Travelocity: Great Content and Even Better Commerce

Travelocity: Great Content and Even Better Commerce
Written bySramana Mitra / April 27, 2007 /4 comments
We have already discussedYahoo! Travel andTripAdvisor from aWeb 3.0 perspective. Continuing our look at theonline travel industry we will evaluateTravelocity next.
Travelocity, launched in 1996, is an online travel agency, and is owned bySabre Holdings. According toNielsen//NetRatings, Travelocity is ranked number two among the most-visited travel sites in the world with over 13 million visitors per month.
In general, most travel sites that have been around for a whileoffer a certain baseline set of functionality, that including Airline,Hotel, and Car Rental Bookings, as well as Vacation Packages, Cruisesand Deals. I am looking at where these sites need to go in the Web 3.0era.
Context
Context, so far, is limited to two rather broad areas: BusinessTravel and Pleasure Travel. In my opinion, this is hardly enough, sinceboth Business Travel and Pleasure Travel come in many forms. BusinessTravel could be hyper luxury, i.e., a CEO traveling with his Board ofDirectors and the entire team staying at the Four Seasons, or it couldbe a sales rep of a startup going to a tradeshow, and staying in thecheapest motels possible.
Similarly, pleasure travel can also swing to both ends of thespectrum. The luxury traveler in search of the finest Aman resorts is avery different "context" than the student backpacker looking for YouthHostels. I would like to see these Context nuances included as optionsin the navigation.
Travelocity, having been around for so long, has a vast amount ofcontent and inventory. Without Contextual navigation, this repositoryof information is way too time-consuming and click-consuming to plodthrough.

Content
Travelocity is rich in content and covers information for over 700airlines, more than 50,000 hotels and about 50 car rental companiesacross the world. The site offers over 6,500 vacation packages, toursand cruises and has travel content in 12 languages including English,French, and German.
The interesting differentiated aspects are what I will focus on.Travelocity is the only major travel site that allows users to booktrain tickets.
Travelocity’s Activities section is also nice. It allows you to booktheatre and sports tickets, site seeing tours, etc. in more than 200cities. It clearly stands out. I would, however, like Travelocity toinclude local festivals as well.
Going back to my earlier example of planning a trip in Andalucia(Southern Spain), let‘s say I am looking to stay at small, romantic Bed& Breakfasts in various cities and small villages: Toledo, Granada,Cordoba, Seville, Arcos De La Frontera, etc. I want to know how thelocal festival dates line up with my travel dates, and how should Iarrange my trip to work those in.
Also, local entertainment and local reviews are super important, anda mashup of information from the travel guides (Lonely Planet, RoughGuide, Guide du Routard), review sites (Yelp, Chowhound, CitySearch),would be very nice to access through Travelocity.
Further, I like to dance the Argentine Tango, and I would love to beable to know where to go dancing and when, in each city, from rightwithin the Travelocity environment, without having to go scoutingseparately on the web.
None of this exists yet, but in this age of mashups, it ought to. The place-smartsearch technology exists, to tag local content in a way that sites canmash them up easily. Travelocity should investigate a small Canadiancompany calledCquay, to make this happen.
Community
Travelocity lacks good community features. The only communityfeature that deserves mention is hotel and tour review, but that is oldfunctionality. They should take a lesson fromTripAdvisor, whose Community features are simply fantastic. The site does allow photo sharing with collaboration viaSnapfish, trying to emulate Yahoo‘s integration of Flickr. Good idea. Not a great implementation, though.
Commerce
Travelocity earns commission on hotels and other services bookedthrough its site, which is pretty much the standard revenue model inthis business. The site, in collaboration withHotlink, sells its "Gnome"range of merchandise, and does a much better job at it than TripAdvisorbut still leaves a lot to be desired. A good innovation is theTravelocity Hotel Gift Card and theTravelocity Credit Cards. Travelocity Rewards MasterCard is a good co-branding strategy that the site is pursuing in collaboration withMasterCard.
Personalization
Travelocity‘s personalization options allow users to view and savetheir trips, receive alerts about low airfares to favorite destinationsby emails in collaboration withFareWatcher, receive change notifications, upload and share photos. Nothing great. Nothing earth shattering.
What would be earth shattering: integration with the frequent flyerprograms of various airlines. The day Travelocity can automaticallybook a coach class ticket on British Airways, and then use my miles toupgrade it to business class, capture my meal preferences, and orderspecial diets at the hotels I reserve through them, I would give thembetter points for Personalization.
Another area of Personalized service that I wish they would tackle,is taking care of all the little behind the scenes adjustmentsautomatically if I need to change travel dates on a specific, complexitinerary. That would make me leap for joy, as this is one of the mostpainful things in life. I will write about a small startup that isattempting innovation in this area soon.

Vertical search
I found vertical searches in Travelocity to be more user-friendlythan TripAdvisor. By and large, all the Airline, Hotel, Car Rentalsearches happen as one would imagine, but there is no imagination inany of this quite yet.
They should think of vertical search based on Context. In theContext of First Class Business Travel, the search interface shouldlook very different, than how it looks in the context of budgetbackpacking vacations. The requisite amenities, the navigation andsearch options presented to the user, all need to be different.
Business Model
Travelocity makes most of its revenues on commissions. However, with an Alexa traffic rank of 604, according tocomScore,Travelocity is one of the most effective advertising options forsponsored search advertisers, having a 6.5% click-through rate,compared to the 4 - 5 percent click-through rates achieved byExpedia orOrbitz.The advertising rates for Travelocity vary between $25 - $55 CPM.Travelocity earned revenues of $1.1 billion in 2006, an increase of 31%over 2005.
Conclusion
My finalWeb 3.0 Rating for Travelocity: Context: B+; Content: B+; Community: C; Commerce: A; Personalization: C; Vertical Search: C; Overall : B-
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# 1
Nicewriteup! You should do a review of kayak.com for this series. I‘ve usedthem extensively on my last holiday and it usually gave me the bestprice available. Even when i did my haggling in person and looked atkayak later they would have the same price i ended up with there.
Posted by:Tijs |April 28, 2007 03:11 AM
# 2
Greatarticle Sramana,Looks like your overall rating of ‘B-‘ is notreflecting the article subject "Travelocity: Great Content and EvenBetter Commerce", wondering?!
Posted by:Srikanth Bhakthan |April 28, 2007 08:20 AM
# 3
Do you know what does it mean in french ?
It‘s toooooo funnyyyy
Posted by:Muahaha |April 29, 2007 08:26 AM
# 4
Greatwrap up. I think travelocity and trip advisor fill two differentniches. I go to travelocity to book travel but trip advisor to get thereal inside scoop that travelocity does not give.
I have to say though, living in Marrakech, that I often can get muchbetter deals going to my travel agent rather than booking throughTravelocity.
Posted by:Maryam in Marrakesh |April 29, 2007 11:13 AM
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