A new business opportunity that might be overlooked
Travelers last year averaged 21 trips to various travel Web sites before finally booking a trip, according to Compete.com, which raises the question of who will be getting the business.
“That’s a lot of time surfing the Web — and a possible business opportunity for travel sites that can make that search faster and easier,” points out The New York Times.
Now, several “meta-search” firms are offering to do just that, each promising that their users will either find the cheapest fares or spend less time searching for them.
Several meta-search sites such as Kayak.com, Fly.com and Momondo.com do not directly sell plane tickets or control bookings at hotels but instead search hundreds of travel sites at one time to identify the best rates and prices. Consumers are then sent to book directly with the seller’s site.
All have recently been raising their profiles — Kayak with a new TV ad campaign that trumpets its supposed primacy (“Search One and Done”); Momondo, a Danish company, with a site that boasts it is “the best flight search engine” on the Web; and Fly, with one-on-one sessions with newspaper reporters.
By David Wilkening
David
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