the allegiance of the online travel buyer up for grabs :: Travel Weekly :: Travel Weekly - The National Newspaper of the Travel Industry ::

:: Travel Weekly - The National Newspaper of the Travel Industry ::: reporter Dennis Schaal reports: "the meta-searchers and screen-scrapers, in alliance with big-name portals and suppliers, squaring off against the online agencies.

At stake is the allegiance of the online travel buyer, and by some accounts the outcome could reshape online travel distribution and the Internet balance of power....

The result could be a next-generation of travel search engines that promise to further reduce distribution costs for suppliers and take market share from the online agencies...

one search company, while acknowledging that supplier direct is the least costly channel, claimed it costs an airline $8 to sell a ticket through the meta-searcher compared with $22 through an online agency and GDS and $27 through an offline agency and GDS...

The meta-searchers and aggregators are a diverse group with varying operations and business models:

screen-scrapers...crawl the Web carrying out simultaneous searches of supplier and agency Web sites and present "results to consumers in a comparison-shopping frenzy"

revenue from online advertising
service fee from consumers
cost-per-click basis
licensing fees
revenue share

IAC’s TripAdvisor, which markets itself to consumers as a destination-research tool uses the advertising model

Will paid search become the dominant form of online travel distribution? Terry Jones of KAyak, ex Sabre and Travelocity leader said. “We think the time is right...Paid search is really working now on the Web. It’s very successful. Suppliers of all kinds of goods -- not just travel -- understand it....people are searching multiple sites, and they are buying where they want....“So we [at Kayak] said, ‘Why don’t we build a site where people can search multiple sites and buy where they want?’"

In response Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia actions against the meta-searchers deeming scraping unauthorized...."Expedia North America, said the company views unauthorized commercial searches of its sites as the “travel-search equivalent of spam.”...xpedia have sent cease-and- desist letters to screen-scrapers;"...Erik Blachford, who heads IAC Travel said "“There have been lots of people who tried really hard to capture the hearts and minds of travel consumers, and I think it’s a pretty tricky business,” Blachford said. "