Skift Take
In the end, the way things are going, airlines will become hotels, and hotels will become airlines. Taxis will become Ubers, and Ubers will become taxis. Convergence, baby.
Adam Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of four-year-old metasearch site Hipmunk, sees competitors rushing to be more like online travel agencies, and online travel agencies starting to offer metasearch results on their own search results pages.
In the context of what Goldstein calls this "race to the middle," the most successful companies will be those that "can just move the fastest," Goldstein says. "You know, who can build a booking experience and a metasearch experience, and have it work well on all devices for all verticals, in all countries, and so on."
Goldstein believes that nimble companies such as his own Hipmunk as well as HotelTonight and Gogobot, have some advantages over large public companies that need to worry about cannibalizing existing lines of business.
"If you look at the companies that have lost market share in online travel in the U.S., I think that's exactly the trap that they fell into," Goldstein says. "Successful companies are the ones that have invested in new products and new technologies and build an architecture for their company, a system, or a series of systems that enables quick experimentation using modern web technologies and mobile technologies, rather than a legacy technology system that requires a lot of upfront, top-down planning."
Skift spoke with Goldstein about these and other issues that are shaping online travel as part of our trends report The State of Travel Metasearch in 2015.
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Skift: What's new in metasearch: Is the momentum of 2013 ongoing or have other things got in the way?
An edited version of the interview follows:
Adam Goldstein: As far as business models and customer preferences, it's obvious that metasearch is continuing to gain followers, traction and market share. Everyone in the travel industry seems to be moving more into a metasearch kind direction, even the online travel agencies as far as including more prominent links to other sites on their own results. Obviously, TripAdvisor is making the switch [to bookings] and continuing to add more options to their metasearch experience. In international metasearch, there are competitors that are starting to expand. It's all metasearch, all the time. That's my view.
Now, as far as the other things that are going on, there's a big shift, and this is something that we've been talking about and a couple of our competitors too. It is the shift in people who are searching and browsing and booking across different device
