InsideTrip - A new spin on the Mega-Travel Search model

A new meta-search company, InsideTrip was mentioned today in Tech Crunch.










The model is the now familiar multi-site airline search pioneered by SideStep, Kayak, Farecast and Mobissmo (not to forget the original pioneer, FareChase which only recently was put on the front page of Yahoo! Travel ). The twist is a rating system that evaluates the quality of a given selection based on three specific categories - speed, comfort and ease and 12 so-called "pain points" such as number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type, connection time, and gate location. Users can indicate which of these pain points are most important and the service will generate a unique TripQuality score for each ticket result. Interesting concept that mirrors the corporate purchasing philosophy of "Total Cost of Ownership" which measures products and services often assigning a numeric score to a qualitative evaluation. A bigger trend is represented here as well which includes personalization techniques adopted by Kayak and Mobissimo as well as semantic search evaluations by start-ups Kango, Nile Guide and Circos. The commonality is a system that filters search results based on user designated criteria. This level of personalization applied to travel search is long overdue and can produce results that are more in sync with the user's needs. That being said, the Achilles heel for these type of personalization techniques is simply a concern that the filtering may eliminate choices that would be acceptable to the user. With gradual maturing of the market for meta-search, competitive efforts promise to continue to provide different tools to filter content to better meet a user's profile. Who owns this preference profile and whether it can be used across sites, is an emerging battle for customer ownership that is underlining the goal to position the company as the first stop in travel search.

Circos debuts at Demo 2008 - a Kango competitor

Demo 2008 is the annual event where start-ups get to do a brief pitch to potential investors. Circos is a new qualitative search engine:

According Tech Crunch:

"Circos most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based on qualities.

While Kango auto-generates tags after pouring through user reviews, Circo lets users search for any qualities they’re interested in. The engine then grades and ranks the results by each quality on an “A” through “F” scale based on how well the description fits for reviewers. For example, a hotel reviewers feel is spacious would rate highly if searching for openness, but poorly if you’re looking for a tiny room.

As with most search engines, Circos’ real test will be whether its application draws users away from other hotel and restaurant sites with less sophisticated search engines. Currently there are a bunch competing in the space. However, Circos says their technology can easily be extended to other categories since their algorithm does all the tough work of pulling the most relevant qualities from reviews. If hotels and restaurants don’t appeal, another category may hold their home run."

This announcement demonstrates the unfilled market need for more qualitative search results. The key to the success of new start-ups such as Circos or Kango will be measured on their ability to become the first stop for qualitative travel search. This will require not only a great product (producing results that better match a user's search descriptions) but creating enough of a brand buzz to draw traffic from user generated review sites such as Trip Advisor or IgoUgo, not an impossible task, but one that will require both paid promotion as well as successful viral marketing effort. These companies both sit in the planning part of the travel research and buying process and thus can benefit from referral fees paid by OTAs and suppliers. Semantic search is an important area to watch for the online travel industry.

Kango

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with Yen Lee, president of the new travel search company Kango. For those who do not know Yen, he has an extensive background in online travel most recently as the head of Yahoo! Travel. So what is unique about Kango? The company is building a semantic travel search engine. Rather than simply displaying results of a key word search by PageRank (the method used by Google) , Kango delivers results that are more personalized based on specific attributes entered into the search criteria. Kango is creating an ontology of global travel content that includes ranking of superlatives within review sites. This enables the search engine to rate a given hotel, for example, putting greater value on adjectives such as "This is the best hotel for kids in Monterey California". Kango allows users to search hotels, activities and other travel related content filtered to meet their own specific preferences. In other words, rather than simply searching for a four star hotel in Monterey, Kango users can use specific descriptive words such as "romantic" to identify the most appropriate hotel to meet their needs. Though the idea of segmenting travel search has been introduced by sites such as the Travelocity Experience Finder or Home and Abroad, Kango's backend semantic catalogue represents a different approach. These other experience oriented sites have created a taxonomy of their content enabling an experience oriented search limited to their traditional content. Rather than simply putting content into categories, Kango's ontology defines travel content in terms of superlatives delivering a numeric ranking of search results that integrates mutiple user generated content. This includes review sites such as Trip Advisor and travel blog sites such as Gusto!. This is not simply a repurposing of ratings from these sites. The Kango engine evaluates reviews and blogs of a specific hotel property for example, across multiple sites to deliver a consolidated rating that reflects the descriptive needs of the user. Kango is adding this semantic interperation of travel content not only to traditional hotel information, but also by embracing the Long Tail concept, Kango is including content options such as campgrounds and other disenfranchised elements of travel industry that normally are not included in standard OTA content. Kango's focus is on the planning phase of travel and will refer their users to booking sites for reservations. This is truly an innovative approach to travel planning that has the potential to truly change the way consumers search travel content.