Travel Technology, Search, Innovation

2010-03-24T09:47:00.001-05:00

00304890B5E0

Recent Projects

2007-07-19T00:32:00.002-05:00

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

2006-10-16T21:37:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-26T23:36:00.001-05:00

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

2006-08-22T15:29:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-08-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-12T00:46:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-04-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

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.

The start of a good thing

2006-04-05T13:18:00.000-05:00

My friend Eric is stating a new blog focused on .Net development. Finally, I have convinced him to start a blog!

Eric left our company a few weeks ago to start his own gig. He was our lead architect and Director of technology. He is in the process of writing a framework on .net 2.0 and SQL server that is going to be Open Source. The framework will consist of three major pieces: XLib (base API for DataAccess, IO Access, Business Logic), xCodeGenerator (for generating classes and web pages from database tables),XWebSiteTemplate( generic modules for building the sites:* User Manager,* Content Manager,* Email Manager).

The main idea behind is to speed the development time by three-fold. I wish him all the best and I am sure his contribution to the Open Source community will be valuable. I am adding him to my blogroll.

He is also behind autosuggestbox. (Open Source).

NY Tech Meetup - 4/4

2006-04-05T11:59:00.000-05:00

I went to the NY Tech Meetup in New York City last night, and I was impressed. I had read about it on NYTimes.com a few weeks ago and decided to check it out. The turnout was good with 250-300 people attending. The simple setup (no flashy marketing ads or banners) gave it a grassroot vibe. The format was demo plus networking. Everyone got about 5 minutes to demo their product project. There were demos by FON (WiFi), BlogAmp (Podcasting),
Commontales (blog, Wiki storytelling), Zipapp (web-based database), Alias-i(text analytics), Gootodo (simple web-based to do list) and another company (can't remember the name) in micro images area.

All of them were interesting, but I was especially taken with Alias-i. They have an API called LingPipe which is a suite of Java libraries for the linguistic analysis of human language. You can check out the site for features and functionality. I plan to play with it when I have some more
time.

Summary: Got to meet few interesting people. Good place to network and meet smart people.

FareCompare

2006-03-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

Farecompare.com is a new site that displays airfare data. I heard about them a while back when they only had RSS feed to fares on city pairs. With the new site re-design, they have added many features and the site looks awesome. There have a whole bunch of cool, new tools like Google Desktop Plug-in, Apple and Yahoo widgets, Firefox extension, and Google Maps mashups (similar to Travelocity dream maps).

Although not a meta-search, the site includes all the fares filed by ATPCO, which is the same form of data used on GDS systems (Sabre, Worldspan,Galileo, and Amadeus) that includes Expedia (Worldspan), Travelocity (Sabre), and Orbitz (ITA)). On the home page, fares are listed for top destinations in 6 continents. The site will allow you to eyeball general airfares around the world out of your home airport without plugging in dates. You can drill down by year, month, or week for a general comparison. The general navigation is organized, but I think few clicks from screen to screen can be minimized.

There are no advertisements on the site except for some deep links to airlines and sites like Orbitz, which may or may not be paid. I know the founders have an APTCO fare management background and could have ties with them. Beyond that I have no information on their business model.

Tradeshow and Conference

2006-03-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

I will be at the TravelCom - April 17-19, NY Hilton, New York, NY - Booth# 1000 and I am attending Open Travel Alliance / Advisory Forum in Garden Grove, CA on April 23-26. If you are attending any of the shows and would like to meet, please let me know.

Vericalsearch.net

2006-02-16T22:01:00.000-05:00

Brian Smith over at Comparison Engines is starting a brand new blog called Verticalsearch.net which will focus on travel search and job search. Here is the feed

Yahoo! Released UI and Design Patterns

2006-02-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

Kudos to Yahoo for releasing their UI and design Patterns and making it open. Some of the UI designs used on Yahoo sites are cleverly implemented. I hope this openness continues…Explore at Yahoo Developer Network

Design Pattern Library
UI Library
Yahoo’s UI blog

(via Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

Mutiple Projects keeping me busy!

2006-02-02T22:30:00.000-05:00

Apologies for no postings for the last few weeks. No postings does not mean that I have not been working hard. Actually, to the contrary, I have been really busy. We are going through some "re-organization" within the company since the start of the New Year. New boss, project re-assignments, new attitude, new everything. So I am adjusting with the change.
With the new shuffling, I had an opportunity to work on some interesting non-travel related small projects, which got signed up all at the same time during December. Therefore, instead of being a light holiday month, it turned out to be a crunch time for me. As a Project Manager, in a small company with several projects on my lap, I have had to learn a few very important lessons on effectively managing time, budget, team, client expectations etc. However, those lessons will have to wait for another time. Today, I just want to share my experiences working on a few of these projects.

Bullseye: Location Based Search
Two of the non-travel projects involved designing a proximity/location search, which is based on one of our core products called "Bullseye". The projects (designed for high profile consumer brands in sports, the other in upscale watches & pens) involved customizing Bullseye. After evaluating the requirement for both companies, it turned out that both clients had almost similar needs with slightly different workflow and UI. We decided to re-write almost all functionality of Bulleye and made it available through web services, which made it really easy to change wokflow and UI.
The biggest challenge was to be able to deploy the new functionality, while keeping the older client users intact. There were a few clients already using the web service. We didn't want to disrupt these clients. Ultimately, we ended up building new versions of the web service with the same code base that supported new as well as old functionality.In the end the product is now more refined, stable and we also added some cool functionality like the ability to easily add Google and Yahoo! Maps mash-ups. If you want to know more details about this product jump over to our Bullseye site.

OTA – Tour Operator
I am also working on couple of my ongoing travel projects, which also involve extensive use of web services. One of the project is almost done. We are currently in the process of deploying a booking API (in beta release) based on the OTA standards for a major tour operator. The API lets you perform all booking tour functionality through a web service. Initially, it was a challenge to work with a "not so completed" OTA specification, but we got around it by using a few tricks of our own. Most of them involved coming up with extensions, but within the OTA message structure.

Fare Search: Date Range:
This fairly small project was done as a proof of concept that allows any user to search for the lowest fare within a wide date range. For example, it will allow you to search for the lowest fares within 30 consecutive days between any two cities. It should be a very useful product, but it still needs some optimization to work efficiently. We are getting closer to nailing this down. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public yet, so I can't share the URL. But I will once it's ready and open.

Posting will be light for few more days. I'll be back in full swing by mid-Febuary. In the meantime, hop over to the excellent blog: Enplaned (aviation news) and Guy's Blog (a must read…I am sure you will like it).

Do Travel Search Engines Deliver?

2005-12-25T02:05:00.000-05:00

Consumers Reports analyses 11 of the most popular travel search engines and concludes that no single sites could be recommended as a one-stop destination for cheapest plane tickets, hotel rooms and other travel products.
The 11 sites analyzed include AOL Pinpoint Travel, BookingBuddy, Cheapflights, ITA Software, Kayak, Mobissimo, Pricegrabber, QIXO, SideStep, Travelzoo and Yahoo FareChase.

Read the entire Consumer Web Watch Report (PDF)

Via (Information Week)

Yahoo acquires del.icio.us

2005-12-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

Yahoo has acquired the popular bookmarking site del.icio.us. Joshua Schachter, the founder of del.icio.us announced the news on delicious blog. Financial details were not disclosed but unconfirmed reports say that the price tag was in the 25-30 million range.

Retuters:

Del.icio.us has only nine employees. Venture backers include Union Square Capital, Amazon.com and BV Capital, among others. Some 300,000 users have shared more than 10 million of their favorite links to Web sites.

RSS that Sales Promo

2005-12-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

Heather Green from Business Week asks if other companies are using RSS feed to alert customers about sales and promotional messages.
I believe that as the use of RSS grows every company should consider this non-intrusive medium to promote sales. As users adapt to this new way of consuming information, it has the potential to become as powerful as email interms of potential sales channel.
Charlene Li's post back in June 2005 on "Looking for examples of marketers using RSS" prompted a lot of examples of marketers using RSS. I am sure that eventually many marketers will get into RSS once they figure out that there are a growing number of users by the day.
You can view some examples on Charlene's post, but since my focus is related to travel, I have listed the few travel companies using RSS feed to promote sales and specials:
Travelocity
American Express
Orbitz (feed of airfare from US cities)
Northwest Airlines
Independence Airlines
Continental Airlines Vacations
Delta Vacations Deals
InterContinental Hotels – Priority Club Rewards

Do you know of any travel companies using RSS that are not listed here?

Virgin America applies to start a new discount airline

2005-12-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

Virgin America said it received $177.3 million in financing to start the new low fare airline in US. Group including Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group filed with federal officials to start the discount airline, reports WSJ.

Virgin America plans to offer a combination of low fares and premium service, partly modeled on JetBlue Airways Corp.

Expedia.com.au Launches in Australia

2005-12-08T23:03:00.000-05:00

Expedia announced its Australian website today. Already the No 1 site in travel destination category and with its 40% of the market share in US, it seems like they are aggressively looking for growth in international market.
The site only offers hotels and attractions but air, car and vacations will be launched soon. (via Yahoo News).

On other news, Microsoft launched Windows Live Local powered by Virtual Earth. A really cool feature is Bird's eye view. You can try it on your own here. (My old neighborhood).

Google launched Google Transit and Yahoo launched Yahoo! Answers in beta.

ITA Fare Rules

2005-12-08T15:41:00.000-05:00

I noticed that ITA now displays Fare Rules. I have always turned to ITA to search for good fares as it provides a lot of options for search. I especially like the month-long search option. It gives an indication of fares filed by the airlines for a given city pair, and you can perform a search for all of these fares within 30 days. If you do not have a specific date to travel, I suggest you try this option. You’ll get a better idea on the price range for the cities you are visiting.
Fare Rules are not that interesting to people who don't work in the industry or for someone who doesn’t really care what kind of fare they purchase as ong as it meets their needs (schedule + price, etc.). However, Fare Rules gives you some good information such as costs for date changes and cancellation on the fare that you are buying. It is always a good idea to double check Fare Rules before clicking that "Buy now" button. Major online sites also display the Fare Rules before you buy on their site.
The information provided by Fare Rules includes: (1) flight restrictions what flights you can take), (2) advanced reservations (how long before you have to buy this ticket to get this rate - 7 day, 21 days, etc.), (3) travel restrictions (what days you can't travel) and most importantly penalties (this is the one you must give a lot of attention, should you have to change the dates or cancel your travel plans).

Technorati Tags: ita travel airfare

Classifieds market getting hot

2005-11-30T00:54:00.000-05:00

Just after two weeks of Google announcement about their Google Base service, Microsoft announced that they would be beta launching a new classifieds website under live.com code name “Fremont.” The free online service that will allow people to list items for sale, events, and other classifieds type of information that can be shared either with select groups of friends or anyone over the Internet, reports Cnet.
This article on NYTimes reports that the number of users of online classified advertising services increased 80 percent this year, according to a report released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project based on data gathered by comScore Media Metrix. In 2005, almost nine million of those visitors went to Craigslist.org, a 165 percent increase from 3.4 million last year.
There are rumors flying around blogosphere that Google will soon announce a similar classified service called Google Automat to tie into their Google Base service.
Technorati Tags: fremont automat classifieds

Airlines Try Portals for Business Travelers

2005-11-29T11:43:00.000-05:00

Struggling airlines are trying to do lure customers to their own travel sites and investing in portals to save money. Both American Airlines and US Airways are investing on their own portal geared towards more lucrative business travelers with additional features that allows them to book both negotiated and published fares including features to book hotel and car. CO, DL, and NW are in negotiation with third party to build a combined portal. This article on Information Week analyzes Airlines' venture on building portals but argues that they might face stiff competition from big online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity.

VC cash flows to specialty web sites

2005-11-28T23:09:00.000-05:00

MSNBC reports VC's interest to plunk cash in niche online travel sites.

Venture capital firms are plunking down bets on a growing horde of niche travel web sites, many in the Bay Area.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

2005-11-28T22:58:00.000-05:00

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. My apologies for the light posting, but I was away for couple of days over the weekend without any computer access. I needed some time to relax with Denise. We went to Saratoga Springs in New York, stayed at the Gideon Putnam hotel, and just had a wonderful time. Although, once we got there it started snowing heavily, so our plans to do some ice-skating were cancelled. We just hung out in the hotel and had a special Thanksgiving dinner. The next day, I took some detox mineral bath thing, which was relaxing. So overall, we had a very enjoyable and pleasant time.
Rest of the weekend, I did some reading and, finally, finished The Art of Start by Guy Kawasaki. If you ever thought of starting a business, I highly recommend it. This book is really well written and very inspiring. You can download a summary of this book here.
I also finished Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham, (I only had few chapters left to finish on this book, too). It was another excellent book, and I highly recommend this one, too. You can always read all of Paul's wonderful writings on his website. This book will make you want to be a real hacker, and maybe even convince you to program in Lisp. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Microsoft's Simple Sharing Extension

2005-11-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

Microsoft's CTO Ray Ozzie announced extensions to RSS known as SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) on his blog yesterday. The specification in its early draft is released under a Creative Commons license and any MS application support of this spec is not known.
As far as I understand it, SSE allows apps using RSS and OPML to allow bi-directional sharing and asynchronous replication among cross-subscribed feeds. I will have to play around with it to find out what is possible in terms of using it in real application, but since it is based on RSS/OPML, it looks very promising.
If it pans out, I think there might be huge opportunity to build some great travel apps. Now, imagine being able to synchronize a public event (conference or meeting from upcoming.com), invite people from your contact list (from outlook, hotmail), synchronize everyone's calendar from disparate systems, compile the aggregated data and feed it to a booking system to search and price a suitable itinerary for everyone, and deliver it via email, IM etc. Now that will be a cool application to work on.
Technorati Tags: SSE ideas travel apps

Skype Video soon

2005-11-19T20:32:00.000-05:00

TechCrunch is reporting rumors that Skype version 1.5 with video will be launching before Christmas. I am really looking forward to this and I think this will be an excellent additional offering from Skype.
I am totally addicted to Skype and so are my parents who are in Nepal. Before I started using Skype,I was paying like $1.20 per minute to talk to them . Now, I talk with them for hours for FREE....and hopefully soon with video. Can't wait.

Technorati Tags: skype

Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks - Ordered DVD

2005-11-19T01:39:00.000-05:00

I ordered Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks DVD today. I came to know about this project from Joel Spolsky's blog. The blog is a must read if you are in the software business. Besides being smart, inspiring, and practical, the guy is a very gifted writer --- someone many bloggers would envy. Joel appears in the film with four of his interns. Two other very impressive minds Paul Graham and Dan Bricklin,(co-creator of VisiCalc) also appear in the film.

The website describes the movie as

Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer geeks around the world fix their friends' computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek

.
As a Project Manager, I can relate to the movie's theme, which could be interesting. Maybe I will learn something from the maestro himself. Very geeky stuff, I know..:)

Kayak.com - Air Search With Multi-City

2005-11-17T18:08:00.000-05:00

Kayak.com released a multi-city search functionality on its site today in beta release. If you need to book trips with three or more city stops, you can now select the "Multi-city" option and search up to four city pairs. The have also added a search category where you can specify fare type, such as first, business and coach class.
I did a quick search for a circular trip (NYC-ATL-LAX-NYC) and result was good. Here is screen shot of the results. Something I had not noticed before is that when you click on the details page you can also view the Fare Basis code.

Amex and Orbitz RSS feeds

2005-11-16T01:09:00.000-05:00

Just found American Express and Orbitz RSS feeds. American express has mostly cruise deals and Orbitz has domestic airfare info from all major airports to different cities.

Having fun with OTA Implementation

2005-11-16T00:32:00.000-05:00

I am currently working with OTA specification for packages (OTA_PkgBookRQ and OTA_PkgRS) elements and trying to map all elements types complex and simple types to online booking engine that we built a couple of year ago. What gets interesting is to map each element to an existing fields in our booking engine. Essentially, what we are doing is building a Web Services wrapper so that booking calls can be made to a legacy system via SOAP/XML. Not elegant by any means, but re-writing logic whose back end is dependent on 30-year-old VAX is no joke. It has turned out to be quite a lot of fun and I am having fun working with OTA specs and their crazy schema. I am also trying to figure out if it is possible build a database schema from the xsd file in .Net

If you are thinking about implementing OTA specification to a new or existing reservation system, feel free to write or call me, I can help you save few hours and avoid lot of pain.

RealTravel Secures $1 Million from Angel Investors

2005-11-15T23:35:00.000-05:00

RealTravel announced it has completed its seed financing of one million dollars from high-profile angel investors in the travel, media and social networking industries. The high-profile angel investors' names were not disclosed. (via Paid Content)

Technorati Tags: vc travel media

35 Million used search engine to buy Travel Online in April 2005 and spent 6 billion

2005-11-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

comScore Networks, Yahoo!, and Media Contacts today jointly released new research quantifying the impact of Web search engines on domestic travel spending. The custom study examined the search, visiting and buying behavior of consumers over eight weeks following the initiation of travel research in April 2005. In April, 35 million U.S. consumers used a search engine to initiate travel planning, and those who bought travel online ultimately spent an estimated $6.6 billion in the category during the eight week analysis period.

Cendant inks deals with Hilton, Marriott

2005-11-15T10:03:00.000-05:00

Hilton Hotels has entered into an agreement with Cendant Corp adding Orbitz.com, Lodging.com and Cheaptickets.com to the list of its accredited hotel room distributors, reports Reuters.

3 Blog software review

2005-11-14T23:38:00.000-05:00

Thinking about starting a blog. Read which one fits your needs. Vinnie Garcia reviews the big three blogging software over at Sitepoint.
Technorati Tags: blogs

Google Launches Analytics

2005-11-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

Google just launched Google Analytics. This seems like a full product launch as the site does not mention anything about Beta. The analytics is free to use although there is a 5 million page views cap for non Adwords users. I singed up and took it for a test drive and I have to say I am impressed. I am used to Urchin but it does seems like Google added few more features. The one that I haven't seen before is called Site Overlay where it fetches your page and tells you where users clicked. There are host of other feature geared towards Search Engine traffic analysis. Reports are grouped by users, you can choose Executive View, Marketer view and Webmaster view from Dashboard.

I copied the Javascript on this site, but I couldn't view the reports as it says "Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours" :(

Longest Flight New World record

2005-11-12T00:33:00.000-05:00

The Boeing 777-200LR entered the Guinness Book of Records covering 11,664 nautical miles from Hong Kong to London. Read the Boeing Blog here to see how it all got started. Two reporters from International Herald Tribune and WSJ took the flight.

I am used to long haul flights but 22 hours and 42 minutes does seem like an awfully long time to be on the plane. I remember two years ago, when I went back home (NYC-FRA-SIN-KTM) it took over 28 hours but I had few lay-over time in FRA and SIN and still felt like never ending.

Google does Print Ads

2005-11-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

Google releases Google Print Ads in Beta which enables you to place ads in print publications.

Publication Ads is currently in a pilot phase. If you've been invited to participate, it's easy to place an ad:

Google provides some search stats for Travel

2005-11-11T23:56:00.000-05:00

Google provides some ad metrics for Travel and few other industries. I've used Google AdWords for few travel companies for their marketing campaigns and results were almost always better than other PPC campaigns.

Few Interesting stats:

•Of the ever-growing number of consumers who use search engines for travel, 82% name Google as their preferred source for researching travel products and services
•Google refers more traffic to travel sites than all other search engines combined
•In a recent consumer survey, 88% of respondents planning to take a summer vacation this year have used or intend to use the internet to research and purchase vacation arrangements.5

Amazon.com taps SideStep to power travel section in '06

2005-11-10T09:41:00.000-05:00

Travel Weekly reports, Amazon will replace Hotwire as a travel provider on Amazon.com com with SideStep.

MS offers some free courses in .Net 2.0

2005-11-09T20:03:00.000-05:00

Microsoft Learning is offering some free courses in .Net 2.0 and VS 2005. Get them while they are free. They expire Nov 17. I know you guys are always “bellyaching” or “whining” about not getting proper training (you know who you are) (internal EVI stuff)

Microsoft's Memo Leak

2005-11-09T10:10:00.000-05:00

WSJ and NYtimes both had a story about a memo leak from Mircrosoft last night. They both failed to provide the full text of the memo.

Dave Winer from scriptingnews.com has acquired a full copy of the memos. Here is Bill Gates Email, Ray Ozzie's memo.

On the web- Travel News - Nov -7- 2005

2005-11-07T10:44:00.000-05:00

The Online Travel Landscape Is Getting Crowded

TRAVEL sites like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz already have their hands full with airlines and hoteliers - their "valued partners" - luring consumers away with sites that look more like full-service travel agencies every day. Now, here come Yahoo and AOL, and maybe even Google.

Go to the article at: NYTimes.com

G2 SwitchWorks debuts platform

G2 SwitchWorks is set to introduce G2Agent, a Web-based distribution platform for midsize, ARC-accredited agencies, that comes with incentives

Read full story at Travel Weekkly

Flightaware.com – New Live flight tracking website

2005-11-06T14:26:00.000-05:00

The site provides live flight tracking and flight data analysis. It is free to use but if you want to get more detail information, you have to register. You can get detailed flight status including Aircraft type, Origin, Destination, Route, Date, Departure time, Arrival Time, Ground Speed, and altitude. You can search flights by flight number, airlines, or just airport code. According to their FAQ: The data displayed are delayed up to 6 minutes and it can only track aircraft that are being tracked by the FAA, which means aircraft only in the United States. For flights arriving in the US from international origin, it will be able to track it once the flight is handed off to the US.
More on Flightaware.com

Microsoft's Other OS- 'Singularity'

2005-11-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

Microsoft Research has developed a prototype of a microkernel operating system, code-named ‘Singularity.’ The MS team built it from scratch with 300,000 lines of code apparently written in “Sing#.” (Sing# is a derivative of Spec#, which is a derivative of C#.). Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with Windows.

Via Microsoft-watch by Mary Jo Foley

Related Links:

Microsoft Research

Published Paper

Dude ! Where's my Jet

2005-11-04T00:06:00.000-05:00

Sergey Brin and Larry Page will soon be cruising the sky in a Boeing 767. WSJ reports the duo bought used plane earlier this year.

Online Travel Earning Reports

2005-11-03T18:02:00.000-05:00

Expedia boosted third quarter profit by 41%. Its shares jumped 13.5% in after-hours tradingon Thursday
Shares of Priceline.com Inc. soared 26% Thursday as the online-travel company's profit nearly doubled
Sabre Holdings Inc owner of the Travelocity Web site, on Thursday said its quarterly profit grew more than 15 percent on an increase in travel demand. Shares were up 3% on Thursday
Online Travel Industry Hits $104 Billion By 2010

New Yahoo maps (beta) and AJAX api

2005-11-03T00:43:00.000-05:00

New version of beta Yahoo maps it out. Have a look at this very cool demo using mashups of few Yahoo APIs
(via Jeremy Zawodny's blog).

Spinoffs Of Orbitz And Expedia Should Help Investors Focus

2005-11-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

Recent spinoffs of travel busines should help investors focus, reports IBD.

Watch for EXPE earning reports on Thursday.

Windows Live is Live @ Live.com

2005-11-02T16:01:00.000-05:00

Live.com is live.
Mary Joe Foley explains what Microsoft 'Live' is over at Microsoft-watch

Airlines try to make Internet work for them

2005-11-01T00:40:00.000-05:00

USA today has a story on GDS and GNEs.

Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue

2005-10-30T16:50:00.000-05:00

This article in NYTimes is worth reading about Google's TV ad ambition
.
WSJ has its own take.

Travelocity introduces RSS

2005-10-30T15:06:00.000-05:00

Travelocity is introducing RSS for custom trips. You can select trip type, from city, add select up to 4 cities you are planning a trip. You can create multiple custom RSS.

Yahoo launched Trip Planner (Beta)

2005-10-27T23:36:00.000-05:00

Yahoo launched in beta online tools for vacation planning this week. According to its Official Blog

Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community.

Some other features include travel photos from Flickr, database of vacation home rentals from owners.

Now, it would be cool if it would automatically find the cheapest price for my trip that I planned and send me the confirmation email. No more searching for the best deals on ten different sites.

Google Links to Travel Sites

2005-10-27T23:24:00.000-05:00

Google is now showing travel search box with airfare based searches. The search results currently links to Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz. The main link goes to Expedia, may be because they are one of Google's biggest Adwords client.

You can view the results with a search like "cheap flights from boston to cleveland"

Lot of rumors are flying around about Google Base which may include travel search among other things.

Meet the Life Hackers

2005-10-16T20:09:00.000-05:00

This report on NYTimes is fasinating. Basically, it is validating the point that Big screen size does matter in terms of workers productivity. Next time you want to talk to your boss about getting a big screen, make sure to have a copy of this article or include the link with your email when requesting one.

The results? On the bigger screen, peo ple completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

Here is the original article from the researcher.

Start-Up Airlines Fly Only Business Class

2005-09-19T23:33:00.000-05:00

Start-Up Airlines Fly Only Business Class

WSJ reports (Subscription required) two new airlines EOS Airlines and Maxjet Airways plan to launch all business class service between New York and London.

ITA Software Hacks

2005-09-19T22:56:00.000-05:00

ITA software provides the most comprehensive list of fares, schedule and availability information on airfares.  Although, most of the advance search feature is documented on the website, here are some compilations of hacks that are not documented.  There is a wide set of commands available, but there is no description of them available on the ITA web site.  (These were compiled from FlyerTalk forum site from various threads).

General Search
www.itasoftware.com

If you do not know how to read the fare basis code, you are fanatic about learning ins and out of booking airlines fares you can read these guides.
Sabre Passenger Type codes
ATPCO Resolution 728
Web Fares DCA 3 Quick Reference

Specifying only specific airlines

For example if I were flying out of SFO and only wanted flights on UA, I would type:

SFO::UA+

You can use a different airline other than UA.  The plus meant that you want one or more segments on UA.  For a direct flight, you could leave off the plus.

You can also demand a transfer in a specific city. For example if I was flying to the east coast from SFO and wanted to take a non-stop to LAX to begin my trip I would use:

SFO::UA LAX UA+

Suppose I really didn't want a code hare on US.  I could use the O: modifier that tells ITA that I want that airline’s metal:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+

Further, I can specify which fare buckets I am interested in.  If I want to limit myself to L fares I can use the /F flag and BC parameter:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+ /F BC=L

or if I was willing to accept L, S, or T:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+ /F BC=L|BC=S|BC=T

Specify the booking code
The extensions to the routing language are accessed by post pending commands after a '/'.  . Unfortunately, each command applies only to one part of the trip, so they must usually be entered in each box.

Command is: "f bc=X" or "f bc=X|bc=Y|..."

Ex: Limit each part of the trip to travel on United and booking in the L booking-code:
from: BOS:: ua+ / f bc=l
to : LAX:: ua+ / f bc=l
Or with multiple booking-code choices and no airline restriction:
from: BOS::/ f bc=l|bc=m|bc=y
to : LAX::/ f bc=l|bc=m|bc=y

Specify Fare Basis Code:

Command is: "f CC.AAA+BBB.FFFFF" or "f CC.AAA+BBB.FFFFF|..." where CC is carrier code, AAA and BBB are fare origin and destination city, FFFFF is fare basis code

Ex: fare only with NW BOS-LAX YUP fares:

from: BOS::/ f nw.bos+lax.yup
to : LAX::/ f nw.bos+lax.yup

Ex: fare only with NW BOS-LAX KR0DCN fares:

DTW:: /f ua.dtw+msp.KR0DCN
MSP:: /f ua.dtw+msp.KR0DCN

Ex: fare with either YUP or F fares on any airline and between any points:

from: BOS::/ f ..yup|..f
to : LAX::/ f ..yup|..f

Ex: fare using only "through" fares
from: BOS::/ f .bos+lax.
to : LAX::/ f .bos+lax.

Ex: fare using only NW YUP fares or UA F fares:
from: BOS::/ f nw..yup|ua..f
to : LAX::/ f nw..yup|ua..f

Google Secure Access (Beta)??

2005-09-19T22:43:00.000-05:00

Google wifi site says, "Google Secure Access (Beta), which will help ensure your connection is secure.” According to their FAQGoogle Secure Access is a downloadable client application that allows users to establish a more secure WiFi connection. Download
via Inside Google