It’s time to officially conclude the work on Etrip, explain what we tried to do and try and analyze where is the online travel market heading without us.
We started Etrip 3 years ago as an online travel agency, believing that through serving customer needs we would be able to identify unanswered needs and address innovative solutions.
For instance, one of the ideas was: ‘save low cost’, which aimed to build a marketplace for swapping unused low cost flight tickets which are transferable, unlike traditional airlines tickets. We did not develop the idea further since we thought that raising awareness to the service would require a too heavy investment. We had other similar ideas that had the same ‘no-go’ faith, until Etrip was brought to life.
It started as ‘Fetch!’, whose original elevator pitch was: “a human based service that gives you a chosen quote for your travel from every available source in the world. To receive the source of this quote you need to pay a small fee (i.e. $20) – and the source is yours to use for the reservation.”
The name Fetch was retired in favor of Etrip and the business model changed: we’d use an engine, comparing every potential travel supplier in the market, but provide the service for free. We started by pulling a live market test, in which we did use human search in order to answer customers flight queries (the infrastructure still lives on Etrip.nl) – the market research proved that our human team was able to find better prices than Kayak.com in 63.4% of the cases, saving on average 52.5 EUR. Our searchers found those fares simply because they set no-boundaries as to where they would search. Something that Kayak and any other search engine do by choice: they only search providers who’d pay if the visitor clicks their offer.
Once proving that the market gap was there, we were set to develop Etrip as a ‘travel reservations gateway’ which would be a competing model to travel search engines such as Kayak.
Our plan was to bring users the ‘perfect’ travel comparison by reviewing every established supplier in the market, without trying to charge these suppliers for leads. Above this structure we wanted to build a set of complimentary products such as service for booking, travel insurance sale or pre-sale of airport services. The slideshow embedded below is one that we showed potential investors and can help see where we were heading.
Despite long efforts, we never actually managed to get enough venture capital to execute our search engine, which was the core of it all. We received some grants and small seed capital, but since we lacked a dedicated techie in the core team it was hard getting passed the ‘engine obstacle’ without paying for developers, and we were left with plans and slideshows, but could not create any real added value.
The Travel Market Today
The previous post in this blog reviewed online travel trends in Europe, and since its publication last summer not much have changed. Kayak, the worldwide market leader in travel comparison, have opened versions for 9 European countries (still shy of skyscanner’s 16), and that, together with the inclusion of more airlines such as Easyjet (but not yet Ryanair) has helped it gain ground in some markets and its now as popular as skyscanner is in countries such as Spain and Belgium.
However, skyscanner, wegolo.com or the newest joiner qfly.nl are better tools when searching for flights within Europe, and Kayak, Bing Travel, Mobissimo or their newest competitor, fly.com, still needs to be compared with other travel agencies when searching for international flights.
Moreover, the promise of ancillary services is still not introduced to travel search engines, which prefer to remain solely a search channel and rely on ads and click through fees as sole revenue models.
We believe that both promises are still there, but would not have the chance to accomplish it under Etrip.
What’s next for Fly Open Sky?
Fly Open Sky, the company behind Etrip, would launch iBidlow.com in November. iBidlow would make purchases on the opaque travel websites Hotwire.com and Priceline.com more knowledgeable using consumers generated content, helping consumers make better deals on these sites.
We plan to launch similar services in the future for other small ‘gaps’ in the online travel market, hoping that the work done on Etrip would inspire another service in closing the search gap.
