Vacations Blog

In a world of unwritten rules, one would never attempt to eat sushi with a fork or show up to a job interview wearing a costume unless you happen to be applying for a position as a clown (or wanting to be clowned).

One particular travel site, however, is taking a different approach than the rest of the players in an elite group of meta search engines in the online travel space. Mobissimo has embraced social networking and personalization tools to a degree that far exceeds its competitors (Kayak, Sidestep and Farecast).

I checked out Mobissimo’s Share Space called MobiShare (available directly on a tab on Mobissimo’s home page). Powered by Plum, this area of the site allows visitors to create a space to share all their travel-related urls, images, videos, notes or documents. It’s like a scrapbook of travel ideas. With MobiShare you can create shared folders where friends can contribute and anyone on the site can comment on the content or discover new places to visit.  MobiShare adds to Mobissimo’s MobiFriends travel community where you can meet travelers from around the world and share the fares you find on Mobissimo.

Other than including a “Deals” section on their sites, true meta search engines have been known to keep a minimalist’s approach in design so that the main focus is on their bread and butter – search. However, with travelers taking fewer trips this year, consumers want to make sure they’re getting the most out of every trip so Mobissimo’s strategy to differentiate by adding a fully integrated social networking component may well pay off.

Historically, Kayak/Sidestep and Farecast (with much greater funding) have had stronger overall U.S. traffic growth than Mobissimo, whereas Mobissimo has had stronger international brand awareness. As a result, Mobissimo’s social networking initiative to grow organically within its own ecosystem may also prove to be a good sticking point for its worldwide user base, keeping visitors engaged longer and driving incremental customer acquisition.

UPDATE: 10:15 AM – thoughtful coverage from AltSearchEngines (interview, announcement), ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, The Semantic Web, Search Engine Land, AppScout, Creative Think, Mashable, Washington Post, Budget Travel, Blissful Travel, TechBays, CNReviews (Elliott’s blog), L-Experiences, Moraaz.org, E-Marketing, Winser-Traveller, Ibis Cluster, Rootly, NoBosh, Les Explorers, MarketWire, Zedomax Network, Texas Word Tangle, WebGuild, ChristineLu, Wandalust, HomeExchangeTravel, FlyAway Weblog, WebSearchGuide.ca, WebWorkerDaily, WebGuild, ZedoMax, JourneyEtc, more to come. We’ll post later this week with responses to all the feedback we are getting from the blogosphere!

This morning, we’ll be celebrating the opening of UpTake to the public!

We created UpTake so you can sit in that beach chair above, having a great vacation, confident you made the very best decisions you could with your scarce time and dollars!

What’s new with UpTake?

UpTake [logo], formerly Kango, is a travel search application that helps travelers make better decisions by providing recommendations based on analyzing over 20 million opinions from thousands of websites. More details are on our press release. Here’s what’s new:

• UpTake now covers the entire United States–over 20,000 destinations across the 50 states.
• We’ve got the largest travel database on the Web, with over 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions.
• We’re launching two more themes: “girls-getaways” and “pet-friendly.” [screenshot] Just like our original “romantic” and “family friendly” themes, these ratings [screenshot] are driven by our database of 20 million opinions
• Launched new check rates button to check rates at multiple booking engines. [screenshot]
• Home page is simple and relaxing! [screenshot]

If you’re a blogger, journalist, or just curious, we have lots of other info here, including our logo, releases, our RSS feeds, quotes, company timeline, bios, photos, recommended travel blogs, and my Twitter account!

Some example searches for you to try…

Feel free to just go to the home page and start searching! Or if you want to jump right to a couple examples, look at: San Francisco Hotels, San Francisco Family Hotels, San Francisco Family Things to Do.

…or you can just watch this video (thanks DemoGirl).
We still want your feedback!

Our U.S. hotels search is in “beta” and our U.S. activities is still in “almost beta” as we add more data sources and activity types. So keep the suggestions coming so we can build a truly great travel search site.

On behalf of co-founders Yen Lee and Gene McKenna, I want to thank all of you for your support and help!

This $115M acquisition has journalists and travel insiders scratching their heads especially given how much smaller Farecast is than Sidestep, the $180M Kayak paid for Sidestep and because MSN hasn’t shown prior interest in travel. But the confusion about the rationale is because the strategic driver for the purchase likely isn’t about travel per se, it’s about something bigger, much bigger – search. Why search? Because travel is a huge category within web search and travel is an even bigger category for paid search. And the last time we checked, Microsoft is really, really serious about closing the very large gap between the MSN web and paid search offerings and those from Google and Yahoo. How should we quantify “huge”? Internal analysis at web/paid search companies indicate between 3-5% of web searches are travel related. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given 79% of travelers search before booking.

Travel paid search spend on just Google and Yahoo is over a billion dollars a year, again, not surprisingly given there is $8.7B spent annually on online marketing and over $90B booked online (U.S.).

So, let’s get back to Farecast/Microsoft. Farecast gives Microsoft an opportunity to slow, and then reverse market share losses in this critical category of search. How? Because Farecast’s “smart search” technology should enable Microsoft to deliver on the holy grail of paid and web search – ‘contextual targeting.’ By understanding more about what consumers are searching for (e.g. their dates of travel) and about the relevant pages (e.g. real time prices – or even better, price predictions), Microsoft should be able to offer a significantly more relevant set of results then Google can.

Google’s current SRP (search results page) for “flights to Boston” points to a bunch of pages all over the web where a consumer would type in their trip context on each.

Microsoft’s SRP (like Yahoo’s today) could offer consumers the ability to give more context like dates, number of folks traveling etc. With this context, Microsoft could return a much more relevant set of integrated results.

That’s a better consumer experience, but Microsoft has an even bigger opportunity around targeting paid search advertisements – especially given Farecast’s ability to predict prices. As Rick at Motley Fool points out, “there is no easier lay-up in the online advertising industry than serving sponsored leads to folks ready to spend money.” With Farecast, Microsoft can hyper target those ads to make it more compelling for consumers to click and make more money per click given Farecast’s existing relationships with travel advertisers.

Well done Steve Ballmer, well done Hugh Crean! Good luck executing on your vision – and good luck acquiring companies to enable your next vertical categories.

Note: This post is based on internal UpTake analysis, and does NOT include data or context from discussions with Hugh or anyone on the Farecast management team, nor Brad, Erick or anyone on the Farecast board.

UPDATE on 4/22: More coverage at WebWare on 4/17 by Ina Fried, the FareCast blog on 4/17 by Hugh Crean, the 4/17 SeattlePI post on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog, John Cook’s original news break, Profy 4/17 post by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, TechCrunch post on 4/17, Seattle Times on 4/17, CenterNetworks on Farcast acquired Microsoft, WebGuild on 4/18, PaidContent.org on 4/17, Venture Beat on 4/17, SearchEngineLand on 4/17, Rev2.0rg on 4/18.

I’d like to introduce myself and the other co-conspirators on the Kango project. I’m still a novice blogger, but I’ve learned that people in the blogosphere appreciate transparency and authenticity, and I’ll try to do that, while keeping in mind my family and children’s right to privacy (as highlighted by mommybloggers).

We are working on a new and better way to do travel planning. Some of the stuff we are working on is still in stealth mode. But we can say that we want to apply our ideas and technology especially to family travel. Prior to having kids, my wife and I traveled to lots of places: Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Singapore, China, Thailand, and Malaysia. After having kids, we’ve traveled a lot less. But when we have, it has been incredibly rewarding. For example, we brought our 1st child to Italy when he was 6 months old, and just found that the country opened up to us in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined.

My background is in consumer software and internet. I’ve started a few companies in internet marketing services, and also worked on some great products at Microsoft (Word, PowerPoint) and at Intuit (QuickBooks).

My mission with Kango is to help people have memorable and fulfilling travel experiences with the ones they love! I’m interested in connecting with people who like travel. Family vacations and travel with babies and toddlers is especially relevant for me right now!

Hello world! We’re working on some very exciting ideas about how to make travel planning (all the stuff you do before you actually get to go on vacation) significantly better. What you see on Kango.com today is a pale shadow of what we are working on in our proverbial Silicon Valley garage.

Well, HP’s garage is pretty expensive Palo Alto real estate today…more than we can afford! So we’ll be starting Kango, Inc. in some rental space not too far away.

Anyway, until we’re ready to give birth to our beta baby, we’ed like to find other fellow travelers who are passionate about travel, and have a specific focus around their travel. It could be around activities or hobbies that they really care about: surfing, skiing, water-sports, etc. Your focus might be around a specific lifestyle, cause or reason for travel: ecotourism, adventure travel, family-oriented vacations. The only prerequisite is that you really care about doing something (even if that’s just relaxing) that results in a great travel experience. If you’re one of these people, we’ed love to enroll you in our project–to create a great travel website that helps you get the most out of your vacation time.

I’m Elliott Ng, the first official Kango at Kango, Inc. I’ll write a post to introduce myself (actually is anyone reading this post not someone I already know?) and share about some of my travel passions. Hope you’ll be interested in what we are doing and helping out!

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