U.S. online travel agencies end airline booking fees

Jun 1, 2009 - CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fees charged by the four U.S. online travel agencies to book most flights could be a thing of the past as the companies, hungry for market share, try to make their offerings more appealing to the traveling public.

Orbitz Worldwide on Monday said it has permanently removed airline ticket booking fees on domestic and international flights. Travelocity said on Monday it would continue to waive flight booking fees. Expedia Inc said the same thing last week.

The fee waivers at those companies began this year as promotions. Priceline.com has not charged fees for published price airline bookings since 2007.

While the new fee waivers could stimulate travel bookings, they also threaten to erode revenue for the companies, which have been suffering as the recession takes its toll on spending for business and leisure trips.

"To be honest, when they say permanent, I don't know how truthful that really is," said Morningstar analyst Warren Miller.

"I can't see them not coming back at some point. That's how they make money," he said.

Miller noted that online travel agencies typically make about 15 percent of their total bookings value in fees.

Of the three publicly traded online travel agencies -- Expedia, Priceline and Orbitz -- only Priceline saw bookings growth in the first quarter.

The companies have been hit hard by economic woes and also by airline capacity cuts that reduce the number of tickets the travel agencies can sell.

(Reporting by Kyle Peterson, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

<< Back to Top

Bing Escalates Search Wars with Early Launch

Jun 1, 2009 - Microsoft apparently just couldn't wait to let the world experience its latest search-engine platform. The software giant launched Bing two days ahead of its June 3 release after offering a sneak peak at last week's D: All Things Digital conference.

With Bing, Microsoft is renewing its focus on relevancy. Ipos Insights reports that 66 percent of people are using online search more frequently to make complex decisions. Bing aims to help slice and dice information for that majority.

Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: Deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to more confident decisions.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."

The Decision Engine

Bing is being positioned as a "decision engine." Microsoft said Bing innovates on core search areas such as entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition, and document summarization technology, as well as a new user-experience model that adapts to query types to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.

A feature called Deep Links allows more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer. Another dubbed Quick Preview is a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the site's relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, a feature designed to provide information within the body of the search-results page to minimize the need for additional clicks.

"Nearly 98 percent of the traffic at Live.com is passive (coming from MSN, etc.) and Bing will be an attempt by Microsoft to establish its search offering as a destination Web site with high active traffic," Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Agarwal said in a research note Monday. "In our view, though Microsoft's search technologies are ready for prime time, making a call on the success of Bing now will be premature."

Bing: Boom or Bust?

The new brand portfolio changes several other Microsoft search-related services. Microsoft's mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise. Technology from Microsoft's April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. Microsoft's popular cashback program is now called Bing cashback.

But is Microsoft betting too much on Bing? Bing does exactly what Microsoft said it would do, according to Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret. You can preview videos in the search without having to visit YouTube directly, he noted, and Bing is well suited for task-centric purchases. But Gartenberg doesn't expect Bing to go boom in the search-engine competition.

"It just doesn't appear that Bing is going to change the paradigm for search in such a big way that it will have any short-term impact on Google," Gartenberg said. "We'll have to see how much time Microsoft spends marketing this, demonstrating the differentiating features, and how a consumer might want to use Bing instead of Google. That's going take a lot of time and effort, particularly when for most consumers, Google is the place they go first."

<< Back to Top

US newspaper ad revenue slide continues

Jun 1, 2009 - WASHINGTON (AFP) - US newspaper advertising revenue fell more than 28 percent in the first quarter of the year with both print and online posting declines, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Print advertising revenue fell 29.7 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the same period last year to 5.9 billion dollars, according to figures posted on the NAA website.

Online advertising revenue declined 13.4 percent during the period to 696.3 million dollars.

Print and online advertising revenue were down 28.3 percent to 6.6 billion dollars during the quarter while classified advertising revenue alone declined by 42.3 percent during the period to 1.46 billion dollars.

The weak revenue figures for the first quarter come on the heels of the worst year ever for the US newspaper industry.

Total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008 over the previous year to 37.8 billion dollars, according to the NAA.

The US newspaper industry has been struggling with competition from free classified ad sites such as Craigslist and the migration of readers to free sites online.

The industry has been hit by a wave of bankruptcies, job cuts and closures over the past few months including a bankruptcy filing by the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other major papers.

The 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor went online-only earlier this year and two major dailies, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have shut down in recent months.

Top US newspaper executives held a meeting in Chicago last week to discuss the future of the troubled industry amid growing moves towards charging readers for news on the Web.

<< Back to Top