"Travel-related booking is not just about the lowest price": Yahoo!'s Jasper Malcolmson

EFT ExclusiveYahoo! is building services for consumers to tap into people's knowledge for everyday questions.

Published: 08 May 2007

EFT Exclusive

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, according to Jasper Malcolmson, Director, Yahoo! Travel.

"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," said Malcolmson. "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'."

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.

So how Yahoo! assesses the situation currently?

"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 one in 10
Internet users is a member of a Yahoo! Group."

On the trends in the US online travel market, Malcolmson told
EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta, "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."

Related Reads

comments powered by Disqus