marketwatch.com Bambi Francisco reports : "AOL is launching a new travel site aimed at non-AOL members and the increasing number of brand-indifferent consumers searching for the best travel deals on the Web.
Time Warner's AOL's Pinpoint Travel, which is set to launch on Monday, helps consumers search 550 airlines and 85,000 hotels...
Much like the new version of travel sites such as Sidestep, Yahoo's Fairchase and Kayak.com, Pinpoint crawls and aggregates the Web for hotel and airline deals and gets a fee for a lead. Unlike the older generation travel sites, such as InterActive's (IACI: news, chart, profile) Expedia and Hotwire, or Priceline (PCLN: news, chart, profile) and Travelocity, Pinpoint does not broker the transactions.
The new site will not change AOL's partnership with Sabre Holdings' (TSG: news, chart, profile) Travelocity, whereby AOL acts as the full-service travel agent. AOL shares the revenue with Travelocity for the bookings conducted on the AOL Travel site.
The services are designed to target two different consumers, said DeKorte. The brand-loyal consumer who wants a full-service treatment will have the option to continue going to AOL Travel. But the searcher, whose criteria are price and convenience, may choose AOL Pinpoint. "Most consumers search three to four sites before making a purchase," said DeKorte.
Pinpoint will be powered by Kayak.com, a start-up that AOL took a minority interest in but also competes with. Asked why AOL didn't just buy Kayak.com since it would be competing with it, and Dekorte said AOL did consider purchasing start-up travel search sites, but it made more sense to build its own service in partnership with Kayak.com.
Besides marketing efforts, AOL plans on buying keywords from Google and Yahoo to drive traffic to its site. Those travel keywords can cost anywhere between 40 cents to $1."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment