Interview with Brett Snyder, business director, Travel, PriceGrabber.com

How do you assess progress made by pricegrabber.com's travel section
this year? How has the travel offering shaped in the recent past?

Our mission at PriceGrabber Travel is to offer the most relevant
information to our customers so they can make the best travel purchase
decisions for themselves.  Considering that we have signed up a great
variety of travel sites and made substantial improvements to our
functionality since we began this spring, I would say we have certainly
made excellent progress.  Soon, we expect to have a new more
user-friendly interface with better features including multiple search
options and more relevant information.  We are also currently working on
enabling both product and seller differentiation.   

How do your operations (specifically travel offerings) differ from those
in other markets like Latin America or Europe?

We show travel inventory from around the globe, and we spend a great
deal of time trying to expand our reach even further.  We are very
competitive in our offerings.  As of now, you can only find those
offerings on our US site, but as we grow, we would expect to eventually
expand to the other PriceGrabber.com sites in places like the UK,
Mexico, Brazil, and more.

How do you keep track of the way consumers use such online services? Is
there any major change in the way such services are used?

We look at PriceGrabber Travel as really being the next step for
customers in online travel search.  Currently, online customers have to
choose from several sites to make their travel plans, and they
potentially have to use a whole different set of sites to do research
beforehand.  We are looking to aggregate not only availability and
reservations information but also general travel planning information,
so that our customers can do their research, find what they want, and by
the time we send them on to the travel companies, they are highly
qualified buyers.

The company had earlier announced partnership with MSN.com. How has this
shaped up?

The partnership with MSN.com has introduced many new customers to the
PriceGrabber product, and it has been quite successful.  At this time,
our Travel product is not included in the partnership.

How do you think your role is evolving with emergence of meta travel
search engines?

As a travel Metasearch engine, PriceGrabber is clearly going to benefit
from this increase in popularity.

What new challenges have you witnessed from operations perspective and
how are you responding to them?

Of course the most difficult challenge for any Metasearch engine is to
find a way to bring traffic to the site.  Fortunately, our traffic of
over 18 million unique customers at PriceGrabber.com serves as a natural
initial audience for our new product. 

What are the salient and unique features of your online search
offerings?

We are focusing on providing the most relevant information to our
customers so they can make the best travel purchase decisions for
themselves.  This includes things such as product and seller
differentiation along with a host of features that will help our
customers research their options.  For example, though price and
schedule are the main drivers for air purchases, there are many other
factors that can influence a purchase to some extent and we plan to make
those available to our customers.

How have you made operations user-friendly?

Our user interface is clean and easy to use for the customer.  There is
no clutter of information and we are making it easy for our customers to
find what they want.  In addition, we will begin adding new features,
such as multiple ways to search, that will enable the customer to take
control of the search process.  They will be able to choose how they
want to search, what they want to see, and who they want to buy from.

What is going to be your focus in near future?

Our focus is on providing the most relevant information to our customers
so they can make the best travel purchase decisions for themselves.