Travel deal newsletter faceoff. Which day best for travel deals?
The marketing department of CheapTickets.com (owned by Travelport and aligned with online travel agency Orbitz) has boldly proclaimed Tuesday the “Day of Deals.”
Consensus among my wired, deal-seeking friends has long been that »Wednesday is the best day« to scope out travel deals online.
If you subscribe to any of the big travel website deal newsletters, such as Travelzoo and SideStep (recently merged with Kayak), you know they land in your inbox on Wednesday — even if you don’t read them until Friday.
But are all of these much-hyped vacation specials true “deals,” or are they the cream of the sponsored-content crop? Unlike on pure journalism websites, what’s not always 100% transparent on the sites mentioned is which are paid placements and which are genuine, unbiased “editors’ picks.”
Which travel e-newsletters and deal feeds do you subscribe to? Which do you find most useful and trustworthy?
For the record, here’s CheapTickets editorial policy: “While CheapTickets may be affiliated with a particular property mentioned herein, the views expressed herein are the blogger’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CheapTickets.”
Travelzoo states: “While it does cost companies money to have their deals listed … no amount of money ensures that a deal will get listed.” And “More than 900 leading travel companies list their very best offers with us. We have deal experts (we call them producers) located in 19 offices across North America, Europe and Asia to work with these companies and to provide you the smartest information.”
For their part, SideStep says: “SideStep gets paid if you click on a partner whose advertisement is marked on SideStep as a sponsored result.”
So, these tough questions raised, at the end of the day, who can deal-seeking consumers trust?
In good-value adventure,
— Andrew
Sr. Producer, Los Angeles Times Travel
[Video: CheapTickets]
6 Comments on “Travel deal newsletter faceoff. Which day best for travel deals?”
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April 8th, 2008 at 5:01 am
Andrew,
The question about who has “the real deal” is a great one. At Kayak, we ask ourselves that all the time (full disclosure: I’m the VP Marketing at Kayak). We’ve tried adding a deals round-up to our blog on Thursday to go through all the deals emails (both ours and other sites) and find the ones that we think are the most compelling. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these round-ups. Are they interesting/valuable to consumers?
Regards,
drew
April 8th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Drew, Thanks for the heads up on your Thursday deals. I’ll have a look.
— Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel Deal Blogger
April 8th, 2008 at 10:22 am
We are in an age of non-transparent travel consolidation, wherein consumers have fewer choices, but don’t realize it. Companies like Expedia and Internet Brands have been quietly buying up sites like Trip Advisor, Smarter Travel, Cruise Critic, Seat Guru, Booking Buddy, Travel Library,Travelpod, Flyertalk, Slowtravel, CruiseMates, CruiseReviews, Vacationhomes, Vacation Timeshare and Rentals, Wikitravel, World66 and Vamoose.com.
This is definitely the era of travel buyer beware.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Thanks for chiming in, Drew. And for the full disclosure.
Looks like your team is doing a pretty good job of tracking breaking air travel-related news there on your blog.
Looking at your most recent deal roundup, from last Thurs, the first thing I notice is that your permalink pages don’t have a time/datestamp. No big deal. Trust me, we know here how quirky Wordpress can be, even if you’ve got the latest install.
Regarding transparency, I like how your site has the “How does Kayak work?” link front-and-center on the homepage (not buried in fine print, like so many other travel sites).
As your About page spells out: “Since Kayak doesn’t sell anything, there’s no hidden agenda or biased displays. And, Kayak is free to use.”
Well, ok, the “How we make money.” bit is at the very bottom, but I still give your site an ~A- for opaqueness. Bottom line:
“Kayak makes money when travelers click on our advertisements.” Fair enough.
As for the deals, I like the direct, deep (AirfareWatchdog-style) links straight to the suppliers, even if I then have to log in for full details, like for BA.
My favorite aspect? The seasonal commentary on each selection, very insightful.
There’s nothing worse than a rock-bottom deal that lands you super-cheap, say, in India just in time for the monsoon…but they forgot to mention that you should pack rehydration salts, flip-flops, mosquito repellent and a rain poncho! Deal, or no deal?
I see Kayak offers city pair deal alerts by RSS and via email. How about a destination-targeted (opt-in by desired destination or city pair) RSS feed dedicated to your blogged deal selections?
Given my budding personal interest in family-oriented travel these days, I’d also like to see more ‘thematic’ deal picks that focus less on destination and price and more on subjective, qualitative judgments relating to specific activities and interests.
How’s that for a wish list?
Finally, looks like you guys don’t get many comments on your blog — would be nice to see more readers weighing in afterwards with specific feedback on if your hand-picked deals were all they were cracked up to be.
— Andrew
Sr. Producer, Los Angeles Times Travel
April 8th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Andrew:
As Travel 2.0 continues to evolve, we believe that the irony of these travel “deals” will become more transparent. The next generation of online travel sites will have the consumers’ best interests in mind, providing travelers with the resources they need to collaborate on the best deals and share trustworthy information. Thus, consumers become the deal finders - not the travel sites.
With our own recently launched website, VibeAgent.com (another full disclosure, VP of Marketing at VibeAgent), we designed our platform with the question of “who can deal-seeking consumers trust” in mind and aimed to serve as an unbiased tool for our users to find the real hotel deals out there.
-Dennis
April 8th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Thanks for that analysis, Dennis. If one more Marketing VP weighs in, I think we’ll have set a record here for our blog.
Any Marketing or PR folks reading from Sherman’s Travel, Smarter Travel, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, SideStep, SkyAuction?
I should add that my ‘Producer’ role here at LAT is purely editorial, unlike, say, at Travelzoo, where their Producer jobs are posted under Marketing on job boards, and the role is described in terms like: “…work with national and regional clients in maximizing performance for their ads
while improving client relationships.”
[from current LA "Client & Staff Manager (at Travelzoo called Executive Producer)" job posting]