Travel website

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A travel website is a website that provides travel reviews, trip fares, or a combination of both. Over 1.5 billion people book travel per year, 70% of which is done online. [1]

Contents

Categories

Categories of travel websites include:

Travelogues and blogs
People writing travel blogs about their own experiences, sometimes including advice for travelling in particular areas, or in general.
Review websites
Some examples of websites that use a combination of travel reviews and the booking of travel are TripAdvisor, Priceline.com, Liberty Holidays, and Expedia.
Service providers
Individual airlines, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cruise lines, automobile rental companies, and other travel-related service providers often maintain their own web sites providing retail sales. Many with complex offerings include some sort of search engine technology to look for bookings within a certain timeframe, service class, geographic location, or price range.
Online travel agencies
Travel agency websites selling travel and tourism services.
Fare aggregators and metasearch engines
Metasearch engines conduct searches across multiple independent search engines. Metasearch engines often make use of "screen scraping" to get live availability of flights. Screen scraping is a way of crawling through the airline websites, getting content from those sites by extracting data from the same HTML feed used by consumers for browsing (rather than using a Semantic Web or database feed designed to be machine-readable). Metasearch engines usually process incoming data to eliminate duplicate entries, but may not expose "advanced search" options in the underlying databases (because not all databases support the same options). Aggregators usually take a cut of each sale made through their websites. [2] [3]
Blogs and news sites on current travel discounts
Travel bargain websites collect and publish bargain rates by advising consumers where to find them online (sometimes but not always through a direct link). Rather than providing detailed search tools, these sites generally focus on offering advertised specials, such as last-minute sales from travel suppliers eager to deplete unused inventory; therefore, these sites often work best for consumers who are flexible about destinations and other key itinerary components.
Travel and tourism guides
Many websites take the form of a digital version of a traditional guide book, aiming to provide advice on which destinations, attractions, accommodations, and so on, are worth a visit and providing information on how to access them. Most states, provinces and countries have their own convention and visitor bureaus, which usually sponsor a website dedicated to promoting tourism in their respective regions. Cities that rely on tourism also operate websites promoting their destinations, such as VEGAS.com for Las Vegas.
Social travel website
A social travel website is a type of travel website that will look at where the user is going and pair them with other places they want to go based on where other people have gone. [4]
Homestays
There are several travel websites that specialize in organizing homestays. These include: 9flats, Airbnb, BeWelcome, CouchSurfing, Friendship Force International, HomeExchange.com, Hospitality Club, Intervac International, OYO Rooms, Pasporta Servo, Servas International, ThirdHome, Tripping.com, Warm Showers, Workaway, and WWOOF

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Travel agency</span> Retailer that provides tourism-related services

A travel agency is a private retailer or public service that provides travel and tourism-related services to the general public on behalf of accommodation or travel suppliers to offer different kinds of travelling packages for each destination. Travel agencies can provide outdoor recreation, arranging logistics for luggage and medical items delivery for travellers upon request, public transport timetables, car rentals, and bureau de change services. Travel agencies can also serve as general sales agents for airlines that do not have offices in a specific region. A travel agency's main function is to act as an agent, selling travel products and services on behalf of a supplier. They are also called Travel Advisors. They do not keep inventory in-hand unless they have pre-booked hotel rooms or cabins on a cruise ship for a group travel event such as a wedding, honeymoon, or other group event.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orbitz</span> Web-based travel fare aggregator service

Orbitz.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine. The website is owned by Orbitz Worldwide, Inc., a subsidiary of Expedia Group. It is headquartered in the Citigroup Center, Chicago, Illinois.

Dynamic packaging is a method used in package holiday bookings to enable consumers to build their own package of flights, accommodation, and car rental instead of purchasing a pre-defined package. Dynamic packages differ from traditional package tours in that the pricing is always based on current availability, escorted group tours are rarely included, and trip-specific add-ons such as airport parking and show tickets are often available. Dynamic packages are similar in that often the air, hotel, and car rates are available only as part of a package or only from a specific seller. The term "dynamic packaging" is often used incorrectly to describe the less sophisticated process of interchanging various travel components within a package, however, this practice is more accurately described as "dynamic bundling". True dynamic packaging demands the automated recombination of travel components based on the inclusion of rules that not only dictate the content of the package but also conditional pricing rules based on various conditions such as the trip characteristics, suppliers contributing components, the channel of distribution, and terms of sale. Dynamic packages are primarily sold online, but online travel agencies will also sell by phone owing to the strong margins and high sale price of the product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amadeus IT Group</span> Spanish travel technology company

Amadeus IT Group, S.A. is a major Spanish IT provider for the global travel and tourism industry.

Cheapflights is a travel fare metasearch engine. The website is part of the Kayak.com subsidiary of Booking Holdings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kayak (company)</span> Travel metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings

Kayak is a metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings.

Travel technology is the application of Information Technology (IT) or Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Some forms of travel technology are flight tracking, pre-travel planning through online travel agencies, and systems that allow tourists to review their experiences.

Data aggregation is the compiling of information from databases with intent to prepare combined datasets for data processing.

E-booking or eBooking, making a reservation or appointment for a service via the internet, may refer to:

Whole Travel is a travel search engine website based in United States. Launched in 2008, it aggregates information from thousands of other travel sites and evaluates each destination's sustainability in order to help users find and book sustainable vacations. Whole Travel combines search results from hotel websites, online travel agencies, local consolidators and other sources such as larger hotel chains.

Momondo is a travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine. momondo was founded in Denmark and is today managed by KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings.

HotelsCombined, a unit of Booking Holdings, is a hotel metasearch engine founded in 2005, with headquarters in Sydney, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wanderu Inc.</span>

Wanderu Inc. is a ground and air travel metasearch engine that operates throughout North America and Europe. It provides a one-stop search and booking platform for buses, trains and flights through its website and mobile app. Wanderu is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

Tripfez Travel is an online travel agency and metasearch engine focusing on Muslims and Halal tourism.

Pronto Hotel pronounced ( Pra-nto) is a free metasearch engine for hotel prices, founded in 2007 and currently based in Rome, Italy.

Booking Holdings Inc., based in Norwalk, Connecticut, owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines including Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable. It operates websites in about 40 languages and 200 countries. The company derives substantially all of its revenues from commissions, although a small portion of its revenues are from advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kiwi.com</span> Czech online travel agency

Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel agency founded by Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi in 2012. Kiwi.com provides a fare aggregator, metasearch engine and booking for airline tickets and ground transportation. Its ticket search features Kiwi.com’s "virtual interlining" concept – itineraries combined from over 750 carriers, including many that do not usually cooperate in online bookings.

Traveloka is an Indonesian technology company focused on travel and ticketing. Operating a services website of the same name and based out of Jakarta, Indonesia, Traveloka is active in six countries, and in 2022 remained the largest online travel app in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2012 as a travel search engine, it now also offers services such as attraction tickets, activities, transportation rentals, and restaurant vouchers. It also provides financial services such as credit and insurance. Classified as a unicorn company and regarded as functionally similar to Expedia, in 2022 it was valued approximately at US$3 billion.

Aviasales is a travel metasearch platform with a monthly audience exceeding 15 million users. As a metasearch, Aviasales does not sell air tickets, but redirects users to airline and online travel agent websites. The service was launched in 2007 and now operates in 14 countries across Eastern Europe, the CIS, Asia, and the United States. The company was incorporated in Hong Kong in August 2011 as Go Travel Un Limited and is headquartered on the island of Phuket, Thailand. In 2019, Skift ranked Aviasales among the top 25 most promising travel startups.

References

  1. ↑ "Online Travel Booking". Statista. Archived from the original on 2019-11-07. Retrieved 2019-11-07.
  2. ↑ "Our Story". elsewhere /. 2021-01-31. Archived from the original on 2021-08-30. Retrieved 2021-08-30.
  3. ↑ "Why Bargain Travel Sites May No Longer Be Bargains | Backchannel". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2021-08-30.
  4. ↑ Buist, Erica (November 1, 204). "How social media is changing the way we travel". The Guardian . Archived from the original on 2017-02-01. Retrieved 2016-12-18.
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