Travel websites are websites on the world wide web dedicated to travel. This site may focus on travel reviews, travel fares, or a combination of both. Approximately seventy million consumers researched online travel plans in July 2006.
Video Travel website
Travelogues
Many travel websites are online travelogues or travel journals, usually created by individual travelers and hosted by companies that generally provide their information to consumers for free. These companies generate revenue through advertising or by providing services to other businesses. This medium generates a variety of styles, often combining graphics, photography, maps, and other unique content. Some examples of websites that use a combination of travel reviews and travel reservations are TripAdvisor, Priceline, Liberty Holidays, and Expedia.
Maps Travel website
Service provider
Individual airlines, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cruise lines, car rental companies and other travel service providers often maintain their own websites that provide retail sales. Many with complex offerings include some sort of search engine technology to look up ordering within a certain timeframe, service class, geographic location, or price range.
Online travel agency
The online travel agency (OTA) specializes in offering sourcing planning and booking capabilities. Main OTAs include:
- Voyages-sncf.com - revenue of EUR2.23 billion (2008)
- Expedia, Inc., including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Travelocity and more - revenue US $ 2,937 billion (2008), later expanded to include Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. , including Orbitz, CheapTickets, ebookers, and more - revenue US $ 870 million (2008)
- Saber Holdings, including lastminute.com and more - revenue US $ 2.9 billion (2008)
- Opodo - revenue of EUR1.3 billion (2008)
- Priceline Group, including Priceline.com, Booking.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, OpenTable, and more - revenue US $ 1.9 billion (2008)
- Travelgenio - revenue of EUR344 million (2014)
- Wotif.com - A $ 145 million (2012) revenue
- Webjet - A $ 59.3 million (2012) revenue
Aggregator and metasearch engine
The average consumer visits 3.6 sites while shopping for airline tickets online, according to PhoCusWright, CT-based travel technology company, Sherman. Yahoo claims 76% of all online travel purchases are preceded by some sort of search function, according to Malcolmson, product development director for Yahoo Travel. The 2004 Consumer Surveys Survey published by Jupiter Research reported that "nearly two out of five online travel consumers say they believe that no sites have the lowest rates or rates." So a niche has existed for aggregate travel searching to find the lowest fares of multiple travel sites, negating the need for consumers to cross-shop from site to site, with search travel quite common.
Metasearch engines are so named because they perform searches on multiple independent search engines. Search engines often use "screen scrap" to get flight availability directly. Screen scraping is a way of crawling through airline websites, getting content from the site by extracting data from the same HTML feed used by consumers to browse (rather than using Semantic Web or a database feed designed to be machine-readable). Metasearch engines typically process incoming data to eliminate duplicate entries, but should not expose the "advanced search" option in the underlying database (since not all databases support the same options).
The cost aggregator directs users to an airline, cruise, hotel, or car rental site or Online Travel Agent for the final ticket purchase. The aggregator business model includes getting the feed from the main OTA, then displaying to the user all the results on one screen. OTA then meets the ticket. Aggregators generate revenue through advertising and OTA filling to refer clients. Examples of aggregate sites are Bravofly, Cheapflights, Priceline, Expedia, Reservations.com, Kayak.com, Momondo, LowEndTicket, FareBuzz, and CheapOair. Kayak.com is unusual in linking to online travel agencies and hotel websites, allowing customers to choose whether to book directly on the hotel website or through an online travel agency. Google Hotel Finder is an experiment that lets users find hotel prices with Google, but does not offer to book hotels, just compare rates.
The difference between "tariff collector" and "search engine" is unclear, although different terms may imply different levels of cooperation between the companies involved.
In 2008, Ryanair threatened to cancel all reservations made on Ryanair flights made through metasearch engines, but later allowed the site to operate as long as they did not sell tickets or overload Ryanair servers.
In 2015, the Lufthansa Group (including Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Switzerland) announces the addition of additional charges for flights booked on other sites.
Bargain site
Travel bargain websites collect and publish low prices by advising consumers where to find them online (sometimes but not always via direct link). Rather than providing detailed search tools, these sites generally focus on advertised specials, such as last-minute sales from travel suppliers who want to deplete unused supplies; therefore, these sites often work best for flexible consumers about the goals and components of other major plans.
travel and tourism guides
Many websites take the digital version of a traditional guidebook, which aims to provide suggestions about destinations, attractions, accommodations, etc., which are well worth a visit and provide information on how to access them.
Most states, provinces and countries have their own conventions and visitor bureaus, which typically sponsor websites dedicated to promoting tourism in their respective areas. Tourism-dependent cities also operate websites that promote their goals, such as VEGAS.com for Las Vegas, Nevada.
Student travel agency
Some travel websites cater specifically for student audiences and an offer list of airline tickets and exclusive travel products. Key sites in this area include StudentUniverse and STA Travel.
Social travel website
A social travel website is a type of travel website that will see where users will go and pair it with other places they want to visit based on where others are going.
See also
- Internet booking engine
- Travel advisor
- Travel technology
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments