Internet Business Group 2006

Folks - having recently left what I consider to be the market leader in travel on-line booking techology, I know Henoo will not be an easy project to make successful because of the way the travel industry is structured.

Either you are investing in time consuming cache technology, enabling search results to be returned quickly, before making a live connection with the supplier. How often do you update the data, how do you cope with returning holidays that are no longer available?

Or you make a live connection each time a consumer searches - meaning potentially millions of connections which becomes heavy on bandwidth and infrastructure costs, especially if your suppliers are running on legacy systems with bolt-on web applications.

Or you do a combination of both.... and that is before you get to the much bigger challenge of effecting a successful on-line booking.

Actually adding feeds to new suppliers is not easy as well - we talk about common language such as xml, but in reality links to travel suppliers are often bespoke, being expensive and time consuming to develop.

There are no quick wins here!

I've tried 2 searches this morning. There are no holidays available to Austria a week either side of the 19th Jan - peak ski-ing season. My other PC is still checking prices for for LGW Spain 26 Jan - 334 properties ...and has been for last 10 mins.

I have no axe to grind other than inform. In fact I have now formed a ppc / seo marketing company focused specifically on the travel industry. Maz - perhaps we could bring to bear all of our experience to help you and your investors - if so just let me know the best way of making a contact with you. I'll look at this thread daily for next few days.