Travelmole Guest Comment: David Soskin, CEO Cheapflights.co.uk

“The various types and functionality of internet travel sites appear to be little understood by many travel practitioners and commentators. The Mail on Sunday last week-end (April 1st) is a case in point since it appears to confuse travel price comparison with travel meta-search.

Online flight price comparison was pioneered by travel editor and author John Hatt in 1996 with the launch of Cheapflights.co.uk. – his early work has been continued by David Soskin and Hugo Burge since 2000.

By comparison, the first meta-search travel site Sidestep.com, was actually launched in the USA in late 1999. In the UK, it was Easyvalue in 2000.

The term ‘ meta-search’ is often bandied around to cover every sort of travel site without any real comprehension of what it actually means. So what is the difference between price comparison and meta-search if you are looking for flight prices? After all they both deliver a choice of prices.

A major difference is that meta-search engines do not own a database; they send your search criteria to the databases maintained by flight-providers and trawl these for results. The idea is simple; a meta-search site scours multiple sites and generates qualified leads for partners.

Whilst these sites are good at providing combinations of departure/destination and date of travel, they are limited by the number of websites they can trawl. This in turn limits the number of deals they can provide so they are not truly ‘encompassing’.

One company that functions well, despite the current limitations of travel meta-search, is the relatively new global flight schedule and trip planner dohop.com in which Cheapflights took an investment in January.

It meets the “encompassing” definition well. This “free to access” meta-search site acquires the schedules for 14 months covering 33 million flights from and to destinations from airlines and budget airline databases.

In contrast, a flight price comparison site like Cheapflights does own its database. It is not a travel company but an independent online publisher of deals. It builds its database from many sources and does not depend on meta-search alone to acquire prices. These sources include off-line travel businesses and specialist agencies as well as airlines, budget airlines and OTAs.

What is often not understood is that the Cheapflights price comparison model actually drives traffic to OTA’s and travel meta-search sites such as Kayak – in fact, according to the Hitwise analysts, the recent UK start up Kayak site received 50% of its traffic from Cheapflights in January.

Neutral deals publishing sites such as Cheapflights and Travelzoo are therefore able to provide consumers with a huge choice of flight deals from a much larger number of sources. Ironically this model is much closer to the definition of “meta” in what it delivers to the consumer than meta-search.”

David Soskin, CEO Cheapflights.co.uk