The New Travel Website Winners

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this is a wise piece of info from wirednews.com ‘s rants and raves…this is a trend that could help gonomad grow much larger.

Joe Buhler (jeb@buhlerworks.com)

Subject: Travel Upstarts Take on Top Sites

To claim that these new travel search engines represent Travel 2.0 sounds like so much hype — maybe Travel 1.5 at best. Of course, as long as online travel is pure price-based comparison shopping, these companies enable easy comparison of travel components (“Travel Upstarts Take on Top Sites,” Nov. 26, 2004).

The fastest growth in online travel, however, is in the sale of travel packages with components bundled into a total price. This will make it practically impossible for the comparison engines to do their job. In addition, this package will increasingly be priced and packaged dynamically, making comparison even less of a possibility. This development into true Travel 2.0 will also bring more focus on added value and branding.

The winners will likely be those travel providers that are able to offer an effective one-stop shopping travel-purchasing experience combined with competitive pricing. These winners might well be travel suppliers offering dynamic packaging capabilities on their own websites, or even destination sites.