The Online Travel Phenomenon

Online travel has become an increasingly popular industry with even Google launching its travel engine for flights and hotels (www.google.com/flights, www.google.com/hotelfinder). Online travel agencies are trying to differentiate themselves on something other than just price. Expedia launched its flash sale site with Groupon for its "Getaways" experience and Orbitz is focusing on its Facebook page launching giveaways for luxury vacations. In addition, Kayak has released a Mac application that lets users plan their vacations. The end goal of these initiatives is to both increase awareness of their brands and hopefully engage and acquire new customers.

Among the clutter of online travel there are a few standouts. The usual suspects include Tripadvisor and Travelzoo. Hipmunk was mentioned in class but here are two that I wanted to share with you:

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This website allows you to lock in your lowest rates for rental cars. Once you book on this site, it automatically searches for lower rates than the one you've locked in until your travel date. If a sale appears later for a lower rate, it automatically cancels your previous reservation and locks you into the new rate. Amazing right?

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This site instantly helps you plan itineraries tailored to your taste. Pick the location, date, theme (outdoor, with kids, best of), intensity (here to rest, here to see everything), and luxury level, and a day by day itinerary is crafted for you. Further fine tune it by preference weightings and you're off to a great start.

Other diamonds in the rough include wanderfly, gogobot, and gtrot. With travel becoming much more social it will be interesting to see which of these sites gain the scalability to become the next facebook for travel.