Delta increases share by squeezing online travel agencies and metasearch

Delta.com is making strides in increasing its share of ticket sales as the airline’s tough-guy approach with online travel agencies and metasearch engines seems to be working.

In fact, officials say that during the second quarter, which ended June 30, Delta.com’s share of ticket sales climbed 4 percentage points to 37% of all Delta tickets sold.

How did this happen?

Since last last year Delta has terminated its relationships with 21 online travel agencies and has barred other online travel agencies from showing Delta flights in metasearch engines such as Kayak, Bing Travel and Hipmunk.

Those 21 online travel agencies on Delta’s hit-list included CheapAir, CheapOair, Vegas.com, AirGorilla, Globester, BookIt.com and OneTravel.

Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity and Orbitz continue to sell Delta’s flights.

But, the changes mean if you see a Delta flight in a travel metasearch engine, the link will be to Delta.com and not to an OTA.

And, Delta also barred OTAs from showing interline flights under the Delta brand.

Delta, of course, also invested in and overhauled Delta.com to make it easier to use, officials say.

“And our strategy really is to control our content, both with respect to combinability [interlining] and scheduled display criteria, so that we make certain that our schedules are accurately displayed and there’s no combinability,” CEO Richard Anderson said during the airline’s second quarter earnings call July 27.

“And utlimately, if our fair rules are followed and our display and content rules are followed by OTAs, then the only question is their fees have got to be similar to what it would cost us to distribute on Delta.com,” Anderson added.

In the context of the website improvements, Anderson also mentioned a direct-connect agreement the airline has with Farelogix to enhance distribution to travel agencies and corporations.

In connection with that agreement, Delta is expected to re-introduce a travel agency portal.

Tnooz

Remember Fly.com? Travelzoo flight metasearch sites get redesign in US, UK and Germany

With all the buzz about Travelzoo Local Deals and its Top 20, you can be forgiven if you almost forgot that the deal publisher has a flight metasearch business, too.

Fly.com isn’t profitable yet, but it attracted a record 5 million searches in July, the company says, and its sites in the U.S., the UK and Germany just got a makeover. The search increase was 46% higher than the searches in July 2010.

Warren Chang, general manager of Fly.com, notes that the traffic increase occurred despite the fact that Fly.com ran TV ads around July 2010 and has no such ongoing campaign now.

He attributed the increased searches in part to more Fly.com widgets on Travelzoo hotel pages and increased direct traffic.

In addition to the homepage tweaks, the site has gone all — or partially — aeronautical.

As Fly.com crunches your flight query, the logos of online travel agency and airline partners — Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, lastminute.com, JetBlue, United, AirTran, Hawaiian, Delta and Frontier — flash before your eyes, or actually scroll right to left across two airline windows before the results pages appears.

It doesn’t exactly evoke the “feeling of sitting in the cockpit of a commercial airliner,” as Fly.com describes it, but it indeed elicits a “positive, fun feeling.”

“One of our greatest challenges is displaying these extremely detailed and comprehensive results in a clean, easy-to-use interface that loads in seconds,” Chang says. “With the new look and feel, we are confident we have done this successfully and are excited that our users will have an even more straightforward experience.”

In the U.S., Fly.com now displays a fare calendar, highlighting the cheapest days to fly, and you can filter results by such things as cabin types, trip and layover duration, as well as by airline, stops and price.

The fare calendar data in the U.S. are supplied by ITA Software, and Fly.com is talking to partners in Europe to provide comparable data so the company can launch fare calendars in the UK and Germany, Chang says.

Fly.com also offers more side-by-side online travel agency fare comparisons than most metasearch sites do.

And, as it has done since late last year, you can click on a suitcase icon underneath a flight-search result to view the airline’s checked bag fees.

Despite all the attention garnered by Travelzoo Local Deals and the Travelzoo Top 20, Travelzoo’s Fly.com, along with Local Deals, are the twin pillars of the parent company’s strategy to increase revenue per subscriber.

And, part of management’s 2011 focus is to “bring Fly.com to profitability and build on SuperSearch profitability,” the company says.

All of this would be “positive and fun.”

Tnooz