Thursday, October 27, 2005

Thurs - Yahoo launches into online travel

Yahoo yesterday launched an online travel agency that helps consumers not only book flights and hotels, but plan, organise and share trips via the internet.

The move reflects a wider trend going on in online travel, where the industry moves beyond travel booking to a more comprehensive service including maps, reviews, photos and user-generated content such as weblogs.

Yahoo seems to have spent 18 months putting together Trip Planner and it weaves together many of Yahoo's existing services and recent acquisitons, including maps, bulleting boards, local lsitings and online photo sharing form Flickr.

Well, you can't blame Yahoo, after all online travel is the largest e-commerce segement and worth a huge amount annually. All the leaders in the market are pure play travel sites so its probably time that a portal shakes the market up. And Yahoo sure have a huge dedicated customer base to sell to.

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