Focusing on delivering community-driven experience

EyeforTravel.com Exclusive: Interview with Jasper Malcolmson, Director, Yahoo! Travel

Yahoo recently introduced a new personalised version of its travel planning website, that “merges online community, bargain hunting, and Internet mapping technology”.

Sharing the plans for the future, Jasper Malcolmson, Director, Yahoo! Travel recently told EyeforTravel.com’s Ritesh Gupta that the company is “committed to offering our 10 million monthly users with the opportunity to come to Yahoo! Travel and find unique resources that will help you plan your ideal trip.”

“Over the course of last year, we innovated and worked to shape the way people research and book travel online. We are even more focused on this now, and are very excited about several projects we plan to introduce over the course of the next several months,” he said.

In an interview, Malcolmson spoke about developments related to Yahoo!’s three major business lines related to the travel in the US - search engine, travel.yahoo.com and graphical media advertising products. Excerpts:

Kindly share info on latest developments related to Yahoo!’s three major business lines related to the travel in the US - search engine, travel.yahoo.com and graphical media advertising products?

The area that is the most exciting for me to talk about, as the director of Yahoo! Travel, is what we’re doing at travel.yahoo.com.

Our site has evolved over the last several years into a dynamic and comprehensive online travel resource that helps travelers make more informed decisions. We do this by offering free, relevant, unbiased and up-to-date travel information, first-hand advice and reviews from a vast community of travelers.

Some of most exciting, recent initiatives in Yahoo! Travel have been around:
·          Trip Planner: A first of its kind, Trip Planner demonstrates Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation in social search and online communities by creating a living atlas of travel information. We offer more than 700,000 Trip Plans.
·          FareChase: The full integration of Yahoo! FareChase into the Yahoo! main search network gives consumers organized access to the most comprehensive index of travel sites in the world. In addition to searching dozens of airlines, we also search the largest database of hotels in the industry, the Yahoo! Travel Hotel Guides which has over 175,000 hotels.
·          Travel Guides: We updated our Travel Guides and made them easier to use, with more integrated information. Our Travel Guides now cover 45,000 cities, 500,000 activities and places to stay, and include more than 350,000 photos (stock and user-contributed).
·          Yahoo! Answers Integration: Tapping into the collective psyche of the web, Yahoo! Answers has more than 90 millions users and more than 250 million answers to-date. Yahoo! Travel users can tap directly into this vast resource.
·          Yahoo! Maps Integration: Yahoo! Travel is fully integrated with the newest version of Y! Maps (street and satellite) in Guides, FareChase and Trip Planner.

In terms of developments related to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Travel has been working very closely to ensure close alignment with our web search team. With some studies demonstrating that as many as 7 in 10 clicks go to natural search results, it’s clear that ensuring a user-friendly presence in natural search is critical. For example, Yahoo! FareChase’s incorporation within the Yahoo! network gives users the ability to search for flights or hotels with a simple web search directly from Yahoo.com. Simply type your desired destination followed by “flights” or type in “compare <destination> hotels” and a Yahoo! shortcut to FareChase appears with the most current – and best-priced – flight or hotel for your desired location.

What new trends have you witnessed as far as the US online travel market is concerned? How is consumer’s preference changing with access to various tools, visually-rich hotel content, low price guarantee etc?

The trend around user-generated content, or “Travel 2.0,” is certainly a major trend we’ve seen emerge in our industry. The web’s influence on the travel industry is no longer limited to just booking tickets. We’re in the process of seeing the online travel industry re-create itself via the influence of Web 2.0. People want experiences, recommendations and connectivity.

We believe that travel-related booking is not just about the lowest price. Price is obviously a huge factor, but people take a lot of other things into consideration when booking a hotel or flight. They have certain requirements when it comes to location, flight times, etc., and we want to offer products that allow people to make informed decisions about their choices, beyond just price.

Last year you told me – there was room for improvements when it came to coordinating various sales forces, to provide advertisers with a single point of contact for the broadest possible combination of online advertising needs. How have you ensured there is no gap in this?

We are doing a number of things to ensure alignment amongst our sales teams and to provide more customised solutions to advertisers. We tailor our approach for marketers so that we can sell them what, and how, they want to buy.  If the display and direct sides of the customers’ business are separate, we sell to them separately.  When a customer wants a holistic marketing solution that combines both display and search, our sales teams are equipped to provide that as well.

Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Main have been two of the largest sites for online social interaction for some time. But of late, travel meta-search engines have been strengthening their social media networking tools/ sites (for example SideStep.com’s series of deals). How do you assess this from Yahoo!’s perspective?

Yahoo! is one of the first companies to realise the potential of social networking and we plan to remain a key player in this business. We believe social media is the next generation of the Internet, and our strategy is to foster social media by blending all types of web content in a way that creates a unique, community-driven experience. Some of our biggest successes in the social media category to-date, include:
·          Yahoo! Answers, which Yahoo! developed internally, has surpassed 90 million unique users and 250 million answers worldwide.   
·          Flickr has a total of 28 million unique visitors. There are 475 million photos in total and one million photos are uploaded daily. 80 percent of the photos are public.
·          Yahoo! Groups has reached 100 million members and nearly 1 in 10 Internet users is a member of a Yahoo! Group.

Last year you told me - social search tools and algorithmic search tools will start to coalesce. What is the latest on this?

Yahoo! Search’s primary focus is algorithmic Web search, but we view social search as a supplement to traditional search, which works well for satisfying a wide variety of information needs. Yahoo! is building services for consumers to tap into people’s knowledge for everyday questions and a great example of this is the integration of Yahoo! Answers with Yahoo! Search. If you search for “best beaches in Costa Rica,” you are likely to see similar Answers integrated within the main search results. We believe this delivers a more comprehensive and satisfying search experience by complementing algorithmic Web search with human insight, or “Better Search Through People.” You’ll continue to see us working to

Travel research online had been more dominated by those seeking speed and convenience. But this has been changing with baby boomer generation becoming more technologically proficient. Which is the best way to cater to various sections of audience when it comes to assisting them in their planning and buying process?

Yes, there is definitely a growing online user base for travel and this audience is increasingly sophisticated, and looking to use the Web as a travel resource, beyond just the booking process. Sites like Eons are doing an incredibly good job at reaching a certain demographic and really understanding their desires and preferences. One of the best ways we can meet the needs of our users is by offering choice and flexibility. We have built both of these concepts into all of our products and will continue to do so in the future.