Mega-searches creating intelligent travel guides
They started as bare-bones comparison-shopping tools, but next-generation meta-search sites are now letting users refine their searches through the filter of relevant intelligence.
“Six to eight billion” according to Yen Lee, a former Yahoo! manager and now president of Internet start-up Kango.com, that’s approximately how many travel-related searches are conducted in North America each year on the Web’s major search engines,” said MSNBC.
There’s no comparable data on the results of those searches. But there’s little doubt that some led potential travelers to throw up their hands at the information overflow and the difficulty of extracting the significant from the spam.
Help, however, may be at hand thanks to developments at several leading meta-search sites.
According to Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst with Forrester Research, meta-search sites account for approximately 12% of the online travel market. That’s far behind the big online travel agencies, but it’s expected to grow because the meta-sites don’t charge booking fees. (In most cases, users book directly via the Web site of the hotel, airline or rental car company they select, says MSNBC).
Industry observers expect meta-search to get another boost now that the two biggest players in the game, Kayak.com and SideStep.com, have joined forces. The companies, which merged in December, handled 34 million searches in January, a total that would make the pair the eighth largest player in online travel, says Drew Patterson, VP of marketing.
“Those are some pretty material numbers,” he said.
Report by David Wilkening
David
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