The travel site is launching a new Friend of a Friend feature today, allowing users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their friends’ friends. It’s sort of like playing the Kevin Bacon game, but instead of six degrees of separation, TripAdvisor is only using one.

TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product, Adam Medros, said that by adding connections, visitors are 10 times more likely to see reviews written by people in their network — even in obscure locations, ranging from Istanbul to Duluth, Minn.

“It’s always been a little hit or miss,” Medros said, about the likelihood of a friend having reviewed a hotel in the city you were searching. “Now, we’ve stretched the coverage by going out by one degree.”

The new feature is the latest move by TripAdvisor to make the 60 million reviews on its site more social. The company first got involved in Facebook five years ago, when it launched an app called Cities I’ve Visited, which lets you mark on a map where you’ve traveled.

With the help of that application and other efforts, TripAdvisor is the 18th most popular application on the social network, with 18.5 million monthly visitors, according to AppData.

The announcement today continues to leverage a partnership with Facebook, which gives TripAdvisor permission to personalize their Web experience using data from the social network. Only seven other companies have similar permissions.

To use the new Friend of a Friend feature, visitors to the site must log in using their Facebook account. Once they’ve done that and have conducted a hotel search, a little bubble will highlight that a review was written by a friend or someone a friend knows. In a search under Istanbul, I had no immediate friends who had reviewed hotels, but thanks to my friends’ friends, I had 10 reviews within my expanded network to check out.

It’s worth noting that TripAdvisor does not disclose any personal information about the friend, like their name or picture.

“We’ve always had this interesting challenge, where we have so much content for properties around the world — at some point, that’s helpful, but I’d love to see reviews from people like me,” Medros said.

Of course, there’s no telling if your friend’s friend is like you. “It still requires some weeding out,” Medros acknowledged.

He also said that the company has discussed the value in extending it even further. “It’s a running joke that if you take it out to three degrees, that everyone is a friend of everyone. I think we’ll stick with one degree for now.”

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

But it doesn’t use Facebook or any identifying information. Instead, Expedia surfaces the best deals found by other travelers, anonymously, for flights and hotel rooms, based on your location.

The site will list the best deals for three time periods: tonight, this weekend or next weekend. Customers can search for hotels or flights based on a couple dozen destinations.

For example, this weekend, nights at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers cost $113 and the cheapest flight out of Los Angeles tonight is to Seattle for $252 roundtrip.

The process is similar to other flash sales sites that sell apparel or other items at a discount based on inventory. Many other flash sales sites focus on travel, too, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter. However, there’s one big difference with this service. The deals are being found by other customers searching the site. The service is not being driven by a special sales relationship between Expedia and the suppliers.

That probably means the deals are not unique to Expedia and can be found on other travel aggregation sites, but at the same time, Expedia didn’t have to hire a sales team or build out a lot of infrastructure to support the feature.

“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, VP and GM of Expedia, in a statement.

The Web site is very simple to navigate and takes out a lot of the headaches of searching millions of listings. That also means that the selection is limited to around six results for each time period — in other words, not a ton of destinations or hotels to pick from. Cancun was offering six hotel rooms — some for as low as $40 a night — for this weekend. Orlando also listed six hotel rooms, all under $100 a night.

This is not Expedia’s first experiment in the deals space.

Last summer, it launched a partnership with Groupon that sells vouchers for vacations around the world. It said it successfully sold 15,000 travel deals in the first three days of launching that partnership, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the model yet. It also launched a program called ASAP (A Sudden Amazing Price), which lists deals at 9 am PT and is bookable for 12 hours only.

The new campaign — set to the tune of “Let’s Stay Together,” by Al Green — is much more tame than last year’s ad. The 30-second spot focuses on creating family memories around campfires, swimming holes and hiking trails; memories that often can be made in or near homes — not in hotels.

HomeAway, which operates vacation-rentals marketplaces, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com, went out on a limb for its Super Bowl commercial last year. If the point was to generate buzz before filing for its initial public offering, it was a success.

But the Austin, Texas-based company ended up having to yank the ad after drawing criticism over a particularly disturbing image: In the commercial, a doll — which was obviously not a child — was thrown against a wall to demonstrate how cramped hotel rooms can be, compared to more spacious rental houses.

The updated — and more subtle — campaign will air in select markets during NBC’s broadcast of the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Following its debut, the spot will air on the Travel Channel, the Food Network, HGTV and other special promotions, including the Grammy Awards on Feb. 12, the Academy Awards on Feb. 26 and the “Survivor” finale.

Second time’s the charm?

As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

The two carriers have sent “cease and desist” letters in the past year to several websites that track travelers’ loyalty programs. Southwest argues the third-party sites threaten security of passenger information; American doesn’t want outsiders “scraping” data off its website.

Sites like AwardWallet, MileWise and GoMiles have been growing in popularity. You give the mileage manager account information for all your loyalty programs, usually airlines, hotels and car rentals to see, in one place, when miles are about to expire or which program is close to an award or elite-status level. Some show cash prices for a ticket as well as what a ticket would cost in miles—a comparison that requires multiple searches on an airline’s website.

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Instead of searching for hotels based on a destination or maybe a few keywords, users can see photos first, after entering search terms such as “best pools,” “Miami infinity pools,” “kid-friendly,” “Hawaii cabana beach hotels” or something as simple as “workout rooms.”

Ariel Charytan, Oyster’s co-founder and chief creative officer, and Eytan Seidman, co-founder and VP of product, said it reverses the traditional travel site, which buries the photos within the editorial content.

What’s even better is that photos are taken by photographers hired by Oyster, so none of them will be deceiving or doctored to make a small pool look bigger or a sandy beach more pristine.

The co-founders argue that the authenticity of the photos is critical in order for travelers to make informed decisions. If the main purpose of your trip is to sit by the pool or hit the gym between business meetings, you don’t want an out-of-commission pool or a treadmill in the janitor’s closet.

In addition to seeing photos first, Oyster Shots will return pricing information right on the photograph. The new search engine officially launches today.

Right now, the three-year-old company is mainly focused on building the site and will evolve how it makes money over time.

There’s no advertising on Oyster.com now. Today, it primarily makes money when visitors book a hotel reservation on its site. Ironically, the photos sometimes talk people out of booking a place.

“That’s our value prop. You can always come to us to get the truth,” Seidman said.

In the future, they also anticipate working closely with the Travel Channel, which will send viewers to Oyster if they are inspired to travel after watching a show. The channel, which invested $7.5 million in the site back in April and is owned by Scripps Networks, will not be able to start integrating Oyster into its programming until next season, when new content starts to air.

Here’s an example of results when searching for “Hawaii cabana beach hotels” on Google Images. Random pictures show up, like a helicopter and a sandwich:

The second photo is when you search for the same thing on Oyster:

The announcement is being made today at the D Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason gets on stage.

“Groupon Getaways with Expedia” will work similarly to the daily emails sent by Groupon today, but instead of offers for spas, restaurants and other local services, consumers can buy vouchers for airline tickets, car rentals, cruises and other activities.

Travelers can sign up for the emails starting today at Expedia.com or Groupon.com/getaways, and the service is expected to launch in late June.

“Travel is a very popular category on our normal site, and Expedia is the biggest and best brand in travel. The partnership made a ton of sense,” Mason said.

Together, the two will leverage their combined sales forces to find travel deals across the U.S. Initially, it will offer discounts on hotels and expand to other segments, like air and cars, as well as internationally.

Scott Durchslag, Expedia’s president, said the partnership with Groupon will allow them to serve a new customer segment. Expedia customers typically know when and where they want to go on a trip. ”This is spontaneous travel. You get the best offer you can find and then you can choose when you want to go,” he said.

The partnership model is one that Groupon is using to expand into new categories.

In May, Groupon announced a joint venture with Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, which allows it to expand its group-buying model to concerts, sports, theater productions and other live events across North America. That partnership is expected to launch later this summer.

Mason said the daily deals business model stays the same with partnerships, except that the margins will be lower. The merchant still receives about half of what the consumer pays, but the other half will be split between Expedia and Groupon (specific terms were not disclosed).

Together, the two will be able to market to about 50 million people with their combined email subscriber lists in the U.S.

Groupon and Expedia are entering a crowded market full of discount travel sites, ranging from Groupon’s next-nearest competitor LivingSocial’s own branded Escapes business to other companies, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter and even Overstock.com.

The two believe the value they are offering is in the fine print and by making it as straightforward as possible. For example, once a customer purchases a voucher, they will be able to redeem it over the next year based on availability, and that they’ll do their best to avoid the dreaded blackout travel dates.

Here’s an illustrative video with Mason and Durchslag:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/exclusive-groupon-books-travel-plans-through-expedia-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110327/overstocks-travel-site-takes-flight-with-heavily-discounted-hotels/ http://allthingsd.com/20110327/overstocks-travel-site-takes-flight-with-heavily-discounted-hotels/#comments Sun, 27 Mar 2011 23:00:07 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3866 Overstock, which has been focused on liquidating unsold inventory for the past 12 years, is branching out into offering discounts on hotels around the world.

Starting today, the additional category takes off, offering steep discounts to hotel rooms around in about 30 locations.

The launch of Overstock’s vacation category–its fifth new category since 1999–marks a substantial investment for the publicly held company.

The decision to pick travel is in line with what Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter and LivingSocial.com’s Escapes are doing in terms of offering occasional deals to certain locations. With all of them, the focus is on price, not selection.

But rather than Gilt’s high-end affluent niche and LivingSocial’s curated-packaged approach, Overstock’s inventory is more for the masses–something you’d expect from Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline or Travelocity.

On day one, the choices will vary.

Three nights at the Crowne Plaza London at Heathrow costs $207.85 per person during May. In June, the four-star Renaissance New Orleans Marquette Hotel will run $238.14 per person for three nights. A perfectly decent hotel in Honolulu, which is a little drab and is across the street from the beach, will cost $351.25 per person for seven nights.

But how much you are saving is not exactly obvious.

“We’d love to put the rack rates up there, and if you go to other travel sites, you’ll see these are slick deals, but at the moment we aren’t putting up the rack rate,” said Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne. “The suppliers would like to make it not so transparent.”

The Vacations tab will be featured prominently at the top of the web site, along with the other categories of Shopping, Cars, Real Estate and Auctions.

The addition follows other recent launches by Overstock, including Eziba.com, which focuses on selling a small number of items, ranging from furniture to jewelry, at heavily discounted prices via a daily email.

As for the Vacations business, Byrne said they’ve hired a dedicated sales team to source the deals. “We have been working on it for about a year, and we believe we can expand the cities and inventory very quickly.”

The deals are colorfully laid out on the page to highlight the scenery in each location. They can sell out, or at least that’s the hope.

“This is the equivalent of a private shopping site. They will sell out and quickly. Or, at least we hope so, and then we’ll go get more,” Byrne said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110327/overstocks-travel-site-takes-flight-with-heavily-discounted-hotels/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/thank-william-shatner-as-pricelines-stock-price-negotiates-a-five-year-high/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/thank-william-shatner-as-pricelines-stock-price-negotiates-a-five-year-high/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:09:36 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2856 Priceline’s shares traded at a five-year high today, nearly tripling in value over the past year alone.

The company said it is performing well, as deal seekers around the world–from North America to Western Europe to the Asia-Pacific region–look for deals on hotels and rental cars, specifically, and benefit from improvements in the economy.

The company’s stock is trading at $463.33, up $6.32 a share today. A new 52-week high was hit yesterday, trading at $459.57 a share.

Yesterday, Priceline announced it entered its fifth straight year of its well-known advertising campaign, featuring William Shatner–a.k.a. “the Priceline Negotiator.”

Shatner is portrayed as a James Bond-like character who will stop at nothing to obtain the best travel deals and maximum savings for Priceline customers–although he does silly things along the way, too, like watch a gorilla wrestle a scrawny man.

Shatner will be joined in the campaign–created by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners–by new sidekicks Naomi Pryce and the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company will release its fourth-quarter and full-year results Feb. 23.

Expect the focus to be on growth.

Priceline is forecasting total gross travel bookings to jump year-over-year by 36 to 41 percent, with most of the growth coming internationally.

International bookings are expected to jump by 54 to 59 percent vs. minimal growth in domestic gross travel of 5 to 10 percent.

Annual revenues are forecasted to jump by 31 to 36 percent, and gross profits are expected to soar by 49 to 54 percent.

As a close competitor to Priceline, Expedia.com hit a 52-week high of $29.85 back in September, but has fallen considerably since, to trade around $21.69 a share.

Yesterday, Expedia relaunched a new price-savings campaign called ASAP: A Sudden Amazing Price. The  promotion will offer two discounts a day on hotels and other items of up to 50 percent, aimed at both sides of the country.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/thank-william-shatner-as-pricelines-stock-price-negotiates-a-five-year-high/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101223/ring-ring-hi-its-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20101223/ring-ring-hi-its-google/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 05:33:58 +0000 Amir Efrati http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34374 Google Inc., which helped popularize the idea of automated ad sales on the Web, has been quietly turning to an old-fashioned tool–phone calls–to compete in the hot market for local business advertising.

The Internet-search giant this year has hired several hundred sales representatives to call U.S. businesses such as spas, restaurants and hotels to promote new advertising initiatives, people familiar with the matter said. The effort includes an office in Tempe, Ariz., with around 100 sales representatives, one of these people said.

Since 20% of searches done on Google are for local information, “a strong Web presence can help neighborhood businesses answer those searches and bring in more customers,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of geographic and local services, in a prepared statement. Google’s new local ad offerings “are simple and they work, so we’ve been investing in marketing and sales to support them.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101223/ring-ring-hi-its-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-expected-to-outgrow-apple-in-mobile-display-ad-market-in-2011/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-expected-to-outgrow-apple-in-mobile-display-ad-market-in-2011/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:48:32 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53688 The mobile advertising market is ballooning, as is Google’s share of it. Of the $877 million spent on mobile advertising in the United States this year, 59 percent of it went to the search sovereign, according to an updated assessment by IDC. Meanwhile, Apple claimed just 8.4 percent share, Yahoo 5.6 percent, down from 7 percent last year, and Microsoft 4.3 percent, down from 6.3 percent.

Clearly, Google rules the mobile ad market in the States in much the same way it dominates search. That said, it’s important to note that the mobile ad market as defined by IDC includes both search and display ads and that the advertising business of some of the companies figuring in IDC’s report doesn’t extend to mobile search.

Apple, for example.

In the mobile display market, Apple claims an 18.8 percent share, which basically puts it neck and neck with Google with its 19 percent share. A short distance behind, Millennial Media has 15.4 percent. And behind Millennial, Yahoo has 10.1 percent.

And in front of them all: “Other,” with 20.5 percent (click image to enlarge).

So the leaders of mobile display advertising have yet to be decided, though Apple and Google have staked the largest claims to date. But while the the two companies are essentially tied right now, IDC’s Karsten Weide tells me Android’s growing presence in the mobile space means it will likely overtake Apple in display as well.

“Even if display was decisive for the war, I expect Google to outgrow Apple there in the coming year, primarily because Android devices will outsell Apple’s iOS devices,” Weide said. “More devices means more mobile Internet traffic, means more ad inventory that can be sold to advertisers, means more revenue. That said, search will remain more important than display in mobile and may well increase its market share even more. A lot of the mobile traffic is about finding things while being on the road: shops, restaurants, hotels…and that means search traffic, be it in traditional search queries or map searches. Google stands to benefit from this.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-expected-to-outgrow-apple-in-mobile-display-ad-market-in-2011/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100520/ctrip-sees-challenge-in-online-bookings/ http://allthingsd.com/20100520/ctrip-sees-challenge-in-online-bookings/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 12:00:02 +0000 Loretta Chao http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=25233 One of the biggest challenges for China’s largest online travel booking company, Ctrip, is getting existing customers to go online.

Though having users book flights and hotels through a website rather than a call center is more profitable, two-thirds of Ctrip’s bookings are done through its call centers, according to CEO Fan Min. That means only a slightly higher percentage of users today are going through Ctrip.com than five years ago, and Fan believes it will take another few years for the percentage to increase to 35 percent.

“Each percentage point is hard-earned,” Fan says. “It’s a matter of consumer behavior” even among Ctrip’s wealthier users, he says. Compared to U.S. travelers, people in China tend to book their travel at the last minute and “find it’s more convenient to do it by just picking up the phone.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100520/ctrip-sees-challenge-in-online-bookings/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 15:30:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19346 Average concertgoers go to two shows a year, and there’s a very good chance some of the money they spend on those shows goes to Ticketmaster, which dominates the ticketing business.

So here’s a company that wants a piece of that: TicketFly, a New York-based start-up that just raised a $2 million Series A round led by High Peaks Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1 million in convertible debt last year, via angels Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg, among others.

If TicketFly works, there’s a good chance you won’t ever know about it, because it’s a B2B business: Consumers fund the operation via surcharges on their tickets, but the real customers are the concert venues, which strike exclusive deals with ticketing companies.

So most of the features are designed with the venues and promoters in mind. TicketFly says it can help with Web site design and management, promoting shows on Twitter and Facebook, tracking sales data in real time, etc.

All of this sounds like fairly straightforward stuff, but the ticketing business is an old, archaic one. And Ticketmaster, the industry’s eight million-pound gorilla, now owned by Live Nation (LYV), is particularly slow-moving when it comes to all things tech. So some of this really will feel fresh for the concert guys.

More interesting are TicketFly’s plans, which involve giving venues the chance to sell tickets using the same dynamic pricing/yield management techniques hotels and airlines use: That is, prices for hot shows may shoot up, and if you want to see a band no one else wants to see, you may end up paying very little.

TicketFly has about 50 venues signed up so far, and most are fairly intimate places like Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., or the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis–the kinds of of places where you could see Nirvana before Nirvana became Nirvana.

They’re also the kinds of places that used be served by TicketWeb, another Web-based upstart that Ticketmaster acquired a few years back. No coincidence: TicketFly co-founder Andrew Dreskin used to run that company.

Here’s a little wayback machine: Nirvana at Maxwell’s in 1989. Audio and video quality is about as rough as you’d imagine:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091110/merry-christmas-you-get-wi-fi/ http://allthingsd.com/20091110/merry-christmas-you-get-wi-fi/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:25:45 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17657 Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are all offering some form of courtesy Wi-Fi through the holiday season, at venues such as airports, hotels and Times Square.

Each has a relatively new service it’s hoping to attract consumers to, whether it’s Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Yahoo’s revamped home page and customization features.

Google is working with Wi-Fi providers Boingo Wireless and Advanced Wireless Group to provide connectivity at 47 airports, including Boston, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami and Seattle from today until Jan. 15 (sorry New Yorkers, JFK, LGA and EWR are not on the list).

“We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, said in a statement.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091110/merry-christmas-you-get-wi-fi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090513/att-we-crippled-slingplayer-tv-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20090513/att-we-crippled-slingplayer-tv-app/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 10:55:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7324 Mystery solved, sort of: AT&T is taking the blame for crippling the SlingPlayer iPhone app.

The program, created by Echostar’s (SATS) Sling group, is designed to let users watch TV shows, beamed from their own sets, on the  iPhone. It goes on sale for $29.99 today via Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store–but without the ability to work over AT&T’s 3G network.

That’s our decision, says AT&T (T). The company’s rationale: The iPhone’s too powerful, and our network isn’t powerful enough.

That’s the gist of its argument, which both makes sense and confuses. AT&T says the Sling app could consume lots of network capacity, which is straightforward enough. But you can already use Sling apps for other handsets, like the BlackBerry, on AT&T.

The difference, AT&T says, is that the iPhone really isn’t a phone at all, but a PC that happens to make phone calls. “We consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.”

No argument there, either. But again, given that you can use the SlingPlayer over AT&T’s spectrum using different devices, it seems as if AT&T is really making a different argument: Just because you can watch TV on other devices doesn’t mean you will. But if we give people the chance to watch TV on iPhone, they’ll flock to it–and our network can’t handle that.

See for yourself. Here’s AT&T’s full statement, via Engadget:

Slingbox, which would use large amounts of wireless network capacity, could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network. The application does not run on our 3G wireless network. Applications like this, which redirect a TV signal to a personal computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service. We consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.

That said, we don’t restrict users from going to a Web site that lets them view videos. But what our terms and conditions prohibit is the transferring, or slinging, of a TV signal to their personal computer or smartphone.

The Slingbox application for the iPhone runs on WiFi. That’s good news for AT&T’s iPhone 3G customers, who get free WiFi access at our 20,000 owned and operated hot spots in the U.S., including Starbucks, McDonalds, Barnes & Noble, hotels, and airports. AT&T is the industry leader in WiFi.

[Image credit: Markhillary]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090513/att-we-crippled-slingplayer-tv-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090511/kindle-hikes-book-prices-and-adds-to-my-ambivalence/ http://allthingsd.com/20090511/kindle-hikes-book-prices-and-adds-to-my-ambivalence/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 15:49:46 +0000 Dan Gillmor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11644 Just when I was coming to terms with my ambivalence toward my Kindle e-book reader, Amazon and the publishers have gotten greedy.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the device since I bought my first one about 9 months ago. As a frequent traveler and voracious reader, I’ve found the Kindle to be nearly ideal. I never have fewer than a dozen books in its memory, and they’re always things I want to read.

As someone who believes we should often interact with media instead of passively consuming it, however, I don’t think much of the Kindle for any purpose other than reading a narrative. And given what a disaster “digital rights management” (DRM) is becoming for scholarship, culture and ultimately freedom, the device’s restrictions on how I can use what I’ve purchased are deeply troubling.

Still, I’ve been using it with some degree of satisfaction (as have enough other people to have helped boost Amazon’s stock price, so as the holder of several hundred shares I’m slightly better off in that way, too). The second-generation model improved nicely on the first–among other things, fixing some user-interface quirks, letting me charge it via a USB cable, and boosting the battery life.

The books I load onto the device fall generally under the casual entertainment category. I buy a Kindle book the way I buy a movie ticket (or did before going to theaters became such a crappy experience).

These are books, like most movies, that I’ll read or watch once and forget about. A physical book is more like a DVD–something I want to own and enjoy again and again.

So the kinds of books I tend to buy for the Kindle are the sort I’d often pick up at an airport newsstand, namely mysteries, thrillers and semi-trashy novels that I’d sometimes leave in hotels or airplane seat-back pockets once I’d finished them. (I also subscribe to several magazines, and consider it a favor not to see the advertising.)

Once I got accustomed to reading e-books, I started doing something that had been out of character in the analog era: buying new books that, in print, were available in hardcover only. Why? The price, typically $10 (okay, one penny less), was right. In fact, my new-book purchases soared.

But not for long. In recent weeks, Amazon (AMZN) or the publishers (or both) have done their best to deter me from buying the latest releases. Prices have gone up, way up.

Now, I often find books for which I’d have gladly paid $10 listed at $14 or $15. I save these to a list I keep on the Amazon website, called “Too expensive for Kindle,” and periodically check to see if the price has dropped. So far, not yet on any of these.

Hiking prices this way creates a bad deal for the customer. Amazon’s price for a new hardcover is typically just a couple of dollars higher. This means I could buy the hardcover, read it and donate it to my local library, and–after the tax deduction–come out ahead. I’d do even better taking the book to my local used-book store and getting cash.

But I almost never buy new hardcovers of books I don’t expect to reread or use as a reference, because a) I’m kind of cheap; and b) I can stand waiting for the paperback. So if prices stay high, I stay away.

Now, sellers have every right to charge more for popular books, especially when they’re new. This is basic supply and demand. But when the price only makes sense for people who consider the ultra-portability of an e-book paramount, that’s a turnoff for other potential buyers.

As a customer I also understand supply and demand. My demand is extremely elastic, and in this case it’s snapped.

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Last week’s introduction of the Kindle DX was framed in many ways by different constituencies, but I was taken aback by the praise heaped on the device by several newspaper people, including the CEO of the New York Times Co. (NYT) (in which I also own a small amount of stock). Newspapers aren’t going to fix their considerable woes with Kindles, and anyone who thinks so lives in a fantasy world.

The DX, with its bigger screen, strikes me as potentially useful in several ways, possibly including the textbook function that Amazon hopes to jumpstart with the help of several universities (including the one that employs me). But if textbook publishers don’t radically cut prices on the outrageously expensive books they sell, they will find themselves creating a strong incentive for precisely what they don’t want: unauthorized copying.

I suspect the DX will prove most useful in more prosaic ways. For example, it could be a nearly ideal container and viewer for technical documentation–thick manuals that need periodic updating, where the cost of printing is prohibitive and the bulk of the books is daunting for the user.

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Will all of this be made moot by the widely anticipated Apple (AAPL) “NetPad” or whatever it’s going to be called? I refer to a device that looks like a larger version of the iPod Touch, which would be a wonderful mobile multimedia player, among other likely capabilities.

I doubt it. If you enjoy severe eye strain, reading books on a back-lit, glossy display is just the ticket. The passive displays on Kindles, the Sony (SNE) e-reader and other such devices are much better for this kind of reading.

One size does not fit all in the emerging world of devices. Then again, one carry-on bag doesn’t hold all devices. For now, however, the Kindle has a place in mine.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090511/kindle-hikes-book-prices-and-adds-to-my-ambivalence/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090311/priceline-orbitz-slammed-on-expedia-hotel-fare-promotion/ http://allthingsd.com/20090311/priceline-orbitz-slammed-on-expedia-hotel-fare-promotion/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:32:36 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=9374 As the recession-pressured market for leisure travel shrinks, the competition for online travel customers is heating up.

Expedia (EXPE) today unveiled an aggressive new promotion, which it calls “Free Nights and No Fee Flights,” offering to pick up the tab for one night in a hotel for stays of three, four or five days at a group of more than 700 participating hotels, and also waiving booking fees for flights booked before the end of May. The hotel promotion currently is for bookings made by April 9 for travel through May 15; the company said additional deals will be posted for bookings beginning April 9 for travel through the end of May.

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