Written on July 16, 2008 – 10:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A major acquisition and a round of funding sparked up the European travel industry yesterday. Expedia bought Italy-based Venere, German booking site Swoodoo received two million euros from Deutsche Telekom. How’s that for the peak season?
Expedia improves its European position
Chances are high that you’ve once booked a flight or hotel at US-based travel site Expedia, since it offers localized sites for most European countries and has many subsites like TripAdvisor and Hotels.com. The acquisition of Venere strengthens their position in Europe, as Venere lists about 29,000 hotels - mostly from this continent. 10,000 of these hotels were unavailable on Expedia, most of these new hotels for Expedia are based in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Financial details are undisclosed.
Deutsche Telekom works on web presence
The two-year old travel site Swoodoo was welcomed in the T-Online Ventures portfolio - the online division of Deutsche Telekom. Not with an acquisition, but with 2 million euros and upcoming cooperation with several of T-Online Ventures’s sub sites. Swoodoo will use the money for development, marketing, and growing beyond the borders Germany.
Is it the season?
So why do these strategic moves take place now? My simple guess: both sites have been performing really well in the hectic period before the summer. They’ve proved to be financial healthy and have enough traffic coming in. Reasons enough for Deutsche-Telekom and Expedia to make their moves.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 29, 2008 – 1:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
At several of the conferences I visited this year, I saw Matt Colebourne from CoComment on stage, telling business people to participate in the online conversations. Rather than just ignoring or hiding from them, companies should surprise the bloggers and their readers by showing them that they’re listening.
Some companies really get this. When co-editor Patrick and me had a bad travel experience with Venere, Renée De Meo from the booking site responded to my blog post and proved it was the mistake of the hotel. That’s the kind of alertness a company’s communications division needs.
So tracking blog posts is fairly simple, you either use a service like CoComment or Google Alerts. But how do you follow the thousands of discussions on Twitter? The conversations there are almost as influential as the ones in the blogosphere, as Nate Elliot proved during the Next08 conference. TweetScan and Summize probably look a bit too obscure for your average communications manager, but a new Get Satisfaction service might help the companies out.
The support-experts from Get Satisfaction developed Overheard, a feature that discovers what customers are saying about a given company on Twitter. On top of that, they make it fairly simple for not so savvy people to respond quickly. And if you’re familiar with Get Satisfaction, you’ll know the design is customizable to the max (take a look at the FAQ page of our sponsor Wakoopa to see what I mean).
Although participating in conversation is of the utmost importance for companies - bloggers, Twitter users, and readers are still happily surprised when you actually do so. You’ll really make an impression, so consider to give Get Satisfaction and similar services a try. It’s time to embrace the 2.0 mind set.
Written on May 19, 2008 – 1:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Update: By sending fax and email log files, Renée De Meo from Venere proved that it was actually the mistake of the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo.
For most web professionals, the Internet is like a religion. We evangelize the almost endless opportunities of the medium and try to convince people to trust new technologies. It almost sucks us up, and creates some sort of tunnel vision. So when a new technology lets us down, it hits us extra hard. It happened to my co-editor Patrick and me.
We traveled to Hamburg, Germany last Thursday to visit the one-day conference Next08. Right before we left, I booked a hotel via Venere.com. Quite last minute, but hey, we’re busy guys. Moreover, that’s where these services are for. I browsed around, looking for an affordable hotel within walking distance of the Next08 venue and ended up at the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo. When I completed the reservation, I was happily surprised with the confirmation message via SMS.
So after a rather tiring six-hour drive with traffic jams and without a navigation system, Patrick and me arrived at the hotel. A bit stressed, as we were late for the Facebook Developer Garage after party. Yet when we arrived at the reception, a nasty surprise was waiting for us. After a lot of shaking no with her head and desperate looks in our direction, the receptionist told us the hotel was fully booked and she couldn’t find our reservation. When I showed her the confirmation page on my MacBook, she told me that it should have been impossible for us to make a reservation on that very day, as she had closed the booking system in the morning.
There we were standing, two angry young men. Utterly disappointed in the so-beloved medium. In our anger, we decided to write a blog post titled: “when the Internet fails”. Apparently, the disappointment got to our head, as it wasn’t the fault of the medium. It was the fault of one of world’s largest booking sites, Venere. The technology didn’t fail, the people behind the technology did.
Our faith in the web was renewed when the receptionist gave us two WLAN access cards. Within five minutes, we found an excellent last minute offer from a design hotel called Arcotel Rubin. Two minutes later we booked the room on Hotels.com and ten minutes later we were checking into a very comfortable hotel.
So all you fellow technology evangelists out there. Next time you try to make people trust the web, use this story to explain that when new technology fails, it’s often the people and not the whole medium. That might sound familiar to them, as it’s often also the case with technologies that exist for decades. Explain to them that they can use a broad range of new super handy tools, with the same or less risk.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
