NYNY Solutions

It’s no big secret that Travel Search Engines like kayak, dohop, sidestep (now also kayak…), mobissimo, skyscanner, farechase, farecast, momondo, et al, all want to get paid from the airlines and OTAs in their search results.

The overall prediction is that the willingness to pay for TSE traffic seen from Online Travel Agencies in later years, will be matched by airlines in the near future, as airlines continue to come to terms with, and start executing on, their own Supplier Direct strategies.

But how will these guys pay?

For now, we’ll set aside the notion of radically new or innovative payment setups, as well as the unsuitable common ones like fixed fees (…although that might actually work) and CPM.

This leaves us with Cost Per Click, or Cost Per Order.

So far, the general stance, more or less, from the TSEs have been to try to be strict about CPC, and OTAs (and airlines) have been trying to get CPO deals.

Both sides can argue their case.

• TSEs claim to be information providers to users, and as such they should present unbiased results, and should have no particular stake in the sales that may or may not occur from the traffic they generate. They can also argue that their compensation shouldn’t hinge on the OTA/airline’s ability to actually make their visitors book and pay.
• OTAs/Airlines claim they can not defend paying the CPC rates TSEs want them to pay, without knowing what results they’ll get. With a CPO setup, the risk of participation is substantially reduced.

Or is it? I believe there are strong arguments supporting the CPC model also from the point of view of an OTA/airline:

• With a CPC deal you need a high conversion rate for the traffic to be profitable. This means your prices shown need to be attractive, and you may have to apply specific yield management for TSE traffic. Trying to be attractive to customers, generally is a good idea.
• With a CPO deal, however, you know you need higher profit margins to cover the commissions you’ll need to pay to the TSE. This goes against the idea of a TSE, where - no matter what anyone tries to tell you - price is king.
• • High margins = unattractive fares = negative branding
  • Low margins = attractive fares = higher conversion rate = branding through sales
• Allowing a TSE to query your site costs you. It generally costs more if you’re an OTA than if you’re an airline, but there are some examples of airlines with ridiculous costs per search. OTAs having too crappy look-to-book rates in a GDS might even get shut down by airlines - which generally is not a good thing…
• If you’re an OTA - and aren’t able to convert the TSE traffic to sales, instead of going to CPO, you might use this as an alarm that your site isn’t up to the task. Perhaps you don’t assist your visitors in completing the transaction, or your site is slow or designed by drunken monkeys. Regardless of which, TSEs are pretty good for benchmarking.
• Finally, with CPC, you don’t need to disclose to the TSE how well you are actually performing.

Finally got the vastuswear.com website up. It’s just a logo and some happy cheers from the team.

VASTUS is our fashion-project, we design and produce athletic cut jeans for guys who can’t get the average designer jeans across the thighs.

The mantra is: Producing great looking clothes for athletic people.

Own up, for the best part of the millenium, you’ve thought about e-mail marketing the same way you do about your odd cousin from the country, the one that stares at sheep in an unhealthy way.

It’s just not as fun as search, is it? Well bu-huu.

E-mail is here, you have to deal with it.

Yes, your newsletter program may feel waaay less cool to work with compared to logging in to AdWords for the umptenth time to check your CR.

Yes, your newsletter program is more work, your average e-mail needs more content than a new AdGroup text… plus, your subscribers actually expect things from you.

But, since e-mail IS here, you might as well do your best - and whatever you do, don’t burn your subscriber base just because you got bored with it.

Why? Well, besides the fact that it’s probably profitable right now (I’ll help you find out if you don’t know how), here’s another pretty strong hint: Today, everyone you know is in at least one SEO project, right? If you just think about the absurdity of every half-assed company churning out a million static SEO pages, it’s pretty obvious this insanity will come to an end sooner or later. Then you need to be prepared, because all of the organic search traffic will suddenly no longer materialize, and you and your competitors will all be bidding each other to death in AdWords. Now, if only there was some other way of reaching qualified leads - some forum where you will have the univided attention of your leads and be able to strengthen your relationship with them…….. (yes, it’s e-mail)

So, out of love, technology or panic, e-mail marketing WILL soon be reborn - we will refer to it as Digital Direct Marketing, or Permission Marketing 2.0, or something cooler than “the newsletter that Jane sends on Tuesdays”.

In emerging markets, gaining a large subscriber base is extra adventurous. Jared Blank and Vikram Shegal at tripmela.com is doing this right now. I think they aim at becoming the Indian version of travelzoo.com - well, I hope they succeed.

I’ll keep thinking about new ways to battle e-mail inertia.

I just googled “sudoku” and got 49.800.000 hits. Then I tried “chess” and got a little over 47.000.000.

Yes, yes, I know that sudoku is a universal name, and that there are probably millions of chess sites under words like “schack”, “skak”, and so on - but still…

Sudokus in their present form saw daylight in 1979, and in that time, they’ve exploded in popularity way, way past all predictions.

My own sudoku engine SapientSudoku (at www.sudokucorner.com) is a real killer. We’ve tried it in solver mode on all the toughest über-ninja sudokus in magazines and other sites. Never failed.

If you play the desktop or online java version at the toughest level, you are bound to go mad half way through (or cheat), but we’ve actually pitted one SapientSudoku puzzle against SapientSudoku running in solver mode on another PC and it’s never failed to solve a puzzle - WITHOUT brute force guessing. Always through advanced algos that a dedicated human solver could do as well.