“Ryanair will carry 67 million passengers this year at our guaranteed lowest fares and no fuel surcharges and we are delighted that our partnership with Booking.com will ensure they gain access to the best hotel accommodation in Europe,” said Sinead Finn of Ryanair. “Ryanair passengers will benefit from a wide selection of hotels at great prices which will cater to the needs of every budget.”

“We are proud to welcome such a key partner and to be a part of Ryanair’s commitment in meeting their customers’ needs,” said Nick Monaghan, Booking.com’s Director of Distribution. “With highly competitive hotel rates, a vast choice of properties, multilingual content and the flexibility to make last minute reservations, we believe this partnership offers great added value for Ryanair customers.”

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Whereas other travel companies are limiting their expenses, Travelzoo is looking confident in making such an investment. According to Travelzoo’s announcement the fly.com website will be relaunched in February and will feature a new travel search engine.

Having a pagerank of 6, being over 12 years old and having a huge amount of pages available in search engines still doesn’t justify the amount of money being paid for a single domain, to me that is. Ofcourse they will receive plenty of direct traffic, but whether it will cover the $ 1.8 million remains to be seen.

Still, even the enormous amount of $1.8 million fly.com is not even close to be listed in the top 10 for most expensive domain names ever. In 2006, Sex.com sold for $14 million, making it the most expensive domain name ever. Other expensive domains are fund.com ($9,99 million), business.com ($7.5 million) and beer.com ($7 million).

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“Travel and mobility online are part of our core business,” says Stephanie Mair-Huydts, Publisher. “Despite the financial crisis, we want to expand our position in the online market. tripwolf is the perfect extension of our current offerings.”

Additionally, renowned German publisher Dieter von Holtzbrinck has signed on as a co-investor. Dieter is confident and enthusiastic about both the tripwolf concept as well as the competent and creative management team.

“We are proud to have the trust of such reputable companies and individuals,” says Sebastian Heinzel, CEO of tripwolf, who is excited by the willingness of investors from the print world to support innovative online business models. “We have big plans for 2009, including site launches in French, Spanish and Italian, and a tripwolf iPhone application.”

Tripwolf, a next generation travel guide, launched in June 2008 in German and English. The platform combines professionally created content with user-generated content (reviews, tips, photos and travel blogs ) from thousands of travelers all over the world. Currently, the tripwolf community has nearly 15,000 members, including one thousand “trip gurus“ who provide personal travel tips.

source: Social Media News Room

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December and January have been busy months for me. Not only on personal level, think about social activities all over the place, but also from a business point of view. In december I took a difficult decision, which involved leaving Golden Tulip and pursuing my career in online travel and hospitality elsewhere. Despite the great time I had with my colleagues and many things I have learned, I was not willing to make a move towards Germany and Switzerland as initially agreed upon while renewing my contract during spring 2008.

Despite the credit crunch and negative forecasts all over, it only took me less then 3 days to find a new challenging adventure. Therefore, I am pleased to say that last week I started my new job as internet marketeer at a Netherland based hotel chain.  I am very happy to be able to continue working in this beautifull industry at least.

Now I am starting to get set at my new job, I hopefully will also find some more time to post regular updates. As most experienced bloggers know, it’s not hard to start a blog, it’s rather hard to keep it up to date though, especially when you are occupied with so many things. I have got plenty of plans for this blog however, and will continue to implement improvements over time. I still have to improve the structure of the website and will work out some ideas which I have been playing with since I founded this blog.

Also, I appreciate all your feedback and comments, whether it’s positive or negative. Should you have any ideas or comments, feel free to contact me through the comments or the contact form. Should you be willing to assist me with any matters, also feel free to contact me.

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www.travelta.mobi, which uses location based services to determine the location of the user, lists hotels based on distance from the user and features up-to-date information on room availability and room rates. Next to that, users are informed about availability of specific room types, check-in and check-out times, what the rooms look like and the star classification.

After users have selected their preferred hotel, a toll-free phonenumber is quoted to finalize the booking. As of this moment it is however not possible to finalize the reservation of the booking online, which we see as a missed opportunity for Travelta.

On marketingfacts.nl Travelta’s e-commerce manager Erwin Herbert comments on missing the option to make an online reservation; ‘If you are on the move it is not convenient to make your reservation online, because you will really need a computer or laptop to book online. Using mobile phones or pda’s is just not convenient enough; you will have to enter your credit card number and fill out a lot of forms. Using this phonenumber, reservations are much more efficient and thus better suits demands and wishes of our users.’

Travelta is using a traditional merchant model, earning commision for leads genereated through the mobile service. Due to partnerships with large partners such as booking.com and hotels.com the mobile service can search up to 80.000 hotels already.

The location based services and hotel availability can be used on any Windows Mobile or Android based mobile device. In addition to the automatic geographical location, manual search can also be used on all other mobile platforms such as Symbian (Nokia) and BlackBerry. Using the manual search for locations (run on a Symbian device) appears to working as intended, and can be characterised as self-explaining and easy to use.

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Independent
One of the main priorities of Zoover is that it’s not a bookings website and therefore fully independent. Zoover operates by forging partnerships and co-operates with many international and local tour operators as a platform for informing their visitors of independent reviews.

Syndication
Zoover is freely available to its partners, which means Zoover allows its partners free use of the syndication-model. Syndication is the most extended cooperation which means that reviews on the Zoover website can be placed on the website of its partners so their visitors benefit in several ways e.g by being able to immediately access 710.000 reviews and 150.000 accommodations.

Top three
Zoover International started its activities in many European countries such as France, Denmark, Sweden, Poland. “Last year we successfully launched Zoover in England without any marketing effort and we see substantial growth in the amount of visitors from month to month”, according to Bas Rasker CEO of Zoover International.

The strategy for the UK is outlined in the following statement made by Stephan Bosman, COO of Zoover International: “Zoover presents a totally different model: no direct sales, open to our partners in the travel industry, free sharing of our content (syndication) and collecting reviews as well as advising our partners customers. In Europe we set up a model that has proved its worth with a leading position in a highly competitive tourism market. We act and think locally. Our aim is to be in the top three of holiday review websites in the UK and Zoover intends to eventually belong in the top ten travel websites in the UK by e.g. developing local partnerships in the tourism industry.

New features
New Zoover features are added on the website in which visitors can upload or view pictures and videos of accommodations, check the location using a map and satellite imaging. Soon Zoover will also launch its Social Network called “MyZoover”, a platform in which Zoover visitor can rate hotels, pick trips together and will benefit from co-operation with third parties. Zoover is also developing a Hotel owner module so hotel owners can manage their own data and respond to reviews made by Zoover members. Zoover spends a lot of time and money on innovation and will continue to do so.

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Last week Air France KLM, European based airline holding company and one of the largest airline companies worldwide, launched what they claim to be the first social network launched by the airline industry. All usual social elements such as sharing, recommendations and reviews flights, hotels, restaurants and destinations are included. Next to that, customers are able to display flights booked through Air France KLM on their profiles, find other members on the same flight and find members at similar destinations.

Should Air France KLM instead of setting up their own branded social network have collaborated with existing full featured social travel networks such as dopplr and tripit? 

Bluenity is the first community site for travelers in the airline. You can communicate with and meet people who travel with Air France and KLM, at the airport, in the plane or at your destination. Your trip becomes an opportunity to meeting people : for example, you can exchange favourite addresses (hotels, restaurants, shops, events, excursions…), share a taxi on arrival, use your travel time to make new contacts. You can also submit your good travel tips view and comment on tips given by other members of the community. Join Bluenity and make your trip a moment for sharing.

Bleunity, the official title of the social network, is hoping to get a reasonable market share with a potential targetgroup of over 75 million consumers who fly with either one of the two airlines.

Features mentioned in the introduction are all default basic functionalities a social networking site should have. Still, having the advantage of connecting the network to the flight reservation system could give Air France KLM a potential benefit over other travel related social networks.

Patrick Roux, Senior Vice President Marketing at Air France KLM comments on the launch of Bluenity; This is a response to those customers who would like to be proactive on their trip, whether they are traveling for professional or leisure purposes. From 7 November onwards, travellers and especially the 75 million customers who choose our two airlines every year, will be able, by using Bluenity, to meet before, during and after their flight.

As Freshnetworks is also stating, we have our doubts about Air France KLM claiming to be the first airline related social network. Ofcourse it depends how you interpreted a social network, but British Airline for example already soft launched their social network and service Metrotwin. Again, it’s how you interpretet social network and to what extend a service is actually under management of an airline company. Services like dopplr and TripIt have already doing the same for over quite some time.

With such a large potential target group Air France KLM is looking to make a mark for itself in terms of social networking. They might have and advantage of being able to connect profiles with their reservation databases, still we believe other services such as TripIt and Dopplr have major advantages over such a network because of the possibilities to aggregate multiple services and the diversity of users.

Instead, we would have preferred to see a major company such as Air France KLM collaborate with existing social travel services such as the ones mentioned before. Deciding between collaborating with existing services or setting up full new social networks often results in companies going for new social networks. In the end, this will result in consumers being scattered around using several branded networks and eventually get back to the services which enables them to combine all their data of different brands and different other services.

Like many companies, Air France KLM is realizing their own social community hoping to attract customers to engage the online conversation. However, there is no clear distinction between social communities, except for the fact all of these social communities are focusing on a different brand and thus competing to get customers to sign up. As a result, consumers are being sceptic to sign up for ‘another’ service and are more drawn to independant services which are not associated with any form of organization or brand.

Setting up a social network or using social media requires careful planning and a strategic approach. Although companies are eager to launch their own social network, it’s just a matter of time before consumers are no longer registering to every social network available. In the meantime, we could be proven wrong ofcourse and Bluenity turns out to be a great success.

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At the launch of the platform LinkedIn is featuring several interesting applications such as a presentation sharing application from slideshare and google presentations, feed articles from Wordpress, reading list application from Amazon and several application which were developed inhouse. Also, one of the more interesting applications available at launch was a trip application from social travel website TripIt.

Being asked to develop an application with a potential user base of over 30 million members, not even mentioning the enormous amount of exposure and attention, we can’t imagine TripIt having had any doubts participating in the project. The last few months TripIt have been working on this application, which resulted in them having the only travel related application available at the launch of the LinkedIn application platform.

The My Travel application on LinkedIn is directly connected to a TripIt account and lets you see where and when connections from your LinkedIn network are traveling. Providing the option of generating alerts for connections traveling close , the application enables LinkedIn members to connect with other connections when for example attending an industry event. My Travel can also displays current locations, upcoming trips and travel stats on LinkedIn profiles. Those who use the application can create trips either manually via LinkedIn or use TripIt’s available services.

The partnership with LinkedIn is an addition to the increase of services provided through social travel website TripIt, which now supports over 250 services. TripIt can automatically organize all your travel plans into one master online itinerary with everything you need for your trip such as travel confirmations, weather forecasts, maps of the surroundings and city guides. TripIt can automatically retrieve information from other services and uses this information to provide you with a single source travel directory. Among the services supported are Google Maps, Wikipedia and Flickr. You can also send your travel confirmations to your personalized TripIt email address which will then import these travel confirmations into your travel itinerary.

If you are using both LinkedIn and TripIt you visit the LinkedIn Application Directory to install My Travel. We expect more people familiar with LinkedIn though, so we suggest you see for yourself what TripIt has to offer.

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There is doubt whether sponsored links will result in increased revenues or instead result in higher exit percentages. In reality, these sponsored links have strict exclusions for competitors and thus these sponsored links will have low relevance, resulting in lower click through percentages.

Several executives from large United Kingdom based online travel agents responded to Travolution’s question whether Expedia has set an example for other travel agents and this might be the future standard or whether Expedia’s effort are missing it’s purpose.

One of the respondents, commercial director Andrew Wilson from Opodo said the company is not selling advertisements or links and Opodo is not changing their business model as working with Google would not support them in their core businesses. Instead, Opodo is looking for other ways which support their business and increase revenue at the same time.

Teletext Holidays’ Matt Cheevers, who previously used an Adsense programme said: “The reality of using Google ads in this way is that there will usually be a long list of exclusions. for example I’d suspect that lastminute.com won’t be on the Expedia ads or Opodo.”

If indeed these sponsored links have so many exclusions, this will also result in many irrelevant advertisements. In in the end these advertisements will have low click-through rates and thus will proof ineffective. Online travel agents might ask themselves whether it is worth displaying such advertisements.

However, if online travel agents are willing to limit the amount of exclusions it might be successful to redirect customers to competitors, something customers would also be capable of without displaying these advertisements. Displaying these advertisements at least enables online travel agents to get revenue from price-comparing visitors.

Expedia’s move to include sponsored links on their search result pages illustrate the need for online travel agents to further monetize their operations. Due to the nature of travel meta search engines such as Kayak consumers are more aware of the competitive nature of the travel industry, enabling them to compare rates and fares andbeing less likely to stick to a single travel agent. Instead, customers are crawling different online travel agents themselves looking for the best rates and fares.

Sponsored links could be an effective way for online travel agents to assist consumers and at the same time gain revenue due to consumers clicking sponsored links. As Expedia is currently only using these sponsored links on the United Kingdom website, the future will turn out whether sponsored links are effective for Expedia and whether they will roll out advertisements for other websites too.

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PhoCusWright projects the overall U.S. travel market is expected to increase by 4% and 2% in 2008 and 2009, respectively. These are the slowest growth rates since 2003, when the market declined by 8% following the effects of the terrorist attacks in 2001. All segments are expected to be impacted. Also, it is foreseen that in 2010 the market is expected to be recovered again.
The online travel market remains a bright spot in this forecast, the growth however is not as impressive as it used to be. Online travel sales will continue to increase at more than twice the rate of the market as a result of more customers purchasing travel online; comfort level with online purchasing is increasing, perception of online prices as being the lowest, supplier incentives and increased use of mobile devices.

2008 will also be the first year that the U.S. online leisure/unmanaged business travel market will display single digit growth. Gross bookings are expected to increase 9% in 2008 to reach close to 100.00 billion dollar. Hotels will experience the slowest year-over-year online gains (8 percent), while rail will enjoy the highest increase in online sales (28 percent).

The overall travel market encounters flat growth rates, online penetration continues to rise. PhoCusWright estimates that sales from leisure and unmanaged business travel sites will represent 36 percent of the total market in 2008, up from 34 percent in 2007. However, penetration rates are expected to increase by just one percentage point in 2009 to 37 percent.

The full report, rather expensive, is available at the PhoCusWright website. Source of the article is Hospitality Net.

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