There are now two blogs dedicated to comparison shopping engines – the excellent Organized Shopping and the new Comparison Engines. The author’s got strong content and obviously watches the space closely – he’s an actual client of and investor in (ouch) the engines he watches. He’s already posted interviews from outgoing Shopping.com CEO Dan Ciporin and SideStep former CEO and board member Brian Barth. In the interview with Barth, there’s this gem:
On Shopping.com entering the travel market: “Shopping.com is thinking about the problem in the wrong way. The feed model they use for consumer products makes it difficult to handle dynamic content. And prices on cars, hotels, and flights are changing every couple minutes.”
He went on to say that “With a number such as $100mm in travel referrals, Shopping.com would get limited attention from large travel providers. It would be lower cost, lower risk, and more profitable for Shopping.com to partner with a company like SideStep, which is responsible for over $1b in referrals. “
Two things to note in the above paragraph. First, the ‘feed model,’ which involves a whole lot of processing of poorly-structured data, has got to be more of a technical challenge than a real-time pinger, which is just an API that makes a call to a travel supplier’s server and says ‘hey, what’ve you got for this query?’ It’d take some resources, but Shopping.com could build SideStep-like travel functionality if they wanted to. They wouldn’t even be the first ‘feed model’ comparison shopping site to do so.
Second, with ‘$100mm in travel referrals’, the company would get ‘limited attention’ from the travel providers? $100mm?! If this is true, that’s the real barrier to entry – the travel industry is foolishly acting as a gatekeeper, blocking out new players who can’t drive massive traffic. They’re not just lopping off the long tail, they’re throwing away everything back of mid-torso. No doubt the problem’s compounded by the state of the booking and reservation systems themselves, which are no doubt ancient and a bit testy to integrate with. (It would not surprise me a bit if they were also prohibitively expensive.) But the primary problem is the closed nature of the system. The data needs to be free.
The travel industry is overdue for a visionary, someone who could make their offerings as easy to query through an API as Amazon’s book catalog. Let us check for availability and pricing through a simple REST call. Open the systems up to everybody. There are thousands of developers out there who’ll eagerly build new and innovative ways of searching for and booking travel deals – applications you’ve never even thought of, let alone considered – if you’ll only give them access. They’ll make money making you money. What could make more sense than that?
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