The online travel sector is always in a state of flux, given that it’s innovation that keeps companies in this area on top. But even by these standards, the last few weeks have been extraordinarily eventful.

For starters, the cratering economy has forced travel companies to move out of their comfort zones and offer better deals to travelers. Secondly, travelers themselves have been more and more diligent about searching for value packages and lower fares and rates. What I’m leading up to is that the travel metasearch providers are suddenly much more in demand than before.

And naturally, when you see a bump in demand, there’s going to be more players entering the game, and existing players ramping up their level of service. According to a recent survey by Forrestor Research, 19% of those doing travel research online are now using metasearch. That’s up 3-4% from previous surveys.

Which is why you’ve seen TravelZoo launch Fly.com, TripAdvisor adding to it’s wares with a flight search engine, and Kayak launching hotel metasearch on Travelpost.

Uptake.com is one of the leading innovators in travel metasearch, and it just so happens, there’s a couple of posts on there about travel metasearch, listing inside dope about Vibeagent, Trivago, Hotelscombined and aforementioned TripAdvisor and Kayak.

Pretty instructive, if you go through it all. For example, I learned from these posts that Travelpost offers review filters, so you have the option of narrowing the user reviews to the kind of demographic you’re interested in. Naturally, the question taht comes to mind is - Will TripAdvisor now start offering filters for their reviews? This is the kind of competition and innovation which you’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the coming months, as the travel metasearch wars intensify.

This also raises the question of brand loyalty. Would you be willing to switch over from Kayak to TripAdvisor because they now offer reviews and bookings for hotels and restaurants, along with flight search? Or the other way around, since Kayak now offers hotel reviews?

According to this Compete.com analysis, 55% of TripAdvisor users already shop for flights on other sites in the same month. TripAdvisor attracts 8 million U.S. visitors per month. Do the math, and it’s not hard to workout the oppurtunity and potential.

Even if you put aside TripAdvisor’s unique situation, the potential for customers moving from one search engine to another is still huge, if you consider the results of a survey by J.P. Morgan Internet analyst Imran Khan.

He found that 62 percent would be willing to change search engines. The top four reasons cited by those who said they were willing to change were better results (45%), faster response speeds to search (28%), less cluttered results (27%), and the ability to preview web content (23%).

Apply the same template to travel metasearch, and you have a pretty fair view of what kind of changes you’re going to see in the near future.

Posted on March 7th, 2009 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News