Phocuswright 2016: The Board of Directors trip down memory lane
In 1994 Philip Wolf launched Phocuswright (capitalization intentional… it was Phillip C .Wolf after all). He stepped out as one of the pioneers of online travel to talk about the digital landscape before the Internet became a ubiquitous part of our industry.
His first company was Travelmation, launched in 1989. The first booking for that company came over a dial up connection on technology that only a few of us remember.
He then became a serial board member, participating in the boards of OneTravel.com, Accovia, NewTrade (later bought by Expedia), Wandrian, SpaFinder, On the Beach, TravelJigsaw (acquired by Priceline as rentalcars.com), DataArt, Inntopia, QuickMobile. Philip sold PhoCusWright to Northstar in 2013.
Phocuswright, both on the conference side and the research side, single-handedly tracked online travel from a “zero-billion” dollar industry pre-Web to the behemoth it is today.
Today, 22 years later, at the new Phocuswright, Philip had some of those ecommerce pioneers on the stage. Simon Breakwell, Jim Hornthal, Jeff Katz, Terry Jones, Barney Harford and Bob Deiner.
“In the early days there were believers that took economic and career risks investing in a quest to build a business that would empower generations to come to search, shop and buy travel online.”
It is curious aside that all of the brands that these gentlemen were involved with are now under the Expedia umbrella.
Simon left British Airways in April of 1996 to join Microsoft and the Expedia business. He was the President of Expedia Inc. and launched the company into Europe. Simon has held board and advisory positions with Uber, Homeaway, and onefinestay and is now with Technology Crossover Ventures as a venture partner. He is also on the advisory board of British Airways.
Bob was the founder of Hotel Reservations Network (HRN), formed in 1991 as a call center based hotel booking company (1-800-96Hotels). HRN later became Hotels.com, after he acquired two affiliates (hotel.com and hotels.com) in the Midwest that was running out of their garage. In 1995 a colleague involved in gaming told him about this new thing called the Internet and offered to build out the website. USA Network (Barry Diller) eventually bought HRN and also invested in Expedia. He is now the Co-founder and President of GetaRoom.com, launched in April of 2009.
Barney joined Expedia in 1999 as a product planner. He played a number of roles, from investor relations to corporate development and new channel development, to was eventually named President of Expedia Asia Pacific. In 2009 he became the CEO of Orbitz and sold the company back to his alma mater last year for $1.25b. He has served as a board member and advisor to China based eLong, Kayak, GlobalEnglish and Crystal Orange Hotel Group and more recently LiquidPlanner, RealSelf, TurnKey Vacation Rentals and United Airlines. He is currently the Chairman of the Lola board of directors.
Jim founded Preview Media (later renamed Preview Travel) in 1985, the first company in the travel industry to go public in 1997. Preview Travel provided the travel booking service on AOL. The business morphed into Travelocity. He founded Triporati in 2008 and and is now the chairman of the company, as well as chairman of LaunchPad Central and M34 Capital.
Terry Jones joined American Airlines from Tampa-based Agency Datasystems when it was acquired in the late 1970s. ADS was moved to Dallas in 1982, becoming an integral part of the Sabre organization. In 1989 as one of the key executives of the Sabre division, Terry became a Vice President of AMR Corporation and in 1998 became the CIO for the Sabre Group. When Terry Jones was the CIO of Sabre, he asked Bob Crandall for $1m to build Travelocity, it clearly was going to cannibalize the travel agency business that Sabre had been catering to. After considering the request, Bob told Terry “Someone should build it, and it should be us.” Terry is the founding chairman of Kayak and is now chairman of Wayblazer.
Jeff Katz, Managing Partner of KA Holdings started his career at American Airlines in the early 80s and later became the President of Sabre. He served a stint at Swissair for 3 years before becoming the founding CEO of Orbitz, an airline-backed online travel agency, in June of 2000. Following Orbitz, Jeff lead several non-travel ecommerce efforts at LeapFrog and NextTag and he currently serves on the board of RR Donnelly and CA Technologies.
Some of the topics of the illustrious panel were customer service (Jim talking about answering a question on the same platform that it was answered), credit card handling (Terry sharing about consumer fear about putting in their credit card that caused them to call a special number, after which the agent put the number in using the internet anyway!) and funnel economics (Jim talking about ceding the top of the funnel to Google, when travel retailers have so much information about the traveler).
Barney talked about the cost of acquisition and the fight for conversion. Terry said that conversion has remained flat in 20 years. Bob talked about the checkout process and how many drop out. Jim talked about the various steps of the process and where the actual decision is made. Jeff talked about the work done at NexTag and that there is so much room [still] for innovation in the top of the funnel.
Simon expressed that he wished he got into search engine marketing earlier. Expedia spent so much on brand, and that spending never seems to end. SEM may have allowed them to spend less on brand. Simon also shared an early discussion with Booking.com, which Expedia could have bought at that time for $30m. They would have had to spend ½ of their current raise, so the answer was no.
Priceline (who was not represented on the panel), eventually bought both Booking.com and Active.com to then dominate the European landscape from an inventory perspective.
There was a brief discussion of what comes next. Simon and Terry both said that it was really voice and the interaction machine learning that will disintermediate the current generation of tools. Simon also talked about Facebook, Alexa and other platforms that are capturing such a large market position. Bob talked about the importance of social media and the impact of that user generated content influencing decision.
At the end of the session, Philip shared a brief video of Carl Icahn asking a question in one of the sessions talking about his due diligence (or the lack thereof) in looking at one of the early stage online travel companies.
Since this session was billed as a “sweeping discussion on the state of the travel industry today” by the founders of online travel’s biggest companies and the ultimate board of directors, it was interesting that the theme of the audience comments was “thanks for the trip down memory lane”. Philip absolutely delivered that for us.
We look forward to the balance of the conference giving us the insights about the future that will be an essential part of each of us figuring out the Funnel Revolution.