Rival websites square up

Monday, 28 Oct, 2003 0

Agents are being elbowed out by direct sell options like travelsupermarket.com and traveljungle.com – two rival websites that have launched recently.

Both websites claim to offer comprehensive flight searches by scanning the websites of airlines, agents and consolidators, and presenting consumers with the results. The consumer then clicks through to the relevant website to book the fare they want to buy.

Travelsupermarket.com has soft-launched, but has since ‘gone down’ due to excessive hits after it featured in this weekend’s national papers (consumers can still reach it by going through sister site, moneysupermarket.com). Travelsupermarket scans 28 websites including charter airlines, no-frills airlines, online agents and traditional airlines for flights out of the UK.

At the moment consumers searching the site are connected to the relevant website when they find a fare they like, but chief executive, Simon Nixon told TravelMole that in about two weeks, consumers will link directly to the booking page to book the specific fare they selected.

Mr Nixon says Travelsupermarket is better than rival, Traveljungle because it checks fares in real time so consumers don’t find that a fare is not available once they have clicked the link to book it. A spokesperson for Travelsupermaket said the website is presuming Traveljungle does not check fares in real time because the search is returned too quickly to have scanned a number of websites, and they assume it has instead scanned a database.

Traveljungle co-founder, Hans-Jarvis Vogel refuted the claims, saying his website does search in real time. He added that only very rarely was a fare displayed that turned out to not be available. Traveljungle launched in the UK about two and a half weeks ago, but is already running in the US and Germany.

Mr Vogel told TravelMole that Traveljungle had received around 11,000 visitors on Sunday. He said the site was aimed at consumers, but in the current business climate, business travellers were increasingly using the site.

Mr Vogel said the company didn’t intend to spend a lot on advertising, and was relying on word of mouth and editorial coverage. He said: “Excessive advertising leads to depletion of funds and often bankruptcy.”

Mr Vogel told TravelMole that TravelJungle had reached commission agreements with all agent websites searched for US and German content, but said that negotiations were still under way in the UK. He added: “We keep the details to ourselves”.

Traveljungle currently only offers flights in the UK but will expand to hotels and car rental, like the US and German sites. Mr Vogel said there were no plans to white-label the product to other websites.

The two websites rely on getting their profits from advertising on the sites as well as getting fees or commissions from the websites to which consumers are directed. However, they have gone about it in different ways.

Traveljungle gets a commission when a booking is made by a consumer that has been directed to the provider website from Traveljungle.

Travelsupermarket gets a payment from when a consumer searching Travelsupermarket clicks through to another site (a booking does not necessarily need to be made). “It is not a huge amount, but it is more cost-effective for someone like British Airways to go through us than through a traditional agent” said Mr Nixon.

If a website has not reached an agreement to pay a commission to Travelsupermarket.com, then from two week’s time, the name of the website will not show up next to the fare in the search results. If consumers want to know the name of the website to get the fare, they have to pay a small fee. “We still get our fee – either the provider or the user pays it” said Mr Nixon.

Mr Nixon said Travelsupermarket was also looking to make money through white labelling or co-branding with other websites.