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                             THE STANDARD'S
                        T E C H  T R A V E L E R
         Travel and the Travel Industry in the New Millennium
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                                        | http://www.thestandard.com |

Monday, February 5, 2001

NEWS BRIEFS:
* QuickAid Healed? ... For Biztravel, Time Now Less Valuable ... SAS
in the Sky With Wireless

TOP STORY:
* Travel Sites Get Personal

SITE REVIEW:
* Room12.com

NEWS BRIEFS
~~~~~~~~~~~
QUICKAID HEALED? QuickAid.com, a venerable source of airport
information links since the mid-1990s, is back online after a brief
hiatus and a change of stewardship. The new owner, an independent
entrepreneur named Joe Hunkins, says he acquired the domain last month
from CAIS Internet, which was bought out by Cisco Systems in December.
Despite significant traffic, Cisco chose not to keep the domain as
part of its acquisition of CAIS. "I'm still in the process of figuring
out the future of the project," Hunkins said, "but I'm confident that
I can keep the service fast, free and with a much more accurate data
set based on the actual airport info."

FOR BIZTRAVEL, TIME NOW LESS LUCRATIVE: Biztravel.com, Rosenbluth
Interactive's online travel agency, has revised a 10-month-old service
guarantee that promised customers significant refunds for delayed or
canceled flights on six major airlines. Under the original policy, the
agency offered refunds of $100 for flights arriving more than 30
minutes late, $200 for flights arriving more than hour late and full
refunds for all canceled flights or flights arriving more than two
hours late. As of Jan. 23, Biztravel.com customers will get only $25
for 30-minute delays, $50 for one-hour delays and $100 for flights
canceled or delayed more than two hours. The revised policy, which
applies to flights on American Airlines, Continental Airlines, US
Airways, British Airways, Air France and Japan Airlines, also provides
service guarantees for some hotel chains and car rental companies, as
well as payouts for lost luggage, botched seat assignments and missed
wake-up calls.

SAS IN THE SKY WITH WIRELESS: Scandinavian Airlines System has
announced plans to test a wireless in-flight computer network that
will allow passengers to use portable computers to send and receive
e-mail and view Web pages cached on an onboard server. The system
marries a local area network developed for commercial aircraft by
Seattle-based Tenzing Communications with wireless technology supplied
by Telia, a Swedish telecommunications company that also provides
wireless Internet access in airports and other public areas. For more
on Tenzing's technology, see the Jan. 22 edition of Tech Traveler.

GOING BROKE GETS EASIER: Online travel retailer Away.com has teamed up
with MBNA America Bank to offer unsecured lines of credit to finance
vacation packages. Travelers may use an online application form (or
provide application information over the phone) to request a credit
line of up to $25,000 for trips booked on the site. Interest rates
vary, and participants may take up to 48 months to pay for their
purchases.

TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
Travel Sites Get Personal

A host of customized trip-planning sites look to fill a hole dug by
Expedia and Travelocity.

By Morris Dye

For travelers with a pretty good idea of where they want to go,
services like Expedia and Travelocity.com offer a decent deal.
Efficient and user-friendly, the sites, for all their snags, allow
travelers to book an itinerary with relative ease; most people who use
them plan an entire trip without ever contacting another human being.

But while the services achieve a number of their goals, they ignore a
substantial portion of the traveling population - those looking for a
little advice. Enter sites like VacationCoach, eGulliver.com and
Conde Nast Traveler's Concierge.com, all of which can be viewed
as reactions to the general trend toward self-service sales a la
Expedia and instead seek a more customizable approach.

Concierge.com recently rolled out a feature called Place Wizard, which
helps users sort through a pool of more than 650 holiday destinations.
Users can input a list of criteria - say, a budget-friendly place in
Central America with a laid-back atmosphere and attractive beaches.
The site will return a ranked list of destinations. Another site,
VacationCoach, matches member profiles against a proprietary database
(as opposed to the all-too-common travel-site practice of recycling
content) of destination content. While many of the features resemble
that of Concierge.com, the site does offer some unique features, like
Someplace Similar, which recommends destinations based on what places
the user has enjoyed in the past.

In a similar vein comes sites like Webeenthere.com, a free service
that matches consumers with specialized travel agents Launched just
last month, Webeenthere is one of several companies that aim to
broaden the geographical reach of traditional full-service travel
agencies by hooking them up with customers via the Net. In essence,
these services do for online travel booking what 1-800-Dentist did for
oral hygiene, making it easier for consumers to locate agents with
particular areas of expertise. Among the more established players in
this field is eGulliver.com, which markets a network of more than
1,000 agents through its own Web site and through partnerships with
Expedia and VacationCoach. Meanwhile, Virtuoso.com, a long-standing
consortium of high-end travel consultants formerly known as API, has
partnered with Travelocity to offer a premium referral service for
Travelocity users who want help with their travel plans.

"The Internet travel space in its current form doesn't provide the
necessary level of service for travel shoppers," says Webeenthere CEO
David Feit. "This is why the conversion rate for online travel is so
low and so many people are looking online and booking offline."

The new crop of sites may prove useful for consumers, but the question
remains whether a business model lies under all that helpfulness. The
sites haven't fully resolved the question themselves, but they do seem
to be considering multiple options. For instance, VacationCoach Senior
VP Lora Kratchounova says her company hopes to draw revenue by
charging a $25 annual fee for content from its own site and, more
importantly, by licensing out their technology and content.

With shrinking commissions slowly sucking the life out of traditional
travel agency revenues, it's a good bet that companies will continue
to make more personalized forms of information available - for a
price.

For more on Expedia and other travel sites, please visit:
http://tm0.com/thestandard/sbct.cgi?s=108739277&i=300454&d=990453

SITE REVIEW
~~~~~~~~~~~
Room12.com

Many city guides created for the Web take full advantage of the
ability to publish large amounts of information at a relatively low
cost, with the likes of Digital City and Ticketmaster's Citysearch
posting encyclopedic directories of hotels, restaurants and
attractions. The creators of Room 12 have chosen a very different
path. The site currently offers compact guides to 12 U.S. cities, with
highly selective listings aimed at what the company describes as "a
new breed of style-conscious urbanites who are redefining the
perceptions of contemporary life and travel." Translation: People who
don't want to stay in a Marriott and have lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe.
The Seattle guide, for example, lists only five hotels, eight
restaurants, five places to shop and five "don't-miss" attractions,
along with current weather conditions and interactive maps from
MapQuest.com. The free content, which exists largely to drive traffic
to Room 12's travel agency business and a small online catalog of
trendy merchandise, is presented in a simple, intuitive format with no
ad banners to clutter up your screen. While the site certainly doesn't
hold the answers to all of your travel questions, Room 12 is a good
place to turn when information overload is getting you down.

STAFF        
~~~~~
Written by Michael Shapiro and Morris Dye. Send e-mail to
techtrav@yahoo.com.
Editor: Steven Zeitchik (szeitchik@thestandard.com).
Deputy Editor: Michele Keller (mkeller@thestandard.com).

Copyright 2001 Standard Media International

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