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April 21, 2005
musing about mini travel aggregators
Been in Hawaii (Diamond Head on Oahu) since Sunday (therefor the low post rates). Doing alot of surfing and not much else. But while reading the local tourist rags, something interesting struck me. There are a bunch of local micro travel aggregators that specialize right here in Waikiki. Like: go Waikiki.com. When planning my trip I went to all the big aggregators (Expedia, Tavelocity, NorthWest Airlines, Hotels.com, Priceline, etc.) and was a bit depressed at how uniform the rates were across the large aggregators. And how bad the terms are. With the big ones if you book through Expedia for example, you pre-pay them. If you have to change any of your dates or times, you have to go back through Expedia and deal with Expedia's cancelation policies. Therefore I booked my hotel direct with no pre-pay and a 72 hour change policy.
But back to the local aggregators. Once you get here there are tons of specials and lots of resources (not the least of which is the local yellow pages) which are all way more robust than what I found on-line. GoWaikiki.com has rates about half what the big aggregators had. They don't represent all the hotels, but enough to be useful. There are also local publishers like Spotlight Hawaii (turn off the cheesy music) that do a far superior job of getting all the local resources in one place, usually in the form of flyers and the brochures you find in your hotel. Now, maybe a little more googling would have lead me to the smaller sites, but I bet 90% of your average travelor will never find them. The disparity is a result of breadth versus depth. Large aggregators go for breadth, small ones go for depth. It is always harder to find depth. Typically depth also sacrafices some breadth (gowaikiki's small hotel selection for example).
Humm a conundrum. Or an opportunity?
Posted by Martin at April 21, 2005 11:19 PM
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Comments
Opportunity. But the issue with this (as with all local) is how to efficiently/profitably reach the merchants. That is always the issue with depth, when you compete against breadth. You can get breadth efficiently by going after the chains/big guys, but most of the depth involves little guys and they are hard to reach "on the cheap", at least right now. That could change if Yahoo! et. al. are successful with their free webpages for biz, etc.
Posted by: joe 
at April 22, 2005 10:44 AM
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