Recent Projects

I apologize for not posting for such a long time. These last few months have been really busy for me and I haven’t had a chance to write. So, what have I been doing for the last three months? This post is a brief summary of the projects that I managed and deployed and my experience with them. I took a break from working exclusively on travel technology and worked on these various projects:

1. 24/7 Real Media (www.247realmedia.com)

Project involved implementing new design of the main corporate site www.247realmedia.com in all 11 countries in 5 languages. This was by far the most demanding project that I have managed in the past. The short timeline to have the site deployed added more pressure. It was around the same time Google acquired Doubleclick, and eventually WPP acquired them. During that time the company was getting a lot of press, which meant no screw-ups.

I learned a whole lot from it and now have an excellent experience in deploying multi-lingual sites. One of the big challenges was the Asian language sites with all kinds of encoding issues. But at the end we were able to write a custom CMS that manages all 11 sites through a flexible and highly scalable CMS. The CMS is based in Java/Tomcat/MySQL and uses a publishing mode to write all pages in load balanced servers. The site also has some integration with salesforce.com and uses Google Mini for site search.


2.OpenTravel.org (www.opentravel.org)

Project involved redesigning the site and writing a custom CMS. OpenTravel.org publishes XML specification for the travel industry. The specifications are widely adopted by the travel industry. We’ve been a part of this organization for a long time and work with their specification in all our travel products. The site is built on .Net/MSSQL

3. Guess Watces – Facestowatch (www.facestowatch.com)


Facestowach.com is a worldwide model search campaign to find the next model for their advertising campaign. The campaign ran in over 35 countries in more than 16+ languages.

This project was the most fun. It had all the cool elements: videos, SMS, user voting nomination, and very attractive people submitting pictures from all over the world. The campaign was hugely successful with page views in to the millions and over 100,000 submissions. The site is built on .Net/MSSQL.

4. Travel Collaborative Custom Itinerary (tci.electricvine.com)

Project involved designing a personalized itinerary engine, which uses Sabre web services. The project was done for a group of travel agents with a high profile client base in Boston. They retrieve the travel itinerary from Sabre system and then, personalize it by adding information, pictures, etc. This is sort of like Yahoo Trip Planner. The site is built on .Net


5. Magnuson Hotels (www.magnusonhotels.com)

A flexible hotel search engine and reservation portal that has over 600 independent hotels . Thie site is built in .Net

Farecompare announces Email alerts

I wrote about Farecompare a while ago the company that provides in-depth airfare data. Over the last year they have built few useful tools (more on that below) that allow you to track airfare in various ways.

The company just announced an email alert system that will alert you of airfare drops based on your alert settings. If you really want to take the advantage of fare drop intricacies in the airline business you may want to subscribe to their alert. The advantage of subscribing is that you get alerted way before the airfare are loaded to other travel sites (Expedia, Travelocity) plus the GDS (Sabre, Appollo) etc. This way you can be the first few to take advantage of the dropped fare. Other thing cool is that the fares have star rating (4 star,3 star etc) that notifies you how good the fare is compare to the overall fare within a timeframe. A four-star rating means the fare is at or near the historical low for that particular route. You can also click on the fare and see a historical graph of the fare movement with graphs over two years.

Tools:
One of the tools I found interesting is Mile Maven which tells you all the airline mile promos that airline are offering in that route
Eg for NYC-SFO (insert your own from/to data)
http://www.milemaven.com/offers/flight/route/NYC/SFO

Developer Resources
If you are a developer, they also have extensive documentation on how you can integrate the data into your own application. (PDF)

RSS or XML – If you use any of the rss readers you can customize your own feed.
Example
To subscribe fare from NYC-CHI Use
http://rss.farecompare.com/rss/generateRSS?departure=NYC&destination=CHI

More parameters you can pass
(&Limit=1 (get me the lowest rate)
(&Maxprice=250 (cheapest fare only if less than 250)

More tools

Salesforce integrates Adwords

Salesforce launched AdWords campaign management technology last week (via Marketwatch). If you are already using Salesforce and Adwords, this integration makes a lot of sense. You can do pretty much everything you do with Adwords interface inside Salesforce and track leads and conversion.

I was able to use the demo account (u: google@salesforce.com and pwd: google). to log in and test it out. Go try it out.
www.salesforce.com

Here are some sceenshots

Farecast Opens, VC Money Continues to Flow to Online Travel

Farecast Opens, VC money continues to flow to online travel startups. As you may already know, Farecast opened its doors in 55 new cities. TechCrunch, GigaOm, SearchEngineWatch, and others have already written a good deal about Farecast. A few weeks ago, Farecast created a lot of buzz when it was open by invitation-only for private beta testing. The site boasts an innovative fare prediction tool, which will help consumers make a buying decision. It’s an interesting concept, however, I am not completely convinced that it will be so reliable. Airfare pricing is hard to predict with statistics. A lot of things like weather, terror alerts, and a host of other factors combined with a complicated yield-management logic makes it extremely difficult to accurately forecast.

However, the Farecast site looks good, with a clean UI and RSS feature that can search city pairs for a specific dates. They are using an ITA engine to perform the back-end queries with proprietary statistical analysis software to predict pricing. With $9 million in VC funding, I am sure that Farecast has staying power.

These days, there are loads of new online travel startups. VC money seems to be flowing in the millions. Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOM asks, "How many web travel startups make a bubble?" Personally, I don't consider this growth as a bubble, but rather rejuvenation of an industry sorely in need. US consumers are traveling more than ever. Travel is a $100 billion market, so it’s no surprise that more people are looking for a piece of the pie.

There seems to be little or no innovation with the big online travel agencies, in terms of technology or the way consumers interact with them. Customer loyalty as a concept is, generally, extinct as services such as air travel become commodities. Customers are looking for ways to plan, search, and buy travel products from a multitude of sources. As a result, new online startups are finding clever ways to lure customers. Thanks to the tons of money and buzz around these companies, it’s possible that these startups might give big OTA a run for their money and force them to find new ways to keep existing customers.

Here are few more travel companies that have, recently, received funding:

ITA - $100 million - Battery Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, PAR Investment Partners, Sequoia Capital, Spectrum Equity

SideStep - $17 million - Trident Capital, private investors

Kayak - $15.5 million - General Catalyst, America Online, Sequoia Capital

Mobissimo - Undisclosed - Cambrian Ventures, Index Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures

TravelPost - $1 million - Amicus Capital, Arba Seed Investment Group

TripHub - Undisclosed -Madrona Venture Group

RealTravel - $1 million – Angel Funding

Viator - $6 million - Carlyle Venture Partners, Wandrian Brook Venture Partner, Boston Capital Vntures, and private investors

Gusto - $4 million - DHST, L.L.C., CEO

Groople - $6 million - ArrowPath Venture Partners, FA Technology Ventures

Indian Ventures:

Yatra - $5 million - Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Reliance Capital

MakeMyTrip - $6 million- Gabriel Venture Partners

Travelguru - $10 million - Sequoia India's

Cleartrip - $3 million - Sherpalo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins

Let me know if you know of more VC funding in travel startups.

I am back!

Sorry, I have been really busy with my work and haven't posted for a while. Well, I am back. I got side tracked with another interesting project. Go check it out www.facestowach.com. It had all the interesting cool stuff (SMS, viral video, voting, internalization etc) so I had to jump on it. Finally, it is almost over, we went live in 25+ countries in over 15+ languages. Was very busy last two months.

Hope to be back with more postings.

Analyst downgrades Expedia (EXPE) on GDS incentive risk

Good analysis by Scott Devitt an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus on Expedia. He has downgraded Expedia to “Hold” based on following events - (1) a reinvestment cycle outlined on 4Q05 conference call, and (2) renewed GDS incentive risk. Read the extract from his report here.

We should note that historical segment GDS fees have been in the area of $3.85 per segment. We have assumed that approximately $12 per air ticket is paid from the airline to the agency of which an incentive payment is made to the agency that booked the ticket. In the case of Expedia, the incentive fee per air transaction is in the range of $6-$7. Last year, Expedia generated 38.8 million transactions of which we assume somewhere in the range of 18 million – 20 million were air transactions. Based on these assumptions, we believe Expedia generates between $100 million and $140 million in air incentives. We do not know what will happen with GDS agreements in 2006, but we do believe Expedia would have exposure if deals were materially changed from current GDS pricing. We were beginning to become comfortable with the risk until the announcement of the Worldspan deal earlier this week.

Riya is awesome!

After hearing raving reviews about Riya, I finally give it a whirl. It is just brilliant. I uploaded about 25 pictures and trained it using just three pictures and it recognized the rest. Check it out here.