Home Yahoo! Travel: Heavy on Content, Light on Personalization

Yahoo! Travel: Heavy on Content, Light on Personalization

Editor’s Note: It might be helpful to read Sramana Mitra’s Overview of the Online Travel Space prior to reading this review.

In this article we will analyze the Yahoo! Travel site based on the Web 3.0 framework. The site provides information on travel destinations, best bargains on hotel and travel fares. It has an attractive interface and navigation is simple and easy. However, as a late entrant, it needs to do so much more to differentiate and become a “destination”.

Context

Yahoo! Travel has a very broad and vivid categorization, which gives its users both convenience and ease of choice while planning for their trip. The site provides good contextual information for both leisure travelers and business travelers.

There are eight sub categories, Travel Guides, Hotels, Flights, Cars, Cruises, Vacations, Deals, and FareChase. The Deals section is broken down into four sub categories (Popular Categories, Lifestyle, Price and More Deal Providers), which have been further categorized to help users search for deals more easily.

Content

Like all other Yahoo! sites the Travel site is also rich in content. The site allows users to search and book flights, hotels, cars, and also plan for their travel.

The Travel Guides section, for example, provides detailed information on more than 40,000 cities and 500,000 places to stay across the world along with reviews, maps and pictures of these locations. It also covers the history, culture, accommodation, festivals and carnivals, dining, drinking, nightlife entertainment, shopping, sports, and special attractions of these locations. Travel Guide also contains maps, weather reports and currency converters for each destination.

Yahoo! currently provides Travel content on Mobile through a partnership with Travelocity via Yahoo! Everywhere, which has agreement with service providers and manufacturers of Web-connected devices in 26 countries where it provides the same travel content in 14 languages.

Commerce

Yahoo! Travel through its partnership with Travelocity and other sites provides users booking facilities, which enables it to earn commission on the flights, hotels, vacations, cruises or cars booked through its sites. There is, however, nothing differentiated in its offering versus other more established providers of travel booking.

Community

Yahoo! has been lagging in community features and in its Yahoo! Travel site, it tries to do a decent job of integrating consumer generated media, such as reviews, RSS Feeds, message boards and Flickr. Flickr is an interesting integration as it allows users to share their travel photographs. This is Yahoo! Travel’s most powerful repository of user generated content, and creating better ways for the travel community to engage around it would be an excellent way to leverage their photo sharing community.

The site also allows users to share their trip plans. Though the site has message boards and reviews posted by users, it lacks punch and the site would do well to integrate videos, discussion forums, chat with travel advisors, blogs on important destinations, etc. to increase the level of engagement.

I wrote a few few posts, one on how to incentivize user generated content and one on how Washington Post’s Blogroll has collected 100 Blogs that Lufthansa has bought CPM advertising on. I believe, Yahoo could do a much better job incenting and harnessing user generated content, as well as creating blog networks so that advertisers can buy ad inventory on them as a block, just like Lufthansa did via the Washington Post.

Personalization

Yahoo! Travel offers personalization through My Yahoo! It enables users to plan their trip, check and track their reservations and travel profiles, receive emails and alerts on various travel destinations, fares and newsletters, sharing of trips, etc. The site also allows users to copy and customize someone else’s trip plan.

Nonetheless, there is no personalization based on travel styles (luxury, backpacking, culture, outdoors, romantic bed & breakfasts), budget ranges, amenity requirements, etc. Paper travel guides have always provided this sort of segmentation information. However, websites have always the unique advantage of being able to provide better search and personalization facilities, which so far remains unaddressed. It is also Yahoo’s greatest opportunity for strong differentiation in a market landscape that is fast standardizing.

Vertical Search

Yahoo! Travel has convenient search functions and allows users to search from a multiple range of hotels, flights, car rentals, vacations, cruises and deals. The site also allows consumers to search for hotel, flights and rental cars simultaneously. In 2006 Yahoo! acquired FareChase, a travel search engine that allows users to search and compare fares of flights and hotels online and connects the user directly to the travel provider’s site.

Again, there is nothing wowing about what they’ve done here, and my above recommendations on more category-specific vertical search functionality would help immensely.

In general, segmentation would also allow content to be licensed from category specific travel guides. For example, for travelers in search of uniqueness, the French Guide du Routard is an excellent source. It tells you, not only which hotel to stay in, but also which rooms in the hotel are the best. Similarly, the Rough Guides have catered to budget travelers for generations, and knows the cheapest dives that still serve good food in many far-away destinations.

Business Model

Yahoo earns more than 88% of its revenues from advertisements. The ad rates for the travel site are in the range of $0.32 – $0.57 CPC. The major advertisers on Yahoo! Travel are Avis, InterContinental Hotel Group, Wynn, Sheraton, and Hertz. It doesn’t look like Yahoo! Travel has got its act together quite yet on the advertising side, but presumably it will, and advertising rates will climb up.

Conclusion

The final rating for Yahoo! Travel using my Web 3.0 Rating is as follows: Context: A; Content: A-; Community: B; Commerce: A-; Personalization: C; Vertical Search: C
Overall : B

Do you agree? What are your thoughts on Yahoo! Travel?

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The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

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