More later, but this is great news for Cendant and bad news for Blackstone. Online 3rd party sites and associated plumbing aren't coming back any time soon.

Update: The potential for Cendant in the travel space had always been that the synergies of having a vertically integrated entity - like a European style tour operator - would pay off. By combining a host of suppliers (Avis, Budget, Wyndham, Ramada, Super 8, Travelodge) and the plumbing to distribute them (the Apollo CRS, Orbitz, CheapTickets.com and even trip.com before them) costs would be reduced and margins fattened up and down the chain. Sadly, that just never happened.

With this breakup and the creation of a pure distribution arm, any hope of that seems out the window. Of course, CRSs and online resellers aren't going away anytime soon, but there sure is every indication that they are struggling to stave off declines in growth and margins.

I guess the good people at Blackstone can see something I don't, or they have other plans. Or perhaps just wringing more cost out means that this can spin out a nice enough ongoing income annuity through the decline that they are fine with it.

But it sure isn't a growth play.


Tags: orbitz, travelport, blackstone, cendant

My friend Mark has a post up riffing on the whole "we don't need your bloody marketing" thing that web 2.0 types tend to wax poetic on. And the post sorta makes me want to scream and shove sharp objects in my eyes.

Why? Because Marketing is, and near as I can tell always has been, the basis upon which virtually any good business has been built, and it misses the point completely. For the record, a-gain: Promotion is only a part of Marketing. An important part to be sure, but jeez louise people, it ain't the whole thing.

When I read things out there in the big world like "to be successful you have to have a product that meets a need, regardless of the marketing" or "the marketing was good, but they didn't get the distribution they needed" or "they had great marketing, but it was too expensive" it drives me batty. Marketing is all of those things. Anybody who thinks that somehow you can create something and then foist it on an unsuspecting public with enough ads and it will work must have a penchant for making their lives a living hell.

Marketing is, at its' core, recognizing a problem and then doing everything to profitably solve it. The best businesses stay completely focused on solving that problem in a way that resonates with their market. So for you webby startups out there, that's the thing to remember. It's not whether or not you can avoid spending money on advertising, it's how well you are making your customers' lives better.

Fact is, if you are doing real Marketing well, everything will be easier.

Tags: marketing

Congrats to the Farecast gang for moving out of private to public beta today. Though, with mentions on TechCrunch and BoingBoing, among others, it's not like my little heads-up here matters. That's some serious b-sphere coverage. Nicely done Mike and team.

Now their challenge is to prove that the whiz-bang, P.R.-friendly airfare predictor feature is more than the flavour-of-the-month, and to continue to build on the solid start of their metasearch tool. Oh, and to move into hotels because that's where the cash is. No small task.

Tags: farecast

 

As I mentioned here, TripHub is a new Seattle-based online travel startup which includes some former Expedia colleagues of mine, and at least one Expedia + msn Travel Channel veteran. Off the top, I offer kudos to all of them for tackling something new, and extra kudos for taking on the very difficult task of helping people manage the tremendously ungainly world of group travel.

As you might take from the last sentence, I went into my tire kick of the site with fairly low expectations. Not because these aren't bright folks, but because group travel is really hard to do. As it turns out, my expectations were probably well placed - at least partially.  This is a pretty good invitations-and-central-repository-like-Evite meets private-label-Hotels.com site, but as a real group travel management tool, they still fall short.

Now, the Evite-esque invitation and central trip record thing is a cool tool. If you have ever used Evite to invite people to a party or event, you can probably imagine applying that concept to multi-person trip planning. Pretty handy. And, they have a private label deal with the Hotels.com/TravelNow crew (all part of the Expedia group of companies) and Viator for activities, which from a revenue perspective should drive affiliate revenue for them. But, from a user perspective, beyond the Evite-esque thing, they don't seem to offer much in terms of true group travel planning assistance.

What do I mean by that? Well, "group travel" is really about people going as a group of more than X people (depending on the supplier) and saving money. Fact is, this functionality is very, very hard to offer online. There are a lot of reasons for that which I won't go into, but more to the point, it does not seem that TripHub has pushed that envelope any further.

To their credit, they do link to group request pages on various supplier sites, as well as promoting "featured links" to these types of pages, so and it looks like they are likely getting some kind of payment for the referral and ad revenue for the features, which is good for them in terms of revenue. But short of aggregating the links, there's little user value there.

The flight search is nothing special - it's a straight-up pass through to the TravelNow IAN platform, and only searches for a maximum of 6 passengers (there's one of those hard group travel planning problems - this is a limitation imposed by the CRS). For true "group" deals, you have to go to the airline's own group booking sites, and then input the details back into TripHub manually. Likewise for the hotel portion: there is certainly no new ground being broken in terms of the search functionality itself (eg: there is no meta search or breakthrough-anything here; it's just vanilla private label Hotels.com). In fact, TripHub offers nothing which makes hotel seeking "groups" easier to book or price multiple rooms at once.

Net/net: while the Evite-esque feature is pretty neat-o, as a real travel planning service and aid to group travel, TripHub doesn't get the job done.

Update: I had a chat with Michael McGinn, TripHub's CFO and Operations guy this afternoon. Michael also happens to be a former colleague, a former Expedia Strategic Planning VP and long time air industry guy. He's also one smart cookie to boot. Michael talked with me about their desire to use solving the problem of people travelling together as a way to get people to keep coming back and build an ongoing audience for advertisers. He stressed that the traditional travel industry idea of "group travel" being about deals is not at the core of what they are offering, and I have to agree that making the prospect of "going together" easier is a good good one. As I said above.

All that said, and with great respect to Michael and the team, I still can't imagine that what they have today is where they are going to end up. It just shouldn't be. Group travel is a big business, and making it truly better in a big way is a nice, chewy, defensible objective. My hope is that, regardless of what they are saying at this point, they do have cracking that big problem as the ultimate goal. Now *that* would be cool.

Tags: triphub

Man, living in a formerly heavily Ukrainian neighborhood has never meant anything until now. Today, it's wall to wall cars-with-flags and honking horns.

Little Italy eat your heart out! Too cool.

Update: It hit me that unless you are following the tournement, you are likely scratching your head as to why this celebration was happening. The reason is that Ukraine beat Switzerland 1-0 in todays's FIFA World Cup match.

Here are a few pics of the spectacle - literally at the end of the street. Yep, this is Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Jeff has a tremendous post here. Long, but worth it.

Lines up with my view of the world, big time - as anyone who has been listening to me for the past, oh, two years, and has been playing any sort of follow-the-money already knows.

 

Today might just be my best sporting event day ever.

England over Ecuador, now five cars out of the Montreal GP in the first 13 laps.

Yee-haw.

 

Reuters is reporting that Boeing is considering selling or even shutting down Conexxion by Boeing, their inflight internet service. Certainly, after spending a reported US$1billion for an asset which is being estimated at having a $150m value, you can sort of understand why.

But...what's with these people? As I mentioned here, the bandwidth to make this possible in the US was just made available by the FCC, and the US is arguably the biggest potential market. Walking now seems tantamount to throwing out the baby before the bathwater is even poured.

Now, I suppose it could be that Boeing has already heard that airlines have zero intention of equipping their aircraft with the necessary gear anytime prior to the freezing over of a very warm place.

But man, if you have come this far, only to see the door to potential mega-adoption open in front of you, doesn't giving up seem just a little silly?

Tags: fccauction65, fcc, boeing, airborneinternet

 

The good people at the Globe and Mail have taken it upon themselves to do a feature on me in this Thursday's edition of their new Report on [small] Business Magazine. It's the second time they are putting it out, and in keeping with their main and respected Report on Business Magazine, they are devoting the last page to something called "Exit Strategy". The people they featured last time were Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr, who sold to Yahoo! This time? It's me.

Now, I don't know what they are going to say (Simon Avery is the author, and a photog followed me around for 3 hours a few weeks back) so I guess we will all learn together on Thursday. All that I will say is that if it is good, it's true. And if it is not, it's clearly all out of context :-)

UPDATE: I am yet to see the paper version since I was travelling, but here is the link. For clarity, contrary to the facts layed out in the piece, I didn't calculate airline yield as a child - I was older than that. And, I didn't move to Seattle to work for USA Networks, but for Expedia, Inc., although Diller had bought us by that point. Also that was in 2003 not 2004. And, I didn't actually bring Signature Vacations online - I was about 6 months into that project when I moved on to Expedia.

Tags: globeandmail, reportonbusiness

Heading to Ottawa for a CIRA meeting, watching Argentina vs. Netherlands on the 'puter via wifi and a slingbox. 24:13 in. Both teams playing well.

Feed sorta dodgy, but on the whole...man, this ROCKS.

ps: If you applied for a spot on the CIRA Board, we are meeting to discuss who we will put forward tomorrow.

GO HOLLAND!

Update: here's a sample of the quality of the picture. Not bad, for wifi on a moving train.

Update 2: Ended in a 0-0 tie. Caught the last bit here in the Ottawa train station. Is this the future of media? Well, something like this sure feels likely...

Tags: slingbox, worldcup, train

...these things, which I will dive into more later.

1. Is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? With all the people jumping off to "do their own things" (Tara, Scoble, Om) it sure feels like one of those.

2. Some other former Expedia folks are a part of a team which has launched a group travel site called TripHub. I am going to check it out and report back.

3. A good friend and the former President of Expedia Corporate Travel, Matt Hulett, is now doing a shopping start-up called Mpire. Another one to check out and report on.

4. There are a lot of Canadian online travel sites starting to advertise. I was driving along and heard 3 radio jingles in a row. Great that they are promoting themselves. But too bad they still suck.

Tags: tara, om, scoble, triphub, mpire

I wish my berry had a camera, since I am standing here on King Street across from the TSX, marvelling that there are *hundreds* of people standing on the sidewalk watching the France-Switzerland match on the Reuters jumbotron in front of their building.

This sure is an event beyond compare, isn't it? This is Toronto for heaven's sake. Pretty cool. Really something to see.

Tara Hunt, one of the keynotes at mesh, announced that she is leaving Riya, her employer, to do her own thing to grow her Pinko Marketing brand.

While I certainly wish her well and think she's tremendous, I have to wonder about the wisdom in leaving a hot pre-IPO start-up where she has been instrumental in pulling in boatloads of users and heading off on her own, child in tow and TN-1 visa in hand (yikes).

She says that she and Riya have grown apart, and that sure does happen, but I hope she knows what she's doing.

Break a leg, Tara.

Tags: tarahunt, riya, mesh06, web2.0

Sorry, but with due respect to the folks behind this now-defunct AJAX homepage (uhh...and the world needed another one of those, why, exactly?): When you chose that name, um, what did you expect?

See also Mark Evans.

Tags: fold, goatrodeo

I know it's hardly in keeping with what I write about here, but if you haven't seen this video, you simply have to. According to the email that was forwarded to me with the link, here is the story:

This tunnel in Russia is the longest in-city tunnel of Europe. There is a river running over it and water leaks at some points. When the temperature reaches -38 degrees like it did this winter, the road freezes and the result is the attached video taken during a single day with the tunnel camera.

Keep an eye out about thirty seconds in. After you've seen it, you might want to reconsider public transit...

Tags: Lefortovo tunnel

Seems that's what a bunch of the studios are saying. Their US$150m investment in Movielink, the jointly owned movie download site, hasn't gone anywhere and they are looking to get out. Business Week reports that they have been shopping it, to little avail, and that they have one year of cash left.

It all sounds a little like what happens when you get competitors trying to figure out how to work together and keep a Genie in a bottle, all at the same time. Goat rodeo. And who loses? The potential customer, and category adoption overall.

Now, I get that infighting and arrogance on the part of the studios may well be a big part of the problem here (as Carlo at Techdirt says), and their seeming inability to move beyond just allowing people to watch on their computer screens is a biggee. But - and maybe it's just me - given this brave new broadband planet we are living on, where convergence is just really starting to start and new forms of media are only now starting to pay their own way as money follows the audience, could it be that now might not be the best time to be getting out of the movie download business?

Maybe, say, fixing it might be an idea?

See also Tim Lee's blog.

Tags: movielink

I am really surprised that what is potentially the biggest breakthrough in inflight customer-facing technology since the overhead light - and a new revenue source, to boot - has been met with abject silence in the traditional and online media. Although kudos to Matt Lake at CNet for attempting to surface it.

FCC Auction 65, or the sale of bandwidth in the 800MHz radio telephone range, has the potential to change everything about the travel experience and make a bunch of people a lot of money, and yet nobody's talking about it. Why does it matter? Because this spectrum sale will pave the way to airborne WiFi in the USA.

Inflight internet isn't new. Lufthansa has led the way with what I believe is the biggest install of the Conexxion by Boeing service of airborne WiFi. Many other carriers offer it to a limited extent as well. In the past, I've even used Verizon's inflight dial-up in the US to access limited internet services. But did you know that no airline or provider can offer WiFi in the US because the bandwidth to operate it has not been made available by the FCC?

That's what this auction is about. And as opposed to the last go-round when those poor sucker cellphone providers spent jillions to put lonely little phones in the backs of people's seats, this time the winner seems likely to get some serious spoils. So far, the bids are up to US$38 million.

I can tell you having used the Lufthansa / Boeing service, it's pretty sweet. I watched streaming video, IM-ed, could have VOIP-ed if I wanted to, know people who have used Slingbox to watch their home TV channels over the Atlantic and in fact I even SMS-ed my wife when I learned that we would be landing in Newfoundland to deplane a sick passenger on board. Will the impact on flying in the US be immediate? No. Airlines - especially US airlines - are cheap and service additions aren't at the top of the To Do list. But massive change starts somewhere, and in my estimation a massive change in flying is starting with FCC Auction 65.

Thanks Phil for alerting me to this.

Tags: fccauction65, fcc, boeing, lufthansa, airborneinternet