely to experiment with new ways of finding the best vacation rental for their desired destination, budget, and needs -metasearch makes it easy to do just that.

HomeToGo recently acquired Casamundo. Can you share anything further about how this fits in with the overall strategy?

HomeToGo and Casamundo’s experiences and insights complement each other and create a promising opportunity for future growth and development.

Casamundo has a great team and brand in the UK and European vacation rental industry. We’re looking forward to continuing to build, as a group, the best vacation rental search experience on the market.

Most likely, Casamundo will open its platform to other aggregators as well.

Does not having Airbnb participate in the model hamper it in anyway? Why do you think Airbnb has chosen this strategy and do you think there’s any chance it will change it’s mind in the future?

We can’t speak to Airbnb’s current or future strategy, but by looking at some of our domains you will find that Airbnb is already a partially integrated partner. For instance, via pop-under users can easily reach and compare prices on Airbnb.

What’s your view on the metabook model?

Making the process even easier for the user is key.

How important do you believe brand is in metasearch?

Of course, brand is important, but building a brand without a foundation of a robust product and high quality tech will only carry you so far.

Once a company has a solid foundation, building a brand helps build user trust and recognition, which is always important in a competitive market.

When we started Hipmunk in 2010, we were trying to solve a problem we faced firsthand: the agony of searching and booking travel. I’d planned dozens of trips for the MIT Debate Team, and the average search session took hours and involved a dozen different sites.

We got a lot of strange looks when we told people that we were going after the travel space, but Y Combinator, the famous early stage investor, decided we were worth a gamble. We moved out to San Francisco in June 2010, and two months later we had a working product in time for Demo Day.

Unlike many startups, we didn’t have a set product in mind out of the gate. We considered launching as an online travel agency, for example, and experimented with multiple designs, like an Excel-based table of flight options.

Each time, we asked ourselves, “Would this approach make travel planning easier for frequent travelers?” And using that as our guide, we converged on a set of design decisions that were dramatically different than what had come before.

One of our first decisions was to not sort results by price. We believed that most frequent travelers were willing to spend a little bit more to take a more convenient flight, and that flight options should be sorted by a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.

Originally, we named this sorting metric “suckage,” but the day before we launched, we (wisely) changed it to “agony.”

Our “agony” sort caught on like wildfire, as did our time-based presentation of flight results. We reduced the number of clicks users had to make by putting all the results on a single page, and we used then-state-of-the-art web technology to make results update instantly when users updated their sorting or filtering settings.

A year later, we built on our flight search success by launching a hotel search experience. We pioneered new approaches there, too, combining a list and a map on a single screen and searching hotels and vacation rentals at the same time.

As our innovations captured the attention of frequent travelers, and our competitors slowly started copying some of our features. We knew all along we were going to have to continue innovating to stay ahead, and that’s exactly what we did.

We launched one of the first travel chatbots – Hello Hipmunk – that’s now helped thousands of travelers plan trips to all corners of the world. We also recognized that frequent travelers typically tend to travel for both business and leisure, and so we started building features that really resonated with business travelers, like the ability to search for a company name on a map and see the hotels nearby.

We took it further, allowing users to connect their calendars and see the hotels near their meetings and the flights that would get them in on time.

That focus caught the attention of SAP Concur. Together, we talked about the power of putting that Hipmunk experience in front of SAP Concur customers, like the tens of thousands of small businesses that weren’t yet ready for a fully managed travel solution.

Those efforts came to fruition last year with the launch of Concur Hipmunk, a lightweight travel and expense product that takes the work out of business travel and helps small businesses save money. And it’s also catching on like wildfire: Since launching, more than 900 companies have signed up to give their travelers a way to quickly plan and book travel – all while unlocking travel rates exclusive to small businesses.

This year, tapping into learnings from the Hello Hipmunk chatbot, we helped build the Concur Travel bot on Slack, specifically for business travelers who want to get their travel planning done quickly. And we launched the most advanced search experience in the market for users deciding between different fare classes, so travelers can compare the full cost and benefit of the growing number of fare classes.

Most startups coast when they get acquired; innovation slows down as they settle into complacency. I’m proud that we’ve gone in the other directionz: Our pace of innovation has increased since we were acquired, and in the coming years we expect even more to come.

• This article was written by Adam Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of Hipmunk.

According to recent industry buzz and rumors, Trivago has seen better times.

Hardly a month (or even a week!) goes past by without an article or press release highlighting even more trouble for the metasearch site.

The issues seem endless: Financial woes and a weakening competitive position as an effective marketing channel are compounded by online travel agencies pulling back on spend.

But at the same time, we are still bombarded by Trivago commercials, and demand and interest from hotels in Trivago show no signs of slowing down.

There’s no doubt about the steady interest in the company from the market, and it still remains a major player in travelers’ efforts to research, find and book the ideal hotel.

So, what’s behind all these stories?

From a hotelier perspective: the good about Trivago

At Bookassist, we work with hundreds of hotels to boost their visibility on metasearch sites, including Trivago.

We collect a huge volume of data over time, and that gives us a privileged position in determining how effective Trivago is from an advertising perspective for independent hotels.

And some positive news can’t be ignored.

1. Trivago is still the metasearch leader in terms of traffic generation to hotel websites.

2. The ROI is there.

3. The volumes vs. profitability eternal dilemma: Trivago is fine here, too.

Trivago still drives lot of traffic to hotels websites at a reasonable cost of acquisition, given the ROI it delivers at a larger scale; and it’s actually the metasearch site – second only to Google – that gives the best balance between these KPIs.

So, again: why all the negativity?

All that glitters is not gold

While the year-to-date figures above show some pretty nice and positive KPIs for Trivago itself as well as for Trivago’s effectiveness compared to other metasearch engines, the same can’t be said when those very KPIs get compared to the previous year.

Trivago – as with any other digital marketing actions – has to have a long-term strategy, so looking at its growth (or decrease) over a longer time frame is a crucial task for hotel digital marketing managers – especially at this time of the year when 2019 budgets are due!

When we look at Trivago’s growth through a year-over-year comparison, the picture changes dramatically.

While Trivago is still the channel that delivers the most traffic to hotel websites (see Chart 1 above), the trend has actually decreased quite significantly compared to last year, showing a concerning up-to 40% drop for some hotels.

While metasearch as a whole has been growing, Trivago has been falling behind, not only in terms of traffic generation (see Chart 4), but also in terms of contribution to bookings for hotel websites.

When everything changed … for the worst (aka the bad thing about Trivago)

At the end of last year, Trivago rolled out a major update to its algorithm that determined how advertisers ranked in the auction. While Trivago always has been proud of its price-win auction dynamics (resulting in giving first position to advertisers with the cheapest room rate), this has all now changed to a bid-win dynamic: Room rate is no longer a way to guarantee a first position in the ranking.

Whether this has been done in a desperate effort to try to keep OTAs onboard (as they had started pulling back on spend) or as a way to increase revenue (it’s hard to say, but it’s likely to be a bit of both ), the outcome is the same: This move has only penalized independent hotels and, in particular, the effectiveness of their pay-per-click investments on Trivago. The result is a higher cost-per-click (Chart 6 below) and, as a consequence, less traffic to hotel websites.

Less traffic to hotel websites at a higher cost of click acquisition can only lead to a decrease in profitability, as has happened to many hotels.

The Trivago value proposition compromise

On the consumer side, overall popularity of Trivago also seems to have taken a nose dive. Again, comparisons to last year show fewer users – apparently – using the Trivago search engine, which Trivago also states in its quarterly reports when significant decreases in qualified referrals are reported.

Trivago’s changes to its algorithm didn’t only affect profitability of hotels investments – it has also compromised its value proposition to its customers.

How can you promote yourself as the go-to place to find the best price if the results don’t reflect that?

There’s disconnect here between brand promise and user experience.

And this can be certainly one of the reasons why Trivago, as a brand, has lost some popularity compared to the past in users’ eyes.

So while bidding and ranking algorithm changes were crucial to the effectiveness of hoteliers’ investments in Trivago (which turns into a higher or lower profitability), attractiveness of Trivago to travelers is now crucial in terms of potential volumes that it can drive to hotels.

These are the two key areas that need to be looked at closely to ensure ongoing successful performances for hotels, and we expect (and hope!) that these are the two main areas where Trivago moves next.

A hotelier action plan

Like everything involved in technology and the digital ecosystem – and when it comes to metasearch advertising, even more so! – change is the norm, and the speed of change is the paradigm.

Things change so quickly, so often: Reacting to change – and adapting on time – is the key to staying competitive.

This is the same approach that needs to be taken with Trivago.

Trivago is still delivering positive KPIs as an advertising platform, and it’s a cost-effective channel, especially compared to a number of other digital advertising options hotels can choose. This can’t be ignored by independent hotels in their quest to drive direct bookings.

Trivago is still the leader in terms of traffic acquisition in the meta landscape, especially for properties located across Europe: There’s a lot of traffic to hotels online (official websites or OTA listings) through Trivago, which it makes it a worthwhile channel.

Conversion rate optimization is the key when it comes to converting Trivago’s huge traffic into bookings. Hotels need to be well-equipped for that, with outstanding landing pages, well-performing booking engines and, last but not least, an optimized user experience for mobile devices (since 70% of traffic on Trivago is through mobile).

These are some of the tactical actions required to maximize the Trivago opportunity.

• This article was written by Jacopo Rita, head of product for metasearch at Bookassist.

The company says revenue for its travel network, which covers its distribution business, increased 10.7% to $700.2 million.

Airline solutions revenue increased just over 1% to $209.4 million and hospitality solutions revenue increased about 3% to $69.9 million.

Highlights within airline solutions include the implementation of SabreSonic at LATAM Airlines.

In the hospitality division, the SynXis reservation system saw revenue growth related to an increase in transactions.

Results for the hospitality business were a little lower than expected, but president and CEO Sean Menke says there is a “robust pipeline” going forward.

Operating income for the company was down 22.6% to $136.8 million and, according to Sabre, was because of “unfavorable comparison” to the third quarter of 2017, which included a settlement with the company’s insurance carriers relating to litigation dating back to 2012.

Menke says the company is “not afraid to move forward” on acquisition opportunities for each of the three business units that would help the company grow going forward, after 18 months of internal focus.

He was speaking during an analyst call where he also praised the Sabre team for the “best performance” in terms of product investment and stability for more than five years.

The company has raised its full-year 2018 revenue and earnings guidance following its third quarter results from a revenue growth rate of between 4% and 7% to between 7% and 8%.

REGISTER NOW! Corporate travel execs, tech vendors and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

Price comparison engines, better known as metasearch engines or simply metasearch, have been around since 1995. Remember websites like BargainFinder, NetBot and Nextag?

In travel, price comparison sites have been in existence since the early 2000s. Early flight metasearch entrants were Skyscanner and Kayak, followed by Momondo and Google Flights.

Hotel metasearch was also introduced in the early 2000s with early entrants such as Trip.com, SideStep.com (acquired by Kayak) and, over the past 13 years, Trivago, Momondo, TripAdvisor and Google Hotel Ads.

Price shopping, including flight and hotel metasearch, is needed by consumers only when there are hundreds of price choices, but becomes completely irrelevant when there are only a handful of choices left.

Flight metasearch vs. hotel metasearch

There is a monumental difference between the business model of flight metasearch and hotel metasearch:

• Flight metasearch (Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights): These sites compare airfares between Point A and Point B. Example: New York to Los Angeles. More than 10 airlines operate this route and offer hundreds of price and service options: nonstop, one-stop or multiple stops; different departure times; different classes of service and seats; various routes and flight durations; and more. The hundreds of airfare and service variations are the reason why air travelers need price comparison sites (flight metasearch) to sort out all of their options and make an informed decision. Ultimately, this need is what determines the future and longevity of flight metasearch.
• Hotel metasearch (TripAdvisor, Trivago, Google Hotel Ads): These sites promise to compare rates on hundreds of sites for the same hotel. Travelers are promised to find the best price for the property they have chosen, not the best hotel in the destination they are traveling to. All of the TV and digital advertising campaigns by TripAdvisor and Trivago communicate the same message: “We search over 200 booking sites to find the best price for the hotel you want.”

This leads us to ask the following question: What exactly are the hundreds of websites where hotel metasearch get their rates to compare? Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz and Travelocity offer the same user interface and rates and have no differentiating value proposition. It is clear that these sites are all part of the same entity.

Why hotel metasearch is inherently flawed

The very promise to compare rates on hundreds of sites for the same hotel is what makes hotel metasearch inherently flawed. Back in 2003 to 2005, there were dozens of online travel agencies and hundreds of affiliate sites giving hotel metasearch relevance.

The issue today is that many of those OTAs and affiliate sites are nonexistent after many went out of business or were acquired by bigger OTAs. On top of that, hoteliers became more savvy revenue and channel managers and began to enforce rate parity across the board.

As a result, today there are only three websites worth travel shoppers’ time when researching the best price for the hotel they have chosen: two OTA sites (Booking.com and Expedia) and the hotel’s own website. What is there left to compare with only two OTAs left in much of the world?

A choice of three options does not warrant a price shopping service such as hotel metasearch. Hotel shoppers are very savvy at this point and see clearly through the fake choices offered by the hotel metasearch players. This is why Trivago and TripAdvisor are showing a decline in business and financial performance in recent years.

Can meta-on-meta save hotel metasearch?

Recently, some of the hotel metasearch players like TripAdvisor are buying traffic by bidding on Google Hotel Ads (GHA). At an estimated 6x ROI from GHA campaigns, there is no way the economics of meta-on-meta can work.

In other words, TripAdvisor is losing money from every click and booking it generates from GHA. This is definitely an unsustainable way to buy traffic and position TripAdvisor as a booking channel, something TripAdvisor has not been able to convince the traveling public of after spending millions in advertising for the past five years.

Travelers have already made up their mind about what the hotel booking channels are: the hotel website and the mega OTAs, Booking.com and Expedia.

At HEBS Digital, we have been running GHA campaigns since 2010 for thousands of our hotel clients, seeing ROIs of 6x to 12x. ROIs vary based on how appealing the rate is, the hotel location and how well-known the brand is.

However, these ROIs are aided by the fact that travel consumers perceive direct hotel campaigns as the “official” presence of the owner of the inventory, in this case the hotel. TripAdvisor is perceived as an intermediary, therefore their ROI is inevitably lower.

Even if TripAdvisor’s ROI from GHA is 8x, it is losing money from every GHA click. At an effective commission rate of 12% they make from Instant Booking, they would still be losing approximately $4 to $5 per booking.

They need to be reaching ROIs of 10x to 12x and above to break even, but it is unlikely their ROIs even come close to what we are seeing from the hotels’ official GHA campaigns.

What is the future of hotel metasearch?

I believe at this point it is too late for hotel metasearch players like Trivago and TripAdvisor to:

• Change their business model from promising hotel shoppers the best price for the property they have chosen to promising them that they will find the best hotel in the destination they are traveling to. Travelers have long chosen Booking.com and Expedia as their favorite research tools for finding the best hotel in the destination they are traveling to, and both OTAs offer a wealth of research tools to facilitate this: maps, descriptions, rich media and customer reviews. For example, both Expedia and Booking.com offer over 700 hotel choices in New York City, far more than any metasearch player.
• Position themselves as “booking sites” in the collective mind of the traveling public. As witnessed by the attempt by TripAdvisor called Instant Booking, and Trivago’s Express Booking initiative, this is hardly an achievable task.

So, what is the future of hotel metasearch players? The answer can be found without looking far. Take online retail as an example. Has anyone ever heard of the top online retail price comparison/metasearch engines out there?

The price comparison leaders in retail include Nextag and PriceGrabber, as well as Shopzilla, Shopping.com and Pronto. Hardly well-known, yet these are the top online retail metasearch engines, which are confined to a very niche status by Amazon and the extraordinary consolidation in the online retail space.

Due to the OTA consolidation in travel, the same is already happening in hospitality. Hotel shoppers looking to find the best price for the property they have chosen go to the hotel website, Booking.com or Expedia.

Hotel shoppers looking to find the best hotel in the destination they are going go to Booking.com and Expedia.

As a single-category-focused hotel metasearch player, Trivago will be confined to the status of a niche player at best.

As for TripAdvisor, which is the largest travel website on the planet and has a much broader business model and multitude of product lines, the site needs to refocus on monetization of its large amount of website traffic by revamping its media product while scaling its restaurant and experiences product lines.

What should hoteliers do in hotel metasearch?

TripAdvisor:

TripAdvisor hurt metasearch advertising on its own website when it introduced Instant Booking a few years ago, a commission-based cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model.

The much-promoted Instant Booking has been struggling ever since, mainly because travel consumers do not perceive TripAdvisor as a booking channel.

A negative effect from Instant Booking came as most hotel advertisers abandoned metasearch advertising (cost-per-click) and switched to the Instant Booking (CPA) model.

Recommendations for hoteliers:

• Treat TripAdvisor as a soft-OTA distribution channel. If you have occupancy needs and you haven’t already done so, ask your CRS provider to sign you up with Instant Booking at the best possible terms. Ask your revenue management team to monitor closely and report on the contribution of this channel separately from the other OTAs. Evaluate participation every three months.
• If you haven’t done so, test banner advertising on TripAdvisor. At HEBS Digital, we are seeing consistently good results for our clients with ROIs of 8x to 12x.

Trivago:

Trivago is strong in Europe. If this is an important feeder market for your hotel, it is worth considering this metasearch site and its Express Booking program, which is a CPC auction marketplace.

Recommendations for hoteliers:

• Treat Trivago as a soft-OTA distribution channel. Ask your CRS provider to sign you up with Trivago’s Express Booking at the best possible terms. Ask your revenue management team to monitor closely and report on the contribution of this channel separately from the other OTAs. Evaluate participation every three months.

Google Hotel Ads:

Over the years, Google has become the most important direct booking channel in hospitality. Over 50% of hotel website bookings are direct referrals from Google: 30% from organic and 20% from paid initiatives.

Over the past several years, hotel advertising on Google has become increasingly complex, due to changes instituted by Google itself, changes in travel consumer planning behavior and advancements in technology.

Based on all of these developments, hotel marketers must plan accordingly and understand that the Google ecosystem has become a fully integrated advertising platform where all advertising formats are intertwined and work together: Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Google Display Network (GDN), Google Hotel Ads (GHA), Google Admail, YouTube.

User engagement in the upper funnel influences conversions in the lower funnel, and a campaign in one advertising format influences the results from all other formats.

Treating Google as a fully integrated advertising platform requires hoteliers to utilize all available advertising formats in the Google ecosystem in order to reach travel consumers throughout the travel planning journey.

Recommendations for hoteliers:

• Contrary to industry lore, with its GHA program, Google is not trying to become an OTA. It does not have the OTA CRS technology, the deep industry distribution and revenue management expertise, the local sales force and offices needed to sign up hotel supply, customer service or support.
• Google cares only about providing the most relevant information to its users. There are four crucial pieces of information needed by any hotel shopper before making a booking decision: hotel location, hotel description (for example, a four-star, 600-room branded hotel or a small, five-star boutique hotel), customer reviews about the property and price and availability.
• For many years, Google has been able to provide answers to the first three questions. Since the introduction of Google Hotel Ads in 2010, now Google is in a position to provide answers to the fourth question about price and availability. This is why hoteliers must participate in GHA to take full advantage of the Google ecosystem.
• Quite often hotels are asking the question: Is GHA a digital marketing format, or is it a distribution channel? The answer is very simple: If the hotel operates a CPC campaign on GHA, then this is a pure digital marketing format; and if the hotel uses the CPA model, then this is a pure distribution channel.

The situation is similar with a number of other metasearch players like Kayak, TripAdvisor’s Instant Booking and Trivago’s Express Booking.

Conclusion

In my view, the biggest mistake the hotel metasearch players are making is their inherently flawed business model that promised hotel shoppers to find the best price for the property they have chosen.

They did not focus on teaching the traveling public to use their sites to find the best hotel in the destination they are traveling to.

With only two viable OTA choices left in most of the world, Booking.com and Expedia (and Ctrip in China), what is left to metasearch?

This is the reason for the increasingly lackluster performance by the major hotel metasearch players, and the reason why they will be confined to the status of niche players at best.

• This article was written by Max Starkov, founder and director at HEBS Digital, a NextGuest Technologies Company.

* Correction: The original version of this article misidentified Trivago’s Express Booking program as a CPA model

The system looks at data on a property, its competitors and other market intelligence to help hotels learn more about guests’ travel motivations and booking behavior.

The company says the technology enables hotels to understand “demand patterns on a much deeper level” which should mean improved conversion rates.

Information analyzed by Guest Insights includes guest origin details, average daily rate, average booking window, average cancellation rate and other historical information.

The data can also be filtered by country or region and a recommendation engine then provides suggestions of how to use the insight in marketing campaigns.

Guest Insights is the latest in a series of technology developed by Expedia for its hotel partners. Early last year it released Guest Review Insights, a review analysis tool helping hotels gauge feedback and benchmark against partners.

REGISTER NOW! Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Ctrip, MakeMyTrip and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

Grab has raised more than $2 billion for its current round of financing – including $1 billion from Toyota that came in June – and is on track to raise over $3 billion by the end of this year. In March, Grab bought Uber’s business in Southeast Asia, although that deal is being challenged by regulators in Singapore.

As part of this deal, Bookings Holdings’ brands will be able to offer on-demand transportation services through its apps, powered by Grab. And the Grab app will now offer users the ability to book accommodations across the globe via Booking.com and Agoda and to pay using the GrabPay digital wallet.

“Grab has scaled impressively across Southeast Asia over the last few years, establishing itself as a recognized leader in an increasingly competitive space, and we’re excited to partner with them to build even better travel experiences through technology,” says Todd Henrich, senior vice president and head of corporate development for Booking Holdings.

This deal comes three months after Booking invested $500 million in China-based ground transportation company Didi Chuxing.

In addition to ride-hailing, Grab offers food and package delivery, mobile payments and financial services. It currently operates in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia.

“We are delighted to work with Booking Holdings to give our users even more everyday services to choose from when they open the Grab app,” says Ming Maa, president of Grab.

“The online travel market in Southeast Asia is set to nearly triple by 2025, and we see numerous synergies between travel and transportation that will allow us to capitalize on this huge opportunity. As a global travel leader, Booking’s investment into Grab is a vote of confidence in our continued ability to execute and expand into different O2O [online-to-offline] verticals and roll them out across the 235 cities in which we operate.”

REGISTER NOW! Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Ctrip, MakeMyTrip and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

The Series A round was led by Asset Management Ventures, with participation from AccorHotels and travel investors including Ev Williams, Simon Lehmann, Fabio Cannavale and Tom Hale.

Founded in 2014, San Francisco-based Properly is used by more than 20,000 Airbnb hosts and property managers in more than 65,000 listings worldwide. Its tools allow hospitality brands and property managers to set quality standards for their teams and manage their operations.

Through the Properly app, photo-based checklists help direct cleaners on how to tackle particular tasks, and maintenance work such as changing smoke detector batteries can be scheduled.

Properly says its partnerships with branded collections such as AccorHotels’ Onefinestay help property managers and their service providers meet strict brand standards at a global scale.

In addition to its quality management tools, Properly connects property managers with a network of service providers to offer local support for things like inspections or staffing needs.

“Home-sharing and vacation rentals have grown three times faster than traditional hotels over the last decade, but mass market travelers have been slow to embrace the category because they don’t trust what they’re getting,” says Alex Nigg, founder and CEO of Properly.

“If vacation rentals are to become a real alternative to hotels, the industry needs to set a standard. Properly helps ensure that guests arrive to a safe, clean property – every time.”

Asset Management Ventures partner Rich Simoni says: “The home-sharing and vacation rental industry is a massive, exciting market; just look at the level of investment and consumer interest in the space.

“Properly’s unique combination of quality management tools and a marketplace of service providers positions it to address the next wave of change – establishing brands and standards that attract and retain mass-market travelers.”

REGISTER NOW! Airbnb and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

• Of the many challenges that consumer-focused travel startups may face, I assume that gaining mindshare and stickiness with customers is one of the biggest. For industry-enabling startups, two big challenges are in finding the right person in the company to help you achieve success and having enough funding and a realistic estimate on timelines. It’s important to find a champion within the organization that is willing to educate and convince leaders to try something new, secure project funding, influence priorities and remain engaged throughout the process to drive change. In terms of funding and timelines, you have to be realistic with your team and investors regarding the likely length of time involved in any sales pursuit with a large company. A multi-year sales cycle is not unusual, and sadly, there are far too many startups that die on the vine waiting for big companies to get through all of their own internal procurement, legal and resource prioritization processes. Being patient and setting realistic expectations is critical to survival. Also, if you are not willing for a customer to host your software themselves, be prepared for significant requirements around SLAs and data security liability when acting as a SaaS provider.

Does the industry or do travelers drive change?

• It’s a combination of both. Certainly in the case of something like IATA’s NDC initiative, this modernization program was kicked off by airlines and IATA, but it’s based on a desire to enhance the legacy messaging infrastructure to enable better servicing capabilities for our customers. However, customers vote with their wallets, and they certainly drive change by selecting the channel they like the most. They’re telling us loud and clear that the less friction we put in their way, they happier they’ll be.

What was your childhood aspiration?

• I wanted to be a bus driver. I may have to buy a motor coach mobile home one day to fulfill my childhood dream.

Who is the person you most admire within the industry?

• Sir Richard Branson. I’d like to be him when I grow up.

How do you encourage diversity in the workplace?

• Being my authentic self at work is a big part of this. My husband and I have been together since 1993, and I’m proud of the life we’ve built together. My hope is that I encourage diversity by having the courage to be open about who I am and through sharing my life experience. Also, simply asking my colleagues about their lives and listening to their stories goes a long way towards helping me be more open and empathetic with everyone, even those that may have different political or social views than those that I hold.

What do you do to alleviate stress?

• For the past several years I have been the principal timpanist in the Lakeview Symphony Orchestra, a volunteer community orchestra based in Chicago. Giving my complete attention and focus to something that I’m passionate about a few times a month is a wonderful way for me to decompress. I love creating music with my friends and neighbors and hopefully inspiring others to follow their passion as well.

REGISTER NOW! Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Ctrip, Yatra and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

You’re explaining the industry to a new employee – complete the sentence: “Beware of the …”

• I know I’m biased, but this industry is fascinating, and once you get in, it’s really hard to get out – everything else will seem boring by comparison. So my advice is to take a job in the travel industry at your own risk!

Do you have a favorite type of aircraft to fly in?

• So far my favorite is the 787. I’ve flown our United flight to Singapore and back a few times and I have less jetlag and generally feel more refreshed after flying on this particular aircraft. Plus it has gorgeous lines and I sleep really well onboard!

What’s your one travel hack everyone should know?

• Thinking about a U.S. to Europe flight, here’s my routine to ensure I can hit the ground running: Eat at the airport before takeoff, take a Unisom at liftoff (just in case there is a return-to-gate scenario), drink lots of water, change into loose-fitting clothes, ask not to be awoken for any meals or breakfast and try to sleep for the full flight.

Do you hit the snooze button?

• I use an iPhone for my alarm, and so I hit the snooze button at least once a day, mostly because it’s the only button I can see until I find my glasses!

Adjusted revenue for the India-based online travel agency was up 25% for the period at $160 million.

The company says it recorded its “highest ever” quarterly room nights in the past quarter with more than 6.5 million room nights stayed within its standalone hotels business.

Overall, the hotels and packages business contributed more than 53% to total adjusted revenue.

Within its hotels division, the company highlights developments such as a revamped progressive web application and proprietary videos for premium properties in the quarter.

Personalization developments are also progressing, it says.

In its air ticketing business, MakeMyTrip reported a 29% increase year-on-year with more than 10 million flight segments flown in the quarter.

During an earnings call, Rajesh Magow, co-founder and chief executive, India, also flagged its “new offering in line with our focus on travelers end-to-end experience.”

It seems that like OTA rivals Booking Holdings, Ctrip and TripAdvisor, MakeMyTrip is seeking to offer a more rounded experience.

Magow says the company has soft-launched a series of “standalone and curated experiences” on its Android app.

He adds that initial experiences are available in key cities and include amusement parks, guided and walking tours and in-hotel dining deals.

“We believe, this new product will help driving increased engagement and stickiness of the MakeMyTrip’s app, and we will be adding even more experiences over time.”

REGISTER NOW! MakeMyTrip, Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

As a member of the travel tech community, it wants to explore the current state of gender parity in the space, and take the pulse of the community to see how it compares to the rest of the world.

Research from the World Economic Forum and other leading organizations such as Deloitte and McKinsey & Co. highlights the positive impact of gender-diverse teams in technology, citing improved operational and financial performance, increased innovation and more.

Leveraging the participation of men and women in our community, this survey will enable Phocuswright to explore how companies within the travel technology ecosystem stack up when it comes to promoting women’s leadership.

The results of the survey will be presented during the inaugural Women’s Leadership Initiative Breakfast at The Phocuswright Conference in L.A. on November 14th, and published on PhocusWire.

A panel at the event will include:

• Eva Jenner, vice president for sales at Holland America Line and Seabourn
• Dorothy Dowling, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Best Western Hotels & Resorts
• Erika Moore, VP and GM, US Sales, Travelport
• Siew Hoon Yeoh, founder at WebInTravel and editorial director for Northstar Travel Group Asia

Phocuswright is part of an industry and community that is committed to innovation, creative thinking and strong leadership.

The industry needs to ensure it is positioned to grow into the future, ensuring that its best and brightest are at the helm. The following sources bring some interesting context to the discussion:

• According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, having women in leadership positions is associated with better team dynamics, stronger financial performance and greater productivity.
• Deloitte’s “Smashing IT’s Glass Ceiling” makes a business case for gender-diverse teams in technology, citing improved operational and financial performance, increased innovation and more.
• According to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2018,” by 2020 the most needed skills will be emotional intelligence, people management, complex problem-solving and critical thinking – skills frequently attributed to women.
• “Women Matter: The business and economic case for gender diversity” by McKinsey & Co., reveals that companies with strong female representation on executive committees perform better than those without women in the c-suite.

Please take 10 minutes to complete this important survey. Your candid responses are valued, and of course all contributions are completely anonymous.

In return for your participation, you will receive a choice of research from Phocuswright (which you can download immediately upon completing the survey).

For example, only 15% of consumers turn to social media to help make travel-related decisions, and just 8% take into consideration political ethics, human rights practices or prejudices in locations when choosing destinations.

Additionally, only 5% of travelers think of themselves as adventure-seekers and just 1% as business road warriors.

The findings are part of research undertaken by the Chief Marketing Officer Council’s GeoBranding Center and AIG Travel called “What’s Changing the Way You Travel Today.”

The study examined a survey of more than 2,000 leisure travelers conducted by Pollfish.

The connected and motivated traveler

According to the research, nearly 50% of leisure travelers believe the internet and device connectivity make travel better, and 42% think technology innovations have improved the travel experience across all modes of travel.

Additionally, 38% say tech advancements have helped them find deals, discounts and destinations more easily, and over half (51%) say deals and discounts are the top motivators in making travel decisions, followed by loyalty programs and perks (34%), do-it-yourself travel options (32%) and family and friends (29%).

Although travelers are motivated for a bargain, few are turning to deal and savings sites directly to inspire or assist with travel, indicating travelers are also looking for content and assurance – more than simply a quick way to save money.

Rather, online travel agencies such as Booking.com, Expedia and Travelocity are the most-trusted travel sources for consumers (46%), followed by travel agents (32%).

Top influencers

Social media and the politics of a destination may factor low on what sways consumers to travel, but their own special interests and hobbies rank high as influencers for 43% of travelers.

The security, stability and friendliness of a location also impact traveler choices (36%), as do the adventure and recreation activities on offer (30%). The local culture and history as well as destination geography and diversity influence some 29% of travelers.

Though few travelers consider themselves adventure-seekers or business travelers, most think of their travel styles as smart planners (31%), relaxed nomads (25%) or deal-seekers (22%).

Leisure travelers cite too many distractions or obligations, crowds, the time it takes to book and anxiety over dangers as the top detractors to traveling.

The following years saw many additional entrants into the metasearch arena – some created with that specific purpose, such as Skyscanner (2001), Kayak (2004) and Wego and Trivago (both 2005), and others that have added price comparison to their existing offerings, most notably TripAdvisor and Google. (Yahoo purchased FareChase in 2004 and then shuttered it five years later, and Kayak acquired SideStep in 2007.)

In a November 2017 report, Phocuswright found nearly half (43%) of travelers in the United States use metasearch sites to shop for flights and hotels. That’s up from 28% in 2010.

In recent years, with the rise of mobile, metasearch sites have been shifting from strictly providing price comparison and referrals to getting into the business of booking as well.

Newer entrants have also entered the field in the complex arena of ground transportation, including GoEuro and Rome2rio, and for vacation rentals, such as HometoGo.

But compared to other aspects of travel, such as tours and activities, metasearch has not seen as much activity from startups.

For our final piece in this series, we explore the question of why the presence of metasearch startups is low, with insights from a venture capitalist as well as two of the newer metasearch entrants to hear about the challenges they have faced as they build their businesses.

A funder’s frame of reference

Christian Saller has a unique perspective when it comes to the topic of travel startups and metasearch.

He was the co-founder and CEO of German flight search engine Swoodoo and then served as Kayak’s managing director for Europe after that larger metasearch company bought Swoodoo in 2010.

Then in 2013, Saller left Kayak to become general partner at Holtzbrinck Ventures, an independent venture fund that primarily invests in seed and early stage rounds of European companies. Saller manages the fund’s investments in Dreamlines, Cabify, Tourlane and others.

I would have a very difficult time if I would present to my colleagues here that I want to invest in a new metasearch site.

And when it comes to the question of metasearch startups, he’s rather pessimistic.

“I would have a very difficult time if I would present to my colleagues here that I want to invest in a new metasearch site,” Saller says.

Unlike when he started Swoodoo, Saller says that nowadays the technical aspect of building a metasearch site is much less complex – easier integrations of multiple suppliers thanks to APIs and overall improvements in technology. That’s the good news.

But, on the flip side, the barriers to entry from a marketing perspective are higher than ever.

“There is no efficient marketing channel you can use on a small scale to build a new metasearch site,” Saller says.

“Search engine marketing on Google is super competitive, and no one is able to do it really profitably. SEO is pretty much dead, because – at least in the travel space – Google doesn’t show any organic results any more. They show like 10 results – they show ads, they show their own Google Flights or Google Hotel Finder. And then Facebook never really works as a marketing channel for anyone in that space, and TV is super competitive as well.

“To get any share of voice you would need a huge marketing budget, and I don’t think any startups would get the funding to do this.”

Saller says the Google effect is immense, since it not only controls some of the primary marketing channels, but it’s also pushing aggressively into travel search itself.

“From a funding perspective, no venture capitalist wants to compete with Google,” he says.

While he describes the metasearch space as “very crowded,” Saller says one path to success might come from a startup that is doing something particularly innovative and superior on the product side.

And that’s exactly what the founders of AlltheRooms and Bellhop are trying to do.

AlltheRooms

AlltheRooms co-founder and CEO Joseph DiTomaso has one word to describe the feeling he had as it prepared to launch the accommodations metasearch site in 2014: fear.

“You are constantly concerned about competitors entering the space,” he says.

“It was a bold challenge to step into a market where there were entrenched players – multimillion-dollar players like Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, the hotel chains, Airbnb, HomeAway, etc.”

But what DiTomaso and his co-founder were building was different: a search engine to aggregate every accommodation from around the world, not just hotels but also vacation rentals, hostels, glamping spots and everything in between.

DiTomaso says his premise was to create “the Google of accommodation search.”

Now four years later, AlltheRooms lists more than 14 million rooms around the globe from partners including those “entrenched players” – Booking.com, Expedia, HomeAway, Airbnb, Hostelworld, Skyscanner – and 400 others. The platform has also secured several million dollars in funding.

REGISTER NOW! Benchmark Capital, Altimeter Capital and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.

“If you are going to enter into the metasearch space, it does require a semblance of a perfect storm,” says DiTomaso.

“You do need to be prepared to think about your approach to marketing, you need to think about your customers and your clients and then the right tech team and the right tech stack. Those are the ideas that end up resulting in a successful company. I’m not sure most are thinking like that. It’s hard, because there’s so much you could be thinking about, like cash flow, revenue, investors.”

AlltheRooms’ staff has grown from two to a team of 30 employees, working on the technical challenge of aggregating millions of listings with accurate descriptions, availability and pricing and on creating an effective user interface and experience that drives loyalty.

DiTomaso believes it’s that focus on customer service that will help AlltheRooms succeed, even as Google itself is marching down a path of becoming “the Google of accommodation search.”

“They are trying. Technically they still aren’t; you can go do a search on Google and see if you’ll see Airbnb. You won’t,” DiTomaso says.

“The interesting thing is Google doesn’t always get it right. They will go down the funnel of optimizing the product for what shows the highest revenue, not necessarily what’s good for you the consumer. And then the other item is going to be can they drive traffic to those pages. They’ll be able to do all of that to the degree they want to, but it’s not going to be a core focus.”

Bellhop

Bellhop co-founder and CEO Payam Safa is in the early stages of building his company, a ride-share comparison tool that launched in December 2017.

Meaning many of the challenges of creating a startup are fresh in his mind.

“You need to be ahead of the market to be a leader in anything. When you are kind of one of the first ones, an early mover, you are almost seeing something the investors don’t see yet,” Safa says.

“It’s really hard raising money in that environment. But if you are not a little too early, you’ll end up being behind. It’s a weird chicken-egg kind of problem.”

And it’s not his only “chicken-egg” problem. He also faces that dynamic as he tries to build the product.

“If you are a startup and you’re trying to be an aggregator, you have to prove to your supply you can actually generate business for them in a cost-efficient way and be a strong marketing channel for them,” Safa says.

“If it’s day one and you are literally nothing, how do you go to a supplier and say, ‘Can we integrate with you and send you traffic?’ There is zero incentive for them to work with you in that mode.”

Safa says it has used a variety of channels to drive app downloads and reinforce brand awareness.

“Bellhop is both a new product and new category, so our campaigns have to educate – most users have yet to start comparing prices in this sector and are unaware of major price discrepancies – as well as capture interest and drive the download action,” Safa says.

To raise funds to launch, Bellhop used the equity crowdfunding platform Republic, and Safa says now the company is seeking a Series A round.

“Going after those that understand your space and are mission-driven to make an impact in whatever industry or vertical you are operating in – for us mobility, transportation, smart cities … having conversations with those players has been much more seamless and easy and effective,” Safa says.

Currently the app shows users availability and prices from eight companies, including Uber, Lyft, Curb and Taxify, with more being added each month.

Safa has plans to expand the platform to include other forms of shared transportation, starting with bikes and electric scooters in the next few weeks.

“There are 500 million ride-share users globally. That number is going up to 600 million in the next 12 months or so. In terms of ride-share players globally, this number continues to increase massively year-over-year. In the United States alone, there are over 50 now – you have the two incumbents, and others are catching up and growing,” he says.

“When you look at bike and scooter share, just in the U.S., 20 companies have come to market in the last six to 12 months. As an aggregator it doesn’t matter what those modes are; it just matters that modes exist.

We are agnostic, and the more of these that come to market and grow, the better for us. Definitely it’s a global opportunity. It’s just a matter of how much investor money we get to fuel that expansion rapidly.”

But the contents – and timing – of emails sent by hotels often determine how well any given campaign will perform.

According to Revinate, a software and data analytics company for hotels, segmented campaigns and transactional emails result in high engagement, and reducing how frequently emails are sent could result in higher open rates and conversions.

The findings are part of Revinate’s inaugural Hotel Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than 77 million emails from its customers in the EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific regions.

One-time tricks

The report finds segmented emails – which typically pull customer data from a hotel’s property management system – result in a 20% higher open rate, a 70% higher click-through rate and 73% higher revenue per recipient than non-segmented campaigns.

One-time campaigns, which include newsletters, room offers and events or announcements, see an average open rate is 16.1%, a CTR of 2% and a 0.3% conversion rate.

Regionally, one-time campaigns from hotels in EMEA perform best, with an average open rate of 18.5%, a CTR of 2.7% and a conversion rate of 0.63%.

Asia Pacific and North American hotels have an average email open rate of 16.8% and 15.6%, respectively, and North American campaigns have a higher CTR (2.2%) and conversion rate (0.53%) compared to Asia Pacific (1.4% CTR; 0.25% conversion).

Interestingly, though campaigns from EMEA properties see the highest engagement and conversions, hotels in the area send about half as many emails as properties in North America – indicating outreach to fewer, targeted groups may be a successful strategy.

The report also finds one-time campaigns highlighting events or announcements have the highest open rate (18.7%), while emails promoting room offers are the most likely to lead to conversions (0.36%).

Automate and upsell

Automated campaigns, including welcome, confirmation and pre-arrival emails, have higher engagement metrics than one-time sends. The highest engagement rate is seen with transactional emails such as booking confirmations, which see an 80% open rate and a 17% CTR.

Welcome emails timed to guest check-in have an average open rate of 50% and a CTR of 13% and function as a strategic time for hotels to promote additional food or service offerings.

Overall, pre-arrival emails have an open rate of 61.9% and a CTR of 21.3%, and emails from hotels in Asia Pacific have the highest pre-arrival open rates and CTRs, followed by properties in EMEA and North America.

According to the report, almost 98% of upsell revenue is made through pre-arrival emails. Breakfast deals bring in the most upsell revenue, followed by offers for advanced parking. Early check-in, late check-out and airport transportation offers are also popular.

Hotels that send upsell campaigns two to four days before guest check-in see the highest upsell conversion rate.

Other high-performing automated campaigns include OTA winback emails, which encourage past OTA customers to book direct on their next visit, as well as “We Miss You” and birthday emails.

REGISTER NOW! Hilton, AccorHotels and others speak at The Phocuswright Conference 2018
Click here for details, tickets and the program for this year’s event in Los Angeles, November 13-15.