Vacations Blog

Have you ever found yourself in a place or predicament of sorts and wondered…”Self!  What in the Wide-wide World of Sports is a-goin’ on with your good senses?!”  Well, I have.  On countless occasions.

But his particular occasion was on the Rockcastle River.  Set deep in the lush, humid, Kudzu infested hills of, Rockcastle County, Kentucky.  One of those places so beautiful and peaceful, a fella could stay there for days and days and days.  Until the Banjo music starts playing too close for comfort, that is.  When that happens, one must take to the River.  And even then……all bets are off.

The phone rang very early in the a.m., and my friend Towley said “You ready for this?”.  To which I responded, in my best John Wayne voice, “Let’s saddle up, Pilgrim.”  And off we went.  South.  The wind whistling over the boats anchored, hopefully securely, to the tops of the automobiles and no Idea what was in store for us.

The Rockcastle River is a Kentucky State protected river

A false sense of Calm

so access to a put in is few and far between.  My copy of “A Canoe and Kayaking Guide to Kentucky“, says that if one so desires, to shorten the trip, one has access via “the old Howard Place”.  This put-in allows quick access to the class III, VI, and sometimes V rapids that we had no business being on.  We wanted no part of that though.  We wanted the Long, 20 mile trip.  What fools we were.  It would have been better to take our beatings early and be gone.  Like ripping off a Band-Aid.  But no.  We had to paddle, after putting in at the Rockcastle Adventure Canoe Livery, the eight miles of slack, sometimes (but very seldom) Class I chutes.  Fools, I tell you brothers and sister.  Fools.

I have to take pause here to mention the fine People at

No banjo music at all, oddly enough

Rockcastle Adventure Canoe Livery.  Nice folks.  And informative.  John, the owner, took us in the “shed” and gave us a look via an old USGS map, of what we had to look forward to.  John grinned as we took in the Canoe outside that had been twisted around a tree down stream where we would find ourselves in a few short hours.  “We found that’un there just last week,” he remarked.  Awesome.

We said our goodbyes to John, donned our helmets (you will need helmets.  steak tastes so much better when you don’t have to pulse it in a Blender first) dressed in our PFDs (this equipment, too, is a must.  unless you can hold your breath a very, very long time) and shot out into the calm, olive waters.

The rest, well, was just Highballs with the Devil.

This is the part when you get Wet

Note: This river is foul tempered, friends and neighbors.  Do not make the mistake of being ill-prepared here.  Please, please, pretty-please wear a helmet and a proper PFD (personal flotation device).  After the first “wet exit”, you’ll thank me. Also, there are many blind turns along the way.  Scouting is advisable.  And portaging is always acceptable.

All photos by Charles A. Downs III

Big Bear Lake, CA

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Bench with a view, Lake Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

National Geographic called Lake Coeur d’Alene one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.  I might be a little biased since I live right next to it, but I’d certainly have to agree.  Located in the panhandle of Idaho, far from the state’s population center of Boise, the alpine beauty of Lake Coeur d’Alene offers a wide variety of fun family activities, whether you’re on a budget or you have money to burn.

To me, it’s just about the ideal place to spend a few carefree summer days on the water.  With a length of over 25 miles and a shoreline measuring over 109 miles, the lake is big enough that it never feels crowded, even on the busiest Saturday in August.

The obvious place to begin your family vacation is in the city of Coeur d’Alene, which sits on the north shore of the lake and is your best bet for lodging.  Your hotel options range from the luxurious Coeur d’Alene Resort, which juts out over the water near downtown, to a Holiday Inn Express less than a mile from the city beach.

Summer fun in the water

During the summer months, mainly July and August, the water temperature of the lake is perfect for any activity you can imagine.  My kids and I swim at least two or three times a week during these warm days.  Coeur d’Alene’s city facilities stretch out across the north shore, so you don’t have to go looking for a spot to set up your beach chairs.  City Beach offers the safety of lifeguards, but if you want to get away from the crowds there, simply stroll down to the adjacent beach in front of North Idaho College.  You’ll feel like you have the lake to yourself.

If you want to do more than just sit on the beach and take in the beautiful view, you don’t have to go very far for a refreshing hike.  Right smack dab in the middle of downtown Coeur d’Alene is what can only be described as the jewel of the town.  Tubbs Hill is a 135-acred forested peninsula with a 2-mile loop trail that takes you all along the shoreline, where you can find secluded beaches, scenic overlooks, rocky coves, and woodland habitats.  My family hikes Tubbs Hill regularly, and I’m always amazed at the beauty of the place, not to mention the fact that the city was able to save this urban wilderness from development.  We pack a picnic lunch, hike out to the tip of the peninsula, and find a quiet spot for the afternoon.

Tubbs Hill

If you want to get out onto the water, there are several options.  At Independence Point, next to City Beach, you can rent jet skis, kayaks, and paddle boats.  Many different businesses in town offer reasonable rentals on everything from jet boats to luxury yachts.  Well, I’m not so sure if the words “reasonable” and “luxury yacht” go together.  The Resort also offers daily lake cruises, ranging from 90 minutes to 6 hours.  There’s even a parasail boat and a float plane if you want to see things from a different perspective.

If your kids are waterlogged and tired of hiking, you can rent some bikes and head down any number of paved bike trails that hug the lake shore.  The Centennial Trail runs right through downtown, heading east all the way to Higgens Point and west along the Spokane River, across the border into Washington, all the way into the city of Spokane.  Or, you can explore the prairie north of the lake on the new Prairie Trail, which connects with all the other bike trails.  Come to think of it, there are so many miles of trails around here, you might actually get lost.  But a good kind of lost.  If a park is what the kids are hoping for, there’s the City Park which, naturally, sits right next to City Beach, and contains a huge castle-like play structure for the kids to run wild on.

Hiking, biking, boating, and swimming.  What more could you ask for in a relatively inexpensive family vacation?  You’ll find it all here, in one extremely centralized location at the north end of Lake Coeur d’Alene.  Like I said, though, it’s a big lake and there’s certainly more to explore.  But I’ll save that for another post.  I could talk about “my lake” endlessly.  I’m sure that if you bring your family to this part of Idaho, you’ll also be talking about one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

Kayaking on Lake Coeur d'Alene

Scenic overlook on Tubbs Hill

Cliff diving in Idaho

All photos by Phil Corless

It seems like just yesterday that the travel sector crowned Kayak the undisputed heavyweight champion of price comparison search following their acquisition of SideStep. But wait! It looks like Yahoo has (finally!) unveiled FareChase, the price search engine they acquired back in 2004. On the Yahoo Travel homepage, the Travelocity booking engine is no longer the default search option, it has been re-labeled ‘classic search’ and FareChase is the default search.

Yahoo is a formidable, albeit very delayed, entrant to the price search. It searches more supplier sites then Kayak directly, which presumably leads to better prices for consumers. And Yahoo is the fourth largest travel aggregator, behind only the ‘big three’ of Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. Greg at Compete.com estimates that the combined entity (Kayak-SideStep) will attract over 5 million monthly U.S. website (unique) visitors – about 60% of Yahoo’s footprint.

Presumably this brings a new competitive element that Kayak might not have expected (let’s be serious, four years after the acquisition, did ANYONE expect Yahoo to finally launch FareChase?). With their market share, Kayak is in a strong position as the suppliers perceive Kayak to be an important channel in the continued battle with aggregators for market share. But they aren’t the only player anymore, which as Tim at BOOT suggests, would have made it easier to move from a position of strength to an IPO. Perhaps, as Sramana at Seeking Alpha suggests, they might do additional roll-ups on their way to the IPO. On the other hand, Yahoo plunging into this price search is good validation to Wall Street that price search is still important.

Another implication is that a potential operating benefit from the acquisition might not fully accrue for Kayak. Both Kayak and SideStep depended heavily on acquiring consumers through online marketing. Buying SideStep should have allowed Kayak to acquire those consumers more cost efficiently, but having Yahoo-FareChase also competing might make the acquisition costs higher then anticipated.

Stay tuned, it should be an interesting year.

Travel insiders have known that major changes are inevitable for the online travel industry. While most assume that online travel is already “done” by Expedia and the likes, people who have been in travel like Henry Harteveldt, Gregg Brockway and I are more excited than ever before about future opportunities to improve the consumer travel planning experience online. The consumer travel planning process is usually broken down into four or five steps: 1. Research – learning more about their options for where to go, what to, and where to stay 2. Compare – checking prices and availability 3. Book – booking your flights, hotels and activities 4. Share – adding reviews, blogs etc. to share your experiences with others. and

It’s clear that the online booking sector, dominated by the suppliers and the “big 4” OTAs (2) is maturing. With the announcement of the Sidestep and Kayak merger, the comparison sector demonstrates it is starting to mature – with a couple of interesting caveats. First, the surprisingly low overlap in traffic between Kayak and Sidestep suggests that there is more growth possible; especially if the merger means they can increase investment in product and marketing to accelerate relatively slow growth. Second, there are new companies, e.g. Farecast, trying to drive further innovation in the comparison sector. Finally, rumor has it that in early 2008 Yahoo is planning to make some big, exciting and long overdue moves with its dormant FareChase price comparison product, a product that is actually more comprehensive then Kayak. With Yahoo Travel’s position as the fourth largest aggregator and their strong market share and growth in the critical hotel segment, this move could throw the comparison sector back into flux. [update: see the bottom of this post for additional notes]

The Web 2.0 trend has been very prevalent in travel with the explosion of consumer-generated reviews, blogs, photos, video etc. making it easier and more fun to share but also making it difficult for you to assess which sites and reviews are most useful and trustworthy. TripAdvisor is the most successful example of a hotel review site, but its very success leads to an overwhelming number of reviews to sort through.

Market surveys by industry analysts tell us that the first step of travel planning – research – is the hardest. According to a 2006 survey commissioned by MSN and conducted by Harris Interactive, approximately three-quarters of U.S. adult respondents who have ever taken a vacation say they visit three or more Web sites when researching and/or booking their vacation plans. “The fact that three out of four vacationers spread their online research across multiple Web sites—with some visiting 10 or more—points to the huge timesaving benefits that a truly full-featured online travel planning site can deliver,” said Jim Quilty, vice president of travel and tourism at Harris Interactive. The SideStep/Kayak merger will not solve the most frustrating and time consuming aspect of the online travel experience—researching a trip.

Before a customer can compare prices or book a flight they must decide where to go, what to do and where to stay. This is not a problem if someone needs a flight for a short business trip to Atlanta with a meeting in a hotel near the airport. But, if a customer is seeking a specific kind of experience – romantic things to do in San Francisco or family friendly hotel in San Francisco they still have had to find, collect and organize data from many sites to decide and plan a trip. As Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research discusses in the Bob Tedeschi-written New York Times article and Diane Clarkson of Jupiter Research discusses in her blog, the online travel industry needs to improve the consumer shopping experience and enable you to get recommendations based on your preferences.

That’s what Kango is doing – simplifying that research process by collecting everything you need to decide in one place, enabling you to filter down to your most relevant options based on your preferences, and helping you decide what to price compare/book based on our natural language analysis of reviews from all over the web. Kayak and SideStep do meta-search for prices, we do smart meta-search for reviews and (non-price) travel information. There is over $700B spent annually on travel in the U.S. (3), and “only” $80 billion booked online…there is plenty of opportunity to do remarkable things to enable people to have better trips. And Kango’s mission is to be the first step to planning better trips.

Notes:

1. Gregg Brockway’s Tripit helps you organize your itineraries after you have booked.
2. Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline (and their respective sub-brands)
3. Travel Industry Association of America

Looking for more on this story? We have rounded up the news & blog coverage thus far:

Blog Highlights

• TechCrunch broke the story and did an excellent job of digging into the details of the deal, key operating metrics and the fate of the SideStep team
• Webpronews highlights the less than 10% overlap in visitors between the two company
• Searchengineland mentions the overall size of the online market at $80 billion according to Comscore
• Downloadsquad reevaluates their position that the online travel space will consolidate to only a few sites in travel
• JoeDuck is a fan of Kayak
• Les Explorers highlights non-American players and quotes Adam Healey’s blog
• GigaOM highlights pessimistic forecasts about the online travel market in 2008
• HotelMarketing highlights the turnaround aspect of the SideStep story
• VentureBeat brings together all the funding details in detail
• PaidContent highlights new players like Kango and Kosmix
• RedHerring covers the long period of courtship between the two companies
• Adam Healey of VibeAgent reviews the financial metrics and potential multiples at exit.

Other blog coverage

• VijayDandapani quotes henry harteveldt that 12-15% of online leisure travelers use metasites
• Xconomy suggests “Kayak and Sidestep will travel together in rare east buys west acquisition.”
• Gadling is “concerned that their new powerhouse corporate entity will overshadow their original grassroots mentality.”

Additional coverage

• SearchEngineWatch
• TheAlarmClock
• 23Musings
• SiliconTap
• UndertheradarBlog
• Gigaom

News Reports

• Tjacobi
• InfectiousGreed
• TravelStuff
• Travolution
• Tim’s BOOT
• KelseyGroup

[update] What’s a few hundred million dollars between friends? Speculating about the Kayak & SideStep deal

Wow, did I ever get a torrent of calls from travel industry friends and colleagues and analysts wanting to discuss the Kayak acquisition on Thursday night and Friday. Life was a lot quieter when we were in stealth mode and folks didn’t know we were doing meta-search or we were in travel! We had conversations with two groups of folks about the deal.

The first were travel and search insiders and Yahoo alum I knew who wanted to get our take on the deal and its implications. I certainly have some opinions – see below for my unfounded speculations.

The second group were folks who made a connection between Kayak and Kango because we both do meta-search in our own fashion. Kayak searches many booking sources to help you find the lowest prices. Kango searches many review and information (e.g. descriptions, photos) sources directly to help you find the right hotel or activity (and soon, the right destination). Then you go to Kayak to price compare or Expedia, Hilton, Southwest etc. to book. At Kango, we don’t do the real-time meta-searches for price and availability that Kayak does. And Kayak doesn’t structure unstructured content (e.g. reviews, blogs) and extract meta-tags like we do. Oh, and they are a $500M company…and we’re not!

Those conversations above were based on facts. The rest of this post isn’t I have several opinions on the Kayak-SideStep deal below. I haven’t spoken w/Rob or Steve Hafner about the deal yet, so these are just conjecture.

First, assuming the comScore’s unique visitor tracking for Kayak and SideStep that TechCrunch showed is accurate, these are not two companies growing their user bases quickly. Eyeballing Nov YOY figures, it looks like YOY growth of 15, maybe 20%. hmmm…

This means revenue growth is being driven by generating more revenue per user…our second takeaway. Rob and SideStep have executed very well. It looks like he is monetizing as much as 75% better then Kayak. i.e. according to TechCrunch, SideStep is generating $35M in revenue from $1B in ticket sales and Kayak is generating $50M from $2.5B in ticket sales. Let’s assume there is some exaggerations in the Kayak ticket sale numbers. It still looks a significant positive delta. But the delta looks like it goes away on a revenue per unique visitor basis. hmmmm… But Kayak is keeping SideStep’s ad sales/monetization team, so there must be something worth going on?

Third, contrary to popular opinion, SideStep was doing price meta-search before Kayak was conceived. Rumor has it that SideStep has a patent or two that are potentially troublesome for other price meta-search players.

Finally, what range might Kayak’s IPO be at given the operating metrics reported? I have talked to a VC involved who says Kayak will do a “billion” dollar IPO in 2008. Well, that might be necessary for the VCs who invested in the last round assuming Kayak raised ~$150M in equity (and the remaining ~$45M in debt) for 25% of Kayak. Let’s do some back of the envelope analysis. The dominant online travel agency, Expedia (owner of Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, HotWire…) trades at 3X revenue. Assuming 40% growth on their current revenue of $85M and a multiple of 6 instead of 3 because of a faster growth/higher margin story, perhaps an IPO range of $700-800M?

What’s a couple of hundred million dollars between friends?