Travelzoo’s revenues grew 12 per cent in the first quarter and shares of the online travel deal company rose by almost the same amount on Monday’s consensus-beating earnings.
Its Fly.com meta search engine, launched in beta in February, made a negligible contribution, but management sees major synergies from matching an engine that finds users the best flights with some of the hotel and holiday bargains its site and weekly newsletter offers to 15m subscribers.
Travelzoo announced in January it had bought the Fly.com domain for $1.76m.
“We thought it was a steal,” Max Rayner, chief information officer, told me during a recent demo of the new site.
“It’s maybe the last single-syllable domain that is self-evident, highly recognisable and absurdly hard to misspell, no matter what language you say it in.
“You hear it once, and you’re done, which means no marketing is needed and it’s already search optimised – the URL itself is what people might search for.”
Travelzoo sees plenty of opportunity to win market share in the travel vertical of search. Meta search is currently dominated by Kayak.com, which attracts almost twice the traffic of SideStep (which Kayak also owns) and five times that of third-placed Farecast, according to 2008 figures from the Compete research firm.
I use Kayak a lot to find the cheapest flights to London and US cities and its daily email alerts tracking prices on routes of interest are particularly useful.
Silicon Valley-based Fly.com does not have this feature yet, but its searches do show the best fares for both coach and business travel, and it has begun to match flights with Travelzoo bargains in destination cities.
Mr Rayner argues that customer acquisition costs on a meta search site are much cheaper than on Google. An airline would pay Fly.com around $5 for linking a customer to make a booking on its site, compared to $15-20 for pay-for-placement links on Google, he says.
Metasearch sites seem fairly comprehensive for US users, although Southwest does not allow its flights to be searched. Fly.com plans to launch a full service in Europe next, barring another holdout in Ryanair.
It also wants to extend Fly.com’s search capabilities to package tours, hotels, cruises and car rentals.
“Airlines are the hardest to do, but they lead to everything else,” says Mr Rayner.
