Expedia Goes Hollywood With New Board Member

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

June 24, 2016, 1:32 PM EDT

Online travel site Expedia just expanded its board to add veteran movie maker Scott Rudin as a director. The news of his appointment and the expansion of the board from 13 to 14 members, was disclosed in an SEC Filing on Thursday and first picked up by Puget Sound Business Journal.

Rudin has produced a number of films including The Social Network, Steve Jobs, and No Country for Old Men. He founded Scott Rudin Productions, served as a senior executive at Twentieth Century Fox fox , and has been involved in several theatrical productions including a reprise of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, for which he won a Best Musical Tony Award in 1994. Earlier this month, he pulled out of a musical adaptation of Groundhog Day.

Expedia to buy Orbitz

There’s already film-making DNA in the house. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, chief executive and chairman of IAC iac was formerly a top executive at both Fox Inc., and Paramount.

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Expedia expe , based in Bellevue, Wash., operates several brands including Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Trivago, Egencia, and Venere.com. Competitors include American Express axp Travel Services and TripAdvisor trip .

Some industry observers say online travel aggregation sites like these, which up-ended traditional travel agencies years ago, are under threat themselves as more consumers opt to book lodging through AirBnB. That’s probably why Expedia plunked down $3.9 billion to buy AirBnB rival HomeAway late last year.

Google Could Face EU Android Antitrust Charges Very Soon

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

April 15, 2016, 9:47 AM EDT

Google goog could soon find itself facing more antitrust charges in Europe, this time over the way it runs the Android mobile platform.

The company has been under investigation for years now, on several fronts. It has already been hit with charges for allegedly boosting its own comparison-shopping services in its search results.

The European Commission has also been formally investigating Google over a range of Android allegations, namely that it forces smartphone and tablet manufacturers to preinstall a suite of Google services (such as the Play Store, Maps, and Gmail) on their Android devices.

It also allegedly bans manufacturers that install Google services from developing alternate versions of Android.

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Now, according to lawyers talking to both the Financial Times and Politico, the Commission has been sending out urgent requests for information from the complainants in the investigation.

That suggests competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager is about to move to the next stage of the process by issuing formal charges—a so-called statement of objections—perhaps as early as next week.

The case has very strong parallels with a recent case in Russia, in which the competition authority decided Google had broken antitrust laws with the way it runs Android. Local rival Yandex yndx , the chief complainant in the Russian case, has also given evidence to the EU investigators for their case.

Even if Google ends up facing two sets of charges in the EU, there’s still a chance that even more could lie on the horizon.

The Commission has also been looking into complaints from the likes of Yelp yelp and TripAdvisor trip over the way Google boosts its own services in local searches, and allegations about unfair advertising contracts and the scraping of content from rival services.

Here’s Why Shares of TripAdvisor Are Soaring Today

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

February 11, 2016, 10:43 AM EDT

Travel review website operator TripAdvisor Inc reported a quarterly profit that beat analysts’ estimates, as the company earned more from display ads and subscriptions.

The company’s shares rose 15.6% to $62.65 in trading on Thursday morning.

TripAdvisor, which owns websites such as Tripadvisor.com and Oyster.com, said display ads revenue rose 17% and subscription revenue jumped 23 percent in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31.

However, click-based advertising revenue, its biggest, fell 1%.

The company during the quarter accelerated the roll out of its instant booking feature to more countries.

The feature, launched in 2014 in the United States and UK, allows travelers to book a hotel directly from the company’s website instead of being directed to a third-party booking site.

The company’s net income fell to $3 million, or 2 cents per share, from $36 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, TripAdvisor earned 45 cents per share.

Total revenue rose 7.3% to $309 million.

Analysts on average had expected quarterly earnings of 33 cents per share and revenue of $298.7 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

TaskRabbit COO: This is How I Landed a Seat on HP Inc.’s Board

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

December 2, 2015, 8:16 PM EDT

As a female executive, it’s still incredibly difficult to break into the highest echelons of corporate America: Women hold just 15% of the board seats at public companies and control zero seats at the 5% of Fortune 500 companies that have all-male directors. That makes the insights of the few women who do manage to land a seat at those boardroom tables all the more valuable.

TaskRabbit COO Stacy Brown-Philpot and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, founder of e-commerce startup Joyus, are two of those rare exceptions. At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Brown-Philpot, who recently joined the board of HP Inc. HPQ , and Cassidy, who sits on the boards of TripAdvisor TRIP and Ericsson ERIC , described how they scored their director gigs—and offered advice to those seeking similar roles.

The key takeaways: If you want a board seat, start by saying so to everyone you meet—particularly any CEOs and other business elite whom you happen to know. And once you’re in the running, don’t act like you’re interviewing for a regular job.

“The interview was more about who you are as a person than what you’ve accomplished,” Brown-Philpot said. “You don’t get into the room without the right credentials—those are assumed.” In landing her spot on HP’s board, it helped that she’d already met the company’s CEO, Meg Whitman, at a party at the house of Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook (and a former executive at Google, where both Brown-Philpot and Cassidy once worked).

But the person who ultimately referred Brown-Philpot for the position was someone she’d met at a conference seven months earlier—to whom she’d briefly mentioned that she was looking to join a board. “The more people you tell,” she said, “The more your name will come up when the opportunities come up.”

Cassidy had a similar story about landing a previous board role at J.Crew in 2009. She networked through a friend who was close to the retailer’s CEO Mickey Drexler, as well as her contacts at Google GOOG , including executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who at the time served with Drexler on the board of Apple AAPL . But a seat on any board is good experience, she said, whether it’s the board of a non-profit, a private company or a startup. “Everybody wants a ‘public board,'” she said, using air quotes while referring to publicly traded companies. “Keep in mind there are limited numbers of public boards. My point is, it’s something you work your way up to.” (Cassidy recently launched a database called the Boardlist for nominating women to boards.)

So, what happens when you are actually appointed to a board? Cassidy had some tips for that as well: humility and transparency. It’s important to remember that “you’re joining the board of a CEO who might have a much bigger job than you do,” she said. And if you disagree with management or have questions or concerns about the company’s plans, be upfront and call or email the CEO before bringing them up in a board meeting. “Is your job to surprise a CEO in his [or her] boardroom? No,” Cassidy said. “It truly is not about being the smartest person in the room, because then you’re pissing off the person you’re actually meant to serve.”

Fortune’s Pattie Sellers, who moderated the panel at the conference, featured both Cassidy and Brown-Philpot in her recent magazine story, “Why powerful women love Google, and why they leave it.”

Google Blames ‘Bug’ for Burying Yelp and TripAdvisor Search Results

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

November 25, 2015, 8:08 AM EDT

Over the weekend, companies Yelp and TripAdvisor noticed that Google searches for their businesses on mobile would show their results below those of Google’s own services.

Though it seems like a suspicious move on Google’s GOOGL part, the company said on Tuesday that it’s just the result of a code bug, and it’s working on a fix, according to Re/code.

Yet the companies aren’t particularly convinced, especially not Yelp YELP co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. “Far from a glitch, this is a pattern of behavior by Google,” he told Re/code.

.@kaufer no limit to how far @google will go, tricking consumers when they ask for Yelp or Trip. Everybody loses. pic.twitter.com/Ft6Epniws4

— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) November 22, 2015

Both Yelp and TripAdvisor TRIP have filed complaints as part of the European Union’s case against Google for anticompetitive behavior. Their particular complaints center on just this: that Google is unfairly promoting its own products over that of competitors like them. As part of an Federal Trade Commission probe, internal documents surfaced, which outline the company’s use of “co-occurrence signals” to trigger search results for Google’s own products as well.

In the case with Yelp and TripAdvisor over the weekend, Google is not only showing its own competing services but also placing them above the competitors’, even if they’re less relevant.

Why TripAdvisor’s stock is surging 22%

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

October 14, 2015, 2:41 PM EDT

Investors are loving TripAdvisor Wednesday, sending the stock soaring 22.6% as of mid-day, all thanks to a deal with Priceline that will integrate a chunk of its hotel inventory into TripAdvisor’s new booking platform.

The travel review website launched its Instant Booking service in June last year and spent the past 16 months rallying support from big hotel chains like Marriott International MAR , but it faced major opposition from online booking sites. The Priceline PCLN collaboration is a first sign that the frosty welcome may finally be thawing, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Priceline, along with other booking sites, worried that partnering with TripAdvisor’s TRIP Instant Booking service would pull customers away from their own platforms. After months of negotiations, the two companies struck a deal. Booking.com will be the first Priceline brand to list on TripAdvisor’s service, and other brands like Priceline.com and Agoda.com may follow.

Don’t travel anywhere without these 10 apps

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

July 22, 2015, 10:23 AM EDT

What do US Airways, Hertz and Southwest have in common? They have the worst smartphone apps for travelers, according to a new study.

US Airways scored the lowest of any company, with an aggregate score of 5 out of 100, according to Applause, a service that rates smartphone applications. It was closely followed by Hertz (9) and Southwest (18).

The average travel app received a score of just 40.

“Consumers love apps that deliver clear value, optimize efficiency and simplify presentation,” says Ben Gray, the report’s author and a digital experience analyst for Applause. “Unfortunately, delivering consistently great experiences across both iOS and Android platforms is rare in today’s burgeoning apps economy.”

Here are the worst-rated apps.

1. US Airways (5, iOS) – The lowest-rated travel app the report profiled. US Airways customers are likely looking forward to its end of life as the merger with American Airlines progresses, according to Applause.

2. Hertz (9, Android) – This “improving” app still continues to fall far short of customer expectations, particularly when it comes to elegance and interoperability.

3. Southwest (18, iOS) – Travelers are often unable to change their existing reservations and their reservations are frequently lost, resulting in a manual re-entry of their confirmation code.

4. Marriott (20, iOS) – Members struggle to login and remain signed in. This “quickly frustrates” users.

5. American Airlines (22, iOS) – Reviewers complain frequently about new builds that don’t open on their iPhones. When the app loads, many suggest that it too frequently pushes travelers to its mobile website for core functions.

6. Hertz (29, iOS) – It’s never a good sign when app store reviews warn customers to avoid the app and use the website instead.

7. CouchSurfing (31, Android) – Broken notifications, frequent sign-outs and app crashes frustrate users who expect a digital-first startup to get better than its traditional hotel competitors that are slow to evolve from web to mobile.

8. Delta Air Lines (33, iOS) – Frequent app crashes and freezes suggest the app can improve with real world functional and performance/load testing.

9. Southwest (33, Android) – Lots of app crashes, errors and timeouts all too frequently disrupt the travel journey.

10. JetBlue (34, iOS) – Inconsistent app that users love only when it works. New builds break existing features, suggesting the need for beta testing prior to launch.

If this laundry list of complaints sounds demanding, it’s because, well, it is. “Consumers have incredibly lofty expectations of their mobile app experiences,” notes Gray. And with good reason. Consider how they use these apps. They check availability, compare prices, book tickets, check their status, and select seats.

“These transactions need to work the first time and every time,” he adds. “Because if they don’t, consumers will find a competitor’s app that’s able to serve their mobile needs.”

So who won?

1. Alaska Airlines (87, Android) – Newly redesigned Android app that simplifies the traveler’s experience at every physical and digital touchpoint along their journey.

2. Booking.com (86, iOS) – Cares so much about its customers that it extends testing into the real world.

3. Booking.com (85, Android) – Continuously tests for functional defects as well as localization issues using real world devices and professional testers around the globe.

4. Hotels.com (79, Android) – Impressive hotel selection backed by reviews, all accessible from your pocket.

5. Kayak (79, iOS) – Dynamic search engine with a touch-friendly interface.

6. TripAdvisor (78, iOS) – Friendly travel exploration app that’s backed by reviews and opinions.

7. TripIt (76, iOS) – Organizer that saves customers from the complexities normally associated with travel.

8. Kayak (75, Android) – Powerful desktop search engine that’s been conveniently scaled down for your phone and tablet.

9. TripAdvisor (75, Android) – The most reviewed app that’s established itself as a must-have tool for Android travelers.

10. Alaska Airlines (75, iOS) – The highest-rated airlines app on iOS by a mile, more than doubling up its closest competition.

Overall, the report isn’t good news for the travel industry. The four largest airlines and two of the three most popular hotel chains offer the poorest rated apps, according to Applause. And the lowest-rated industry in travel was airlines, unsurprisingly, with an average score of 33 out of 100. That suggests airlines as a group are totally oblivious to the mobile revolution.

At some level, though, it’s also a sad commentary on the state of customer service in the travel industry. When the top brands ignore the needs of their mobile customers, it makes you wonder what else they don’t care about.

Meet Spot, the latest startup born from an Uber co-founder’s incubator

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

June 19, 2015, 12:11 PM EDT

Spot, the latest startup from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s incubator, wants to be the guide consumers turn to for help making decisions about where to eat, visit, and shop.

The mobile app, which premiered as a private beta Friday, find reviews and recommendations from experts as well as friends to help users answer questions about where to go next. Users can connect using their Facebook FB and Twitter TWTR logins, and the app will show recommendations made by their contacts on the social networks. You can also search by city or filter by type of place. Users can then save recommendations to a list to look at later.

“We want to do in the real world what Google has done for the Web,” co-founder Luke Groesbeck said.

Although there are many online sites for finding travel and restaurant recommendations like Yelp and TripAdvisor, Groesbeck argued that people lack one where they can get trusted, credible information from people they know.

“It’s not just about building a database, it’s about helping people really decide from people they trust,” Groesbeck said.

Spot has raised an undisclosed round of seed funding from Camp’s incubator, Expa. Other companies in the incubator include restaurant reservations app Reserve and shopping concierge Operator. In addition to Uber, Camp co-founded StumbleUpon, a showcase for random Websites.

It’s still unclear how Spot plans to make money. Groesbeck said that he isn’t concerned with it yet, but is instead focused in building a community.

Dozens of startups have tried to tackle personalized travel recommendations. Wanderfly launched with similar ambitions, and was acquired by Trip Advisor TRIP in 2012. Social travel planner Trippy recently moved away from friend recommendations because people wanted recommendations beyond their own group of friends. And companies like Yelp YELP and TripAdvisor also let you integrate with Facebook FB to surface recommendations from friends.

But Groesbeck insisted that the current model is still broken, and that there is a need for a dedicated place to find places and recommendations from people who “see the world in a similar way.”

For more about startups, watch this Fortune video:

Delta’s plan to block third-party sites is more than a game of chicken

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

June 10, 2015, 12:49 PM EDT

In Strategy 101, competition is pretty straightforward. You go to market with your best combinations of price, features, and other attributes, your competitor does the same, and may the best company win. This simple picture, however, gets a bit more nuanced when competitive moves are aimed not so much at beating the competition as tilting the playing field.

I was reminded of this today when reading about the changing nature of power dynamics in the airline business.

Delta Air Lines DAL , notably, is now refusing to allow many third-party sites such as TripAdvisor TRIP or European online travel agencies to access their information or book flights. Lufthansa is taking things even further, actually charging customers extra for booking on a third-party site rather than on their own.

The goal of these decisions is to take back some of the power that a more competitive industry had given up. When online sites first dis-intermediated travel agents, the lure of buying your own tickets on the Internet was that you could conveniently compare prices online, pushing airlines to compete aggressively for the customer dollar and making flying pretty much a commodity experience.

For the airlines, this was a bad deal. Competing on price and losing access to your customers because distributors are closing the sales is not fun. As the industry has consolidated, however, the airlines are less dependent on those third parties, driving customers to their own sites instead, which allows them to not only capture customer information, but to offer extras and perks (for sale, of course).

Which brings me back to what a competitive move is really intended to accomplish. Sometimes, a move is intended as a trial balloon or as in chess, a gambit. You may not be sure the move will work, but it gives the player information.

Gambits allow a company to make a sacrifice in order to test the waters for an unconventional move in its strategy or to signal to other players in the industry that customers might be willing to make tradeoffs that are in the industry’s favor.

The airlines offer an illustrative setting. When customers didn’t openly rebel at the 2008 introduction of a first-checked-bag fee by a major carrier (American Airlines), this sent a signal to the others. While some customers stopped checking baggage altogether, the rest tolerated the fees, creating a significant new revenue stream for the airlines, which led to the unbundling of the air travel experience.

Gambits don’t always work. Around the same time that airlines were finding that customers would actually pony up for checked bag fees, US Airways AAL instituted charges for soft drinks and water. The public backlash was severe, and no other airline followed. After a few months, US Air backed down citing nasty reputational effects as the only airline to charge for a soda. It was a symbolic disaster that to customers represented everything else they hated about US Airways.

In the latest round of industry power-rebalancing, the airlines haven’t given up on third-party distributors altogether. Information is still available on some of the big aggregators such as Expedia EXPE and Kayak PCLN , which have a fair amount of market power as they themselves have been consolidating.

But the model is starting to fragment, and for many end customers the pain of shopping on multiple, fragmented sites is considerable. This gambit looks like a win for airlines like Delta.

Here’s why discount travel sites are angry with Delta

by
Barb Darrow

@FortuneMagazine

May 20, 2015, 7:02 AM EDT

Finding cheap airfare on discount travel sites is great for consumers—but airlines have to play ball for it to truly work.

A group of these sites, including TripAdvisor, CheapOair, and Hipmunk, is banding together publicly against Delta Air Lines Inc.’s DAL recent removal of flight information and fares from their listings. Their complaints are relayed in a report released today by the Travel Technology Association (Travel Tech, as it calls itself), a trade group representing such sites, according to The Wall Street Journal. Travel Tech, on behalf of these sites, is asking the Transportation Department to review its report and decide whether carriers like Delta ought to be required to make their flight data widely available to all sites.

Delta, for its part, has said that it never authorized these sites to use its data.

This isn’t the first time these issues have come up among low airfare sites. Last year, the discount site Routehappy lamented, in a tweet to a customer, that it was one of more than 30 sites from which Delta had pulled its data (nowadays the Routehappy site once again shows Delta information):

@slimheuy Unfortunately, Delta withdrew its flights from 30+ search sites, including us. You can find them using our Find Your Flight tool.

— Routehappy (@routehappy) June 19, 2014

In recent years, CheapAir (not to be confused with CheapOair), Air Gorilla, Globester, and Bookit, among others, have all had Delta take away flight data from their listings, though not all have publicly taken action. And this isn’t just about Delta: today’s study points out examples of other airlines that are, “attempting to restrict access to their fare and schedule information, reduce the ability of consumers to easily compare prices, and drive travelers to their own websites, which do not offer price comparisons with other airlines,” the report says. In other words, this is an industry-wide issue just beginning to heat up after many years.

Delta, in a brief statement, told the WSJ that it would “continue partnering with a limited, but responsive and adaptable group of online retailers.” Today, the sites involved in Travel Tech’s study may be wondering why Delta does not appear to deem them “responsive and adaptable.”

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