Yahoo! Travel: Heavy on Content, Light on Personalization
Editor's Note: It might be helpful to read Sramana Mitra's Overview of the Online Travel Space prior to reading this review.
In this article we will analyze the Yahoo! Travel site based on the Web 3.0 framework. The site provides information on travel destinations, best bargains on hotel and travel fares. It has an attractive interface and navigation is simple and easy. However, as a late entrant, it needs to do so much more to differentiate and become a "destination".
Context
Yahoo! Travel has a very broad and vivid categorization, which gives its users both convenience and ease of choice while planning for their trip. The site provides good contextual information for both leisure travelers and business travelers.
There are eight sub categories, Travel Guides, Hotels, Flights, Cars, Cruises, Vacations, Deals, and FareChase. The Deals section is broken down into four sub categories (Popular Categories, Lifestyle, Price and More Deal Providers), which have been further categorized to help users search for deals more easily.
Content
Like all other Yahoo! sites the Travel site is also rich in content. The site allows users to search and book flights, hotels, cars, and also plan for their travel.
The Travel Guides section, for example, provides detailed information on more than 40,000 cities and 500,000 places to stay across the world along with reviews, maps and pictures of these locations. It also covers the history, culture, accommodation, festivals and carnivals, dining, drinking, nightlife entertainment, shopping, sports, and special attractions of these locations. Travel Guide also contains maps, weather reports and currency converters for each destination.
Yahoo! currently provides Travel content on Mobile through a partnership with Travelocity via Yahoo! Everywhere, which has agreement with service providers and manufacturers of Web-connected devices in 26 countries where it provides the same travel content in 14 languages.
Commerce
Yahoo! Travel through its partnership with Travelocity and other sites provides users booking facilities, which enables it to earn commission on the flights, hotels, vacations, cruises or cars booked through its sites. There is, however, nothing differentiated in its offering versus other more established providers of travel booking.
Community
Yahoo! has been lagging in community features and in its Yahoo! Travel site, it tries to do a decent job of integrating consumer generated media, such as reviews, RSS Feeds, message boards and Flickr. Flickr is an interesting integration as it allows users to share their travel photographs. This is Yahoo! Travel's most powerful repository of user generated content, and creating better ways for the travel community to engage around it would be an excellent way to leverage their photo sharing community.
The site also allows users to share their trip plans. Though the site has message boards and reviews posted by users, it lacks punch and the site would do well to integrate videos, discussion forums, chat with travel advisors, blogs on important destinations, etc. to increase the level of engagement.
I wrote a few few posts, one on how to incentivize user generated content and one on how Washington Post's Blogroll has collected 100 Blogs that Lufthansa has bought CPM advertising on. I believe, Yahoo could do a much better job incenting and harnessing user generated content, as well as creating blog networks so that advertisers can buy ad inventory on them as a block, just like Lufthansa did via the Washington Post.
Personalization
Yahoo! Travel offers personalization through My Yahoo! It enables users to plan their trip, check and track their reservations and travel profiles, receive emails and alerts on various travel destinations, fares and newsletters, sharing of trips, etc. The site also allows users to copy and customize someone else’s trip plan.
Nonetheless, there is no personalization based on travel styles (luxury, backpacking, culture, outdoors, romantic bed & breakfasts), budget ranges, amenity requirements, etc. Paper travel guides have always provided this sort of segmentation information. However, websites have always the unique advantage of being able to provide better search and personalization facilities, which so far remains unaddressed. It is also Yahoo's greatest opportunity for strong differentiation in a market landscape that is fast standardizing.
Vertical Search
Yahoo! Travel has convenient search functions and allows users to search from a multiple range of hotels, flights, car rentals, vacations, cruises and deals. The site also allows consumers to search for hotel, flights and rental cars simultaneously. In 2006 Yahoo! acquired FareChase, a travel search engine that allows users to search and compare fares of flights and hotels online and connects the user directly to the travel provider’s site.
Again, there is nothing wowing about what they've done here, and my above recommendations on more category-specific vertical search functionality would help immensely.
In general, segmentation would also allow content to be licensed from category specific travel guides. For example, for travelers in search of uniqueness, the French Guide du Routard is an excellent source. It tells you, not only which hotel to stay in, but also which rooms in the hotel are the best. Similarly, the Rough Guides have catered to budget travelers for generations, and knows the cheapest dives that still serve good food in many far-away destinations.
Business Model
Yahoo earns more than 88% of its revenues from advertisements. The ad rates for the travel site are in the range of $0.32 - $0.57 CPC. The major advertisers on Yahoo! Travel are Avis, InterContinental Hotel Group, Wynn, Sheraton, and Hertz. It doesn't look like Yahoo! Travel has got its act together quite yet on the advertising side, but presumably it will, and advertising rates will climb up.
Conclusion
The final rating for Yahoo! Travel using my Web 3.0 Rating is as follows: Context: A; Content: A-; Community: B; Commerce: A-; Personalization: C; Vertical Search: C Overall : B
Do you agree? What are your thoughts on Yahoo! Travel?
2 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2147
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I'm actually really surprised by your assessment of Yahoo Travel. It's not my favorite travel site, but they've done a fabulous job over the past couple of years to modernize the site. I'm a former employee of SideStep and follow the online travel industry very closely. Though you make some good observations, many don't take into account the competitive context and some are incorrect. For example, why do you claim that Yahoo Travel is a "late entrant," considering it was around before Orbitz?
In terms of community, Yahoo Travel has done a fabulous job of engaging its user base, when compared with other major travel sites. Whereas strong community-focused Websites like BootsnAll still have an edge, I'd argue that Yahoo Travel even beats TripAdvisor for its community efforts. I agree with your assessment of Farechase, though not for the same reasons. First of all, because of Yahoo's deal with Travelocity, they have conflicting travel searches, which is confusing to the end user. Furthermore, since Farechase still doesn't have a car search, it's complete deficient when compared with Kayak or SideStep. Also, why do you think Yahoo doesn't have it together with the advertising side? Those CPC rates seem to be pretty good and Yahoo Travel drives a lot of revenue for Yahoo. Do you have some industry statistics to show otherwise?
Finally, I think you missed the most important and innovative of Yahoo Travel's properties: Yahoo Trip Planner. This is a tool that allows users to build trips, share trips with others, and keep all trip data in a single location. Though it's still got a ways to go, it's the first step in the right direction of creating an online virtual travel assistant.
I love these assessments from Read/Write, but I wish that you'd vet them with industry experts before posting.
Mark,
Yahoo's Trip Planner is linked to under community, you will see it if you follow the link through to the article. I generally feel that users who contribute content should be compensated. That's what this particular point discusses.
Yahoo! Travel has been around for a long time, but has not been one of their focus areas until recently, after they've started organizing the company more by segments. You can read my analysis of Yahoo's turnaround strategy from a few months back: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/484.
On revenues, they drive much more through commissions at this point, than ads, it seems. This seems to me like a wasted opportunity. I don't have their CPM number ... do you have it? Expedia's CPM numbers seem a lot higher: $20-$60, but I can't really compare CPC to CPM, just making some assessments.
You consider yourself an industry expert. There are others who do the same. I think, the beauty of the web is the opportunity to "facilitate" shared learning.
Thanks, Sramana
Lightload Towels three packs are the only towel that is also a tool for the outdoors. Use it as a fire starter coffee filter, water filter, first aid supplement, wind scarf, sweat band and much more. Waterproof packaging covers each piece; that always ensures that the user will have a clean dry cloth.