Quick Look into the Online Travel Industry Sramana Mitra recently has written an excellent overview about the state and future of the Online Travel Industry and provides several insights running the travel category against his formula for the future incorporating Yahoo's turnaround formula, the 4C:

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), where 3C = Content, Commerce, Community, the 4th C = Context, P = Personalization and VS = Vertical search

New for me was the context, which means gravity in terms of organization, marketers should be able to systematically reach the community in a specific context (contextual advertising).

Management of Products and Services within Digital Markets (own research)

1. Search and Directory

1. Search
2. Vertical Search

2. Content and Community

1. Groupware and Collaboration
2. Information Management
3. Knowledge Management
4. Content Management
5. Work-flows
6. Multi Channel Facilities
7. Single Sign On
8. Special Applications

3. Transactions (Commerce)

1. Catalog
2. Shopping Cart
3. Address Book
4. Shipping Options
5. Payment Gateways
6. Self-service Tools
7. Marketing Instruments

4. Context
5. Personalization

1. Implicit Personalization
2. Explicit Personalization

6. CS - DC
7. BI

Interesting is people's behavior in researching travel related information and decision making. It turns out that their favorite methods include researching travel related price comparison sites, RSS-feeds, review sites, blogs and travel sites, while consumer generated content and easy to use tools have a huge impact on their decision making.

Online Travel is a booming segment representing 2% of Internet traffic and 24% of online advertising expenses and offers excellent growth opportunities during the coming years, in the US as in Europe and increasingly in Asia/Pacific. Among the leading sites Expedia, TripAdvisor, Y! Travel, Orbitz, VirtualTourist (Blog) and Gusto (Network)..., and of course it's also possible to research flight related information in the US via Google, just type the airport's three letter code followed by the word "airport" or the name of the airline followed by the flight number.

Having a passion for travel and sports I did a bit of research about Bezurk.com, a travel search engine located in Asia Pacific, which recently launched a new flight search product incorporating a very innovative user interface featuring cutting edge AJAX making sorting, filtering and comparing travel products a walk in the park.

Labels: bizdev, strategy

  ¶ 'Quick Look into the Online Travel Industry' posted by eA : 5:01 PM