This page is getting traffic about the google comparator so click here
Ok this is one of my topics as we own www.carrentals.co.uk - the best car hire sites
Comparators in travel are mostly useless and everyone is having the same problems. The simple reasons are that prices and availability change rapidly and to make it a good user experience data needs to be upto date.
Every hotel company has a different code and description for the same hotel, stupid but its true. Hence the data needs to be firstly rationalised, so imagine 20 suppliers each with 50,000 hotels, thats 1 million hotel descriptions. These then need to be checked and cross referenced against each other so as to end up with one unique code for one hotel. So now we have something to start with. This will take you 5 to 10 man years to even vaguely get it right. But don’t expect it to be finished, as suppliers who aren’t very bright will change the id’s without telling anyone. So you better keep them staff to keep fixing problems.
Suppliers are also constantly changing their prices and hence pricing has to be done on the fly, which slows down the results.
Flights all have the same id for an airport, so its much easier there, but not so fast. Flights is a nightmare because to get real time prices for suppliers/airlines most have to interrogate the gds system. The gds system charges per enquiry, hence a good comparator with a large numbers of enquiries will cost the supplier/airline but make limited sales. Sites like Kayak, cache the prices, hence making the user experience bad as the prices are wrong. Of course you could do what CheapFlights do and not even bother getting the price and allow the companies advertising to be on your site just saying prices from….lucky their seo is good as most people think the site is useless.
Car hire is simple in comparison and matching 8000 depots with 40 suppliers is relatively simple. Of course pricing again has to be done on the fly. Only 1-3 years man work for the matching on that one.
My advice if you want to build a comparator in your bedroom, you are being stupid. You don’t have the resources. Partner with someone else.
My advice to a large corporate wanting to build a comparator . Click here . You will take forever.
Doug feeling like an expert
Feel free to stumble this OR
DIGG it - http://digg.com/travel_places/Travel_comparators_are_hard_to_build
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Mate, I couldn’t agree more. Had I known how hard it would be to even integrate dynamic packaging, I would have left all of our travel websites as quote/lead generators and stuck to Adsense and Aff ;)
The craziness is that even some major suppliers have the same hotels listed several times with diffent ID’s !
March 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am
You make some valid points. The fact remains that most people in this game are hardly well-placed to succeed. Resource as you state is an overriding issue, but moreso, few if any companies can cross the divide of understanding - which lies between the technical (getting the data, assimilating it, making it useable) and selling the concept (understanding what people want, and getting people booking). Some sites are great technically, but you wouldn’t book anything on them even if they were the last one left on Google. Others have great product, but are shit functionally.
Taking Google as the ultimate comparator, even they have a shedload of faults, so it just goes to show that this is still a developing area of online, which suggests why so many are interested in it - but then realise that the barriers to entry are extremely high.
March 29th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Globus, hopefully we will get it right on http://www.asap.co.uk :)
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Hello,
We have build this search engine for flight - http://www.trabber.co.uk
We also have in spain a search engine for Hotel - http://www.trabber.com/es/hoteles/
Most of what you say it is true but I think we have managed to do a nice development.
Let me know your thouhts.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Yes not bad but several issues
Why do your flight search feature so few players
Why such a bad name:)
Doug