Doug’s Mouthpiece – Droug.co.uk

Comparison sites in travel and why they are so hard to build

Online Stuff for Saddos written by Doug Scott

This page is getting traffic about the google comparator so click here

Ok this is one of my topics as we own www.carrentals.co.uk – the best car hire sites

Comparators in travel are mostly useless and everyone is having the same problems. The simple reasons are that prices and availability change rapidly and to make it a good user experience data needs to be upto date.

Every hotel company has a different code and description for the same hotel, stupid but its true. Hence the data needs to be firstly rationalised, so imagine 20 suppliers each with 50,000 hotels, thats 1 million hotel descriptions. These then need to be checked and cross referenced against each other so as to end up with one unique code for one hotel. So now we have something to start with. This will take you 5 to 10 man years to even vaguely get it right. But don’t expect it to be finished, as suppliers who aren’t very bright will change the id’s without telling anyone. So you better keep them staff to keep fixing problems.

Suppliers are also constantly changing their prices and hence pricing has to be done on the fly, which slows down the results.

Flights all have the same id for an airport, so its much easier there, but not so fast. Flights is a nightmare because to get real time prices for suppliers/airlines most have to interrogate the gds system. The gds system charges per enquiry, hence a good comparator with a large numbers of enquiries will cost the supplier/airline but make limited sales. Sites like Kayak, cache the prices, hence making the user experience bad as the prices are wrong. Of course you could do what CheapFlights do and not even bother getting the price and allow the companies advertising to be on your site just saying prices from….lucky their seo is good as most people think the site is useless.

Car hire is simple in comparison and matching 8000 depots with 40 suppliers is relatively simple. Of course pricing again has to be done on the fly. Only 1-3 years man work for the matching on that one.

My advice if you want to build a comparator in your bedroom, you are being stupid. You don’t have the resources. Partner with someone else.

My advice to a large corporate wanting to build a comparator . Click here . You will take forever.

Doug feeling like an expert

Feel free to stumble this OR

DIGG it – http://digg.com/travel_places/Travel_comparators_are_hard_to_build

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