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

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

...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