Affiliate Programs

There are plenty of web sites providing online hotel reservation services. Most provide incredible discounts, hard to believe they are earning anything. Most give good customer service, have huge marketing campaigns. So what will be the difference? Who will win? My answer: who has the most affiliates.

A New Way to Buy Travel: Gimio

Gimio provides a new concept in helping us buy travel services. Their motto is "exactly what I need".
In fact, they do not sell anything. They just provide a travel requests listing system and service providers read and send you offers regarding your requests.

SideStep.com and Kayak.com Merged

The best travel comparison sites of the web have merged. I hope they will create a better experience, combining their powerful sides.

Why am I Frequently Linking to Hotel-Board.com ?

You may wonder why I am linking to Hotel-Board.com in almost every post. That's because I think this web site is worth mentioning. They are trying to keep their prices as low as possible, avoiding any unnecessary expense in their operations. I do not see them in massive marketing campaigns, they don't provide 7x24 phone support or toll-free numbers. As these things are not free for the service company, they have to charge these costs from their customers by increasing their rates.
That's what is special about Hotel-Board.com . At least you must try them.

Booking Online for Beginners

Making an online hotel reservation has become a daily practice. You get your Venice accommodation, London flight ticket, Paris car rental, an so on. Anyone can do it. But, does that mean everyone can do it for the best rates? Certainly, not!

Budget aware customers look for the best discounts. That means looking at further than the first pages of search results. I think it is more an art than knowledge to grab the best deals among all those links.

Happy bookings!

Online Travel Trends Blog

This is a blog about what is going on in the online travel business. You can keep track of the trends in the online travel market from this site.

Today, anyone who has an Internet access can make a travel search and book his or her hotel room, book flight tickets, rent a car, buy a cruise deal. This was not the case 10 years ago when the WWW boom was just emerging.

Gradually online travel agencies opened their web sites (e.g. Expedia) and provided all kinds of services online. Even the classical phone call was replaced by live support chats and inquiry forms. Agencies were publishing their hotels and the offline rates they got from their tour operator contracts. Clients could make searches by destination, dates, room types and etc. and select among the search results.

A few years was enough to evolve into the age of real time availability. Tour operators (e.g. Travco, Miki, Tourico, Special Tours, Hotelbeds) with thousands of hotel contracts all around the world provided XML interfaces to travel agencies. Agents could provide real time results for hotels, cars, and flights. Real time packages was also available to travel buyers.

As these new technologies were adopted by new web sites, the market started to demand something new. Any search from Google or Yahoo can bring thousands of results (e.g. paris hotels, from which it is very hard to select. What can be the criteria? Rates, extras, discount coupons, trust ...

Finally price comparison systems like Kayak, HotelsCombined appeared. Hundreds of hotel, flight, car suppliers were compared in these systems and the customer can easily spot the best deals. It was a great improvement in travel search which saves time and money.

The market is still evolving presenting new concepts to online travel sales like mobile search, map services, traveler reviews and forums.

Let's see what is next.