Online travel services group Expedia has reported its results for Q2 2009, and the financials aren’t looking spectacular, but they are not as bad as expected.
Although the number of booking transactions handled by the company actually saw a small uptick, gross bookings decreased 5%. As a result, revenues went down 3% (from $795 million in 2008 to $770 million) and operating income decreased a staggering 33%.
On the upside, Expedia’s flight and hotel bookings rose 10% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter following some expense-cutting measures and airline fare cuts. The company’s second-quarter profit was $41 million, or 14 cents per share.
There are two different types of hotel reviews: user reviews and professional reviews from travel journalists. When choosing a hotel, it can be helpful to evaluate both. TripAdvisor has long been the leader of the pack when it comes to providing a database of user reviews for every hotel out there. Oyster Hotel Reviews aims to provide consumers with qualified professional reviews of hotels around the world, hoping to compete with the likes of Frommers, Fodors, Conde Nast Traveler and others. Oyster’s reviews take on a longer, more magazine-like form, and are all written by a staff of full-time journalists who travel to each hotel reviewed.
There’s no doubt that Oyster’s actual reviews are comprehensive. Reviews include a snapshot summary that lists detailed pros and cons of each hotel, and extensive descriptions on the scene, service, location, features, activities, food and drinks for hotels. Because the review is able to be so lengthy, the details given about the hotel are ones that you wouldn’t normally find on other review sites, such as the thread count of the sheets on the beds or which celebs have stayed there. Each review also includes photos from when the reporter stayed in the hotel (not the fancy photos pulled from the hotel’s website), a map with nearby hotels, and user comments/reviews.
Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.
The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen.
NileGuide, a one-stop travel planning site, is rolling out several new features to its travel booking and planning portal. You can see our original review of the site here. NileGuide has re-designed the site with a sleek interface, a few more bells and whistles, added more geographic coverage areas, and created several trip planning tools to enhance the planning process.
The layout and general concept of the site has remained the same but Nile Guide has added more graphic imagery and high quality photos of destinations to add to the aesthetics of the site. It has also added 20 more destinations, so that it now includes customized, in-depth information for 100 destinations worldwide. Like the original version of the site, NileGuide aggregates information about destinations from over 10 sources, including Citysearch, OpenTable, Priceline, and Expedia, as well as adding its reviews from local experts who are familiar with the area. Now NileGuide has “suggested itineraries” for each destination. With all of this information, NileGuide has created neighborhood guides for various neighborhoods within each destination (much like CitySearch does). The site has interactive maps with the top destinations in each neighborhood. With NileGuide’s search filters, you can easily choose the right spot for any occasion, with options such as “price,” “kid-friendly,” hip,” and “upscale.”
Airline group Air France-KLM, formed after the merger of Société Air France and the Royal Dutch Airlines and currently the largest airline company in the world in terms of operating revenues, has recently launched a social network for travelers called Bluenity to connect its +75 million customers when traveling (presumably so that they can meet up with strangers).
An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise.
TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).
TripAdvisor plans to include FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract 12 million visitors a month in the U.S., and 28 million worldwide, according to comScore.
Mahoney previously was a co-founder of Compete.com. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is an advisor to the startup. FlipKey raised $500,000 last December from angel investors, including Allaire, Care.com CEO Sheila Marcelo, and venture capitalist Nick Beim of Matrix Partners.
Later today VibeAgent, a site that lets users find, rate and review hotels, will be announcing their site is out of beta at the PhoCusWright travel conference in Orlando.
We previously covered VibeAgent during their private beta and handed out some invites on Inviteshare. The easiest way to describe the site is as a more social TripAdvisor, which the company clearly wants to take down. Currently the site only deals with hotels, though. Members can log on to post reviews, ask questions, finding travel agents, and use some new features like mapping their trips. The system expresses a clear network effect, getting better at recommendations as you and your friends put more in the system.
The big question is whether VibeAgent will draw enough users to the site in order to generate a network effect. It doesn’t hurt that VibeAgent is prettier and a bit easier to use than TripAdvisor’s rather dated design. Still they’re yet another startup hoping to re-map the “social graph” to provide a more personalized experience.
However, their most touted feature is a socially powered search, which ranks hotel search results based on your reviews and those of your friends/groups on the site. The idea is that the trusted reviews through social networks are more important than anonymous ratings. If you happen to not have any friends on the site, you can also search through all reviews by general concepts, like “hip” or “for golfers”.
Their engine searches over 120,000 hotels amongst Priceline.com, Intercontinental Hotels, Holiday Inn, Skoosh, and Booking.com. While it worked well for big cities like San Francisco, California they missed results for some cities in the East Bay. VibeAgent needs to nail the product for the anti-social users before it expects people to feel comfortable investing their time into the system. I can’t see the service knocking out Trip Advisor with it’s seven years of accumulated reviews unless they can at least meet that basic need.
Update: We have now confirmed that this deal has not happened and is in the discussion stage only. Inside Facebook pulled the trigger on their post a little too soon.
TripAdvisor has acquired Facebook Application “Where I’ve Been” for a reported $3 million.
Where I’ve Been allows users to share where they have been in the world from their Facebook profiles and has approximately 2.3 million users.
Inside Facebook notes that the $3 million purchase price values Where I’ve Been users at around $1.30 each.
The purchase is the first major seven figure acquisition for a dedicated Facebook only application. Where I’ve Been was recently included on the TechCrunch interns list of favorite Facebook apps.
