Meet the TSEs

Meet the Travel Search Engines was the name of the panel I was on at the Search Engine Strategies Travel conference in Seattle last week. This was their first event focused on travel and the most in-depth I've attended on the travel search category specifically. Lots of good stats on the growth of TSEs, which I hope to share once the power point presentations become avaialble. Speakers on the panel were:

Pablo O'Brien, Director, Product Development, Yahoo! Travel
Drew Patterson, VP of Marketing, Kayak.com
John Robison, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Technology, SideStep.com
Beatrice Tarka, CEO and Co-Founder, Mobissimo
Mike Fridgen, VP Marketing & Product, Farecast
Rick Seaney, CEO, FareCompare.com

Farecast on MSN Travel

Farecast's unique airfare predictions and planning tools are now available on MSN Travel. This marks the first major distribution deal for Farecast and an opportunity for the company to generate awareness on a broader consumer scale.

Here is a quote from Jeff Dossett, executive producer and general manager at MSN: “Integrating Farecast’s unique airfare predictions and tools is part of our overall strategy to build out a rich set of innovative and differentiated content and services in travel and across all channels on the MSN media network.”

(Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Yapta, SideStep & TripHub

Lots of online travel start-up news recently.

Yapta raised $2.3M from First Round Capital, Bay Partners and other investors. Read more here. Yapta is the new travel start-up that provides a browser add-on that lets users “bookmark” and track fares that they find on major travel sites.

SideStep reports to TechCrunch on the value of their Facebook app. and their acqusition of TripUp (formerly TripMates). Here's an excerpt from the Facebook app. interview by Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, "SideStep sees Facebook as a customer acquisition vehicle... the company had already had over 1,000 solid leads from their two Facebook apps, and expect this figure to rise rapidly as they improve their cross promotion strategies." I was surprised they have only have ~1,000 solid leads with over 150,000 Facebook users.

TripHub group travel collaboration tools are now available on Orbitz. More from Mashable. This deal is TripHub's third and most significant private label relationship and is consistent with their strategy of partnering with a select group of market leaders. Orbitz is the only major online travel agency to exclusively feature and promote TripHub's planning and community tools. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to TripHub.)