Jaunted

Priceline / Travel Industry / Travel Advertising / Travel News / Travel Booking Sites / → All Tags

Priceline Kills Off Captain Kir...Err, the Priceline Negotiator

We're not as-a-rule opposed to seeing travel advertising mascots getting killed. Last December, when Air New Zealand murdered off their spokespuppet Rico, we even declared ourselves to be fairly pleased. The borderline rapey rat-like character had become insanely grating even (especially?) for a felt puppet. So when the airline announced a viral Whodunit game where players tried to figure out Rico's murderer, we figured that was as good an excuse as any to be rid of him.

But today we weep. For today, Priceline kills off the Priceline Negotiator. The travel industry icon, played by William Shatner, has been the face of the travel bidding and booking company for 14 years. To give you an idea of how big a business and culture story this is, it's being run everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Perez Hilton. They sound sad too. Not as sad as we are, of course, but it's there if you read between the lines. For his part Shatner describes himself as being "in grief mode."

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Travel Booking Sites / Jetsetter / Vacation Rentals / Hotels / Travel News / Hawaii Travel / → All Tags

Jetsetter.com Wants to Sleep With You, But In a Big Fancy House This Time

Pardon us for uttering two very dirty words: vacation rentals. Ew, right? Renting someone else's house is like, for old people and big families and stuff, not for cool people. Or so that's what we thought up until this week, because lovely little Jetsetter.com has gone and launched Jetsetter Homes, with villas and condos and beach bungalows (oh my!) to add to the variety of hotels regular Jetsetter already offers.

Yes, they'll be on limited sale. Yes, you can score a first booking credit of $500 if you book for at least five nights before the end of October. It's standard Jetsetter stuff, just taken to another level.

It maybe seems like there's nothing Jetsetter can't do, what with their grabbing the first discounted rooms at the Armani Hotel Dubai, offering the occasional private jet deal and even planning your trip for you if you're into that sort of thing. They still haven't quite gotten their grip around First Class seats on regular airlines, but that's something we're willing to wait for.

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Train Travel / Travel Booking Sites / Tripadvisor / Travel Websites / Rail Europe / → All Tags

TripAdvisor Will Now Even Hook You Up with Train Tickets

Okay you guys. Enough of this opening multiple tabs and windows to search all your travel options. Travel booking sites are finally getting hip to integrating many modes of transportation into one search, and the latest to up the ante is TripAdvisor.com. In addition to providing flight prices and information, they'll now set you up with rail tickets:

TripAdvisor has partnered with one of the leading mobility and logistic companies in the world, Deutsche Bahn, as well as other top European rail providers including Rail Europe Inc., to give travelers access to train choices across continental Europe as they plan the perfect trip. It becomes the first travel website to integrate multiple rail providers in-line with flight options across a global network.

When travelers conduct a flight search on TripAdvisor, the site will now display rail itineraries alongside flight choices for routes where it's relevant, and in some cases priced even cheaper than air travel. The site has partnered with leading European rail providers, including Deutsche Bahn and Rail Europe, for the beta launch to give travelers access to train choices across continental Europe.

[Photo: Tripadvisor]

Travel Booking Sites / Hipmunk / Travel Websites / Airlines / Airfare Deals / → All Tags

Hipmunk.com Displays Flight Options Not by Price or Time, but by 'Agony'

What's up with the chipmunk wearing aviator goggles? Oh, he's just the mascot of new-ish flight search site Hipmunk.com. We've been kind of obsessed with it the last few weeks, and for good reason. Hipmunk is a very cleanly designed site, like if Kayak and Google Search had a baby, and made it display plane ticket options in very appealing ways. Overall, we're loving Hipmunk for two very distinct advances it has over many other booking sites:

1. Flight options display in colorful bar charts: Enter the basic information for whatever flight you want—dates, destinations, class and preferred airline. Now comes our favorite part: the way the search results show up. The default is not to show you tickets by price level or flight length or number of connections, but by general "Agony." They describe it as a "combination of price, duration and number of stops," so it pretty much gives the best summary of what's available. A bright chart is displayed, from which you can easily see the differences between the flights.

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Travel Advertising / Kayak / Travelocity / Travel Booking Sites / Travel Ads / Travel Websites / → All Tags

Kayak Launches Massive Old-Fashioned Ad Blitz

You'd think the recession would have catapulted price comparison engine Kayak.com into universal traveler awareness. The company's internal figures, though, tell a different story. Less than 1/3 of the more than 100 million Americans who use travel booking sites know about Kayak. Even less are able to differentiate Kayak from similar-on-first-look but significantly different competitors like Expedia. In a move that's bound to raise eyebrows in the travel industry and among travel advertisers, the company is shifting their resources into a massive offline ad campaign.

The new ad blitz was launched over the weekend and is set to blanket primetime cable through 2010. CNN, ESPN, and MSNBC have all been selected as venues, presumably on numbers promising that most coveted of travel industry demographics: 25-44 year olds with disposable income. Forbes.com has a full writeup on the campaign, including a description of one of the "witty 30 second spots":

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Travel Booking Sites / Orbitz / Facebook / Social Media / → All Tags

No Orbitz, You Didn't Need To Develop That Facebook Application

Memo to booking and airline companies: despite how it sometimes might appear, we're on your side. Really we are. We want you to only do smart things. When you do not smart things you incur costs without producing revenue, creating shortfalls that you pass on to us. That means we travel less, which causes us to get just a wee bit claustrophobic, and without getting into too many details - everybody loses.

Shifting gears, the last few years have seen something of a trend among the 30 year old former frat boys who inhabit the classrooms of our nation's fine MBA programs. Specifically, if a project has a Facebook application or somehow involves Twitter, it's gold. Conversely, projects without Web 2.0 tie-ins are preemptively deemed failures. Proposals don't have to make sense. They just has to have lots of phrases like "viral advertising" and "user generated content."

Fast forward a few years and these supple minds are now consultants, randomly going from business to business telling middle managers to invest in Facebook apps. To which we can only respond the same way fashion blogs react when starlets show up to awards shows wearing formal shorts. Oh honey, no:

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Travel Booking Sites / Kayak / Bing / → All Tags

Did Bing Totally Copy Off Of Kayak's Homework?

Microsoft's new Bing search engine hasn't even been available to the public for a month yet and already it's under fire for potentially copying the site's design from good old Kayak. We have to admit that we thought it looked a little too familiar, and the people at Wired recently tore it apart and aired claims on both sides:

There’s no question Bing feels like Kayak. When Microsoft showed us the search engine under embargo, this reporter’s first comment upon seeing the travel page demo’d was 'This looks like Kayak.'

Kayak noticed too. 'We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,' Kayak’s CMO told Wired.com 'From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.'

That’s careful language for 'Microsoft copied our stuff wholesale.'

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Travel Booking Sites / Technology / Bing / Farecast / → All Tags

Farecast's New Bing Engine Wants To Make Your Travel Decisions For You

While we've tinkered around with predicting airline ticket prices using MSN's Farecast engine, we always seem to pick the routes that cannot be computed or have no cool historical graphs over which to drool. So we're hoping that the upcoming launch of Bing Travel, a combination of Farecast and MSN Travel's content works out much better in terms of doing what is says it will.

And what it says it's going to do is go beyond simply returning results from search queries to help you make a decision. They're even calling it a "decision engine," a kind of Wolfram-Alpha of travel results, able to tell you if what you just paid for your air ticket or hotel room is the cheapest at the moment.

In addition, MSN wants you to keep returning to Bing Travel for more than just price updates and wanderlust indulgences; the site will be supplemented by an online community with blogs from the likes of Peter Greenberg and Pauline Frommer. Watch for it to go live by June 3, but until then check out their official Twitter, the @Fareologist.

Related Stories:
· Announcing Bing Travel [Farecast/MSN]
· Travel Websites Coverage [Jaunted]

[Image: Bing.com]

Travel Booking Sites / Fly Dot Com / Travelzoo / OLTAs / Travel News / → All Tags

Fly.Com's New Calendar Option Lets You Search for Cheaper Tickets

When Fly.com first appeared on the travel booking site scene, we were hoping that the flight aggregator would be somewhat different than the others. While we liked the book directly with the airlines option and the listing of the in-flight amenities, we weren't totally wowed by Fly.com.

But now we learn, thanks to Tom at Hudson Crossing Traveler, that Fly.com has introduced a new feature which lets you compare prices for different days in different months.

We plugged in a trip to Newark from Los Angeles for May 28 and a fare of $259 round-trip on American Airlines showed up. In the top tab of the results page, the last tab listed is "Calendar" and a helpful balloon tells you that "$246" is the best price. It turns out that fare is available in July. Not so helpful. However, Fly.com did pull up the cheapest date in May. And we could see that flying on a Friday or a Sunday is more expensive (obvs) at $279.

Interestingly, when we put in the same route and dates on Kayak.com (which already uses a calendar of fares) a Continental flight for $279 was the cheapest option. $20 is not that big of a difference but hey, that's a checked baggage fee these days.

Related Stories:
· So Far, Fly.com Is Not So Fly (Dot Com) [Jaunted]

Travel Booking Sites / Orbitz / Fees / Travel Hell / Online Travel Agents / → All Tags

Orbitz Automatically Adds $14 Bus Ticket 'For Your Convenience'

Oh Orbitz. Why do you keep making us publish these stories? Via Technologizer:

I ended up at Orbitz, which offered some attractive-sounding package deals for a flight and hotel room. I started clicking my way through to buy... Orbitz had added a $14 bus pickup and dropoff to my order. One I hadn’t asked for. And it told me it was doing it "for my convenience." ...

Keep reading to what other optional upgrades Orbitz thinks are "convenient" for you.

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TripAdvisor / Travel Websites / Travel Booking Sites / Travel News / → All Tags

TripAdvisor Now Advising On Airfares

Just when you thought that everyone and their brother had a search engine devoted to travel, we get one more. Adding a little friendly competition to the mix is travel review king TripAdvisor. The site launched its own flight meta-search yesterday, and now hopes to save you money in the air and to keep you away from that roach motel.

We took the new search for a spin, and it seemed to respond well to our simple requests. It lets us know that it’s searching perennial favorites like Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, and many more. The results include all the legacy carriers, but like so many others, leave out our Luv buddy—Southwest Airlines.

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Travel Booking Sites / Travelzoo / Travel News / → All Tags

So Far, Fly.com Is Not So Fly (Dot Com)

The internet is all abuzz today about the launch of Fly.com. Ok, maybe it was just us travel geeks since Travelzoo paid something like $1.75 million just for the domain name alone. (PS. Previous owner of Fly.com: Gimme a call, we'll do drinks!)

Of course, we had to give Fly.com a try. We plugged in a very popular route, LAX to EWR, for a trip we are taking at the end of May and decided to see what came back.

Since we are staying a bit longer than the weekend we could be flex with our dates. Leaving on Saturday, May 30 and returning Monday, June 8 we found a deal for $398 on United. Eh. American had flights for $419. Also, eh.

We did like how you could compare Priceline and Hotwire in different windows, yet those browser windows jumped about 50 percent in size when they opened. Kind of annoying. But once you find a fare that you like, the site sends you over to that airline's site and not just to the homepage, but to the actual "Book this flight" page. That's actually very comforting.

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