Kei Sihibata, President & CEO of Venture Republic, which operates the Japanese travel search engine, travel.jp, believes it could actually benefit users “as both Yahoo Japan and Google could then better focus on the areas they are good at”.
Yahoo Japan, owned one third by Yahoo Inc, made the rather surprising announcement this week that it would adopt Google’s search-linked advertisement delivery system and feed its data to Google sites, in contrast to the decision by Yahoo Inc to integrate its search technology with Microsoft, after the US government blocked a tie-up with Google.
Shibata said that while he too found the move a “bit surprising”, it made sense. “Search requires too much investment (even for Yahoo Japan) and Google perhaps wants to leverage the Yahoo Japan’s ability of business development in Japan in content and advertising sales at the same time.”
Venture Republic operates Japan’s first and only public company in travel search. Listed on the Osaka stock exchange, the company started “Travel.jp” in 2001 and “Hotel.jp” in 2009.
Its travel search business is modeled on a similar concept as Kayak’s and Qunar’s. “We let the users search/compare the different airfares and other travel related products and we are paid by online travel agents and other travel related clients in CPC or CPA,” said Shibata.
“Our sites attract two million users monthly and we generate over US$10 million
of annual revenue from our travel,” he said.
According to comScore data for the travel segment for April 2010, travel.jp was positioned at 18th among all travel-related sites – including maps, airlines, hotel booking engines, amusement parks – in number of unique users.
Among the top 25 sites, its competitors – Hikaku.com and Tour.ne.jp – were positioned at #22 and #25 respectively.
Shibata said that Japanese consumers tend to spend more time searching and planning than in other markets with transactions not such a high priority in online travel.
This is true, he said, especially in air tickets and tour packages “since there are quite large selections of tickets and packages available for consumers so that they tend to spend more time in searching and planning for better deals”.
Another reason alone is the strength and scale of the travel agency network in Japan. Travel.jp has contracts with more than 210 travel agents and the airlines rely quite heavily on travel agents for their ticket distribution through the sales of tour packages, said Shibata.
“As a result, there are lots of different, often deep discounted offers available in the market, which are actually not available to book real time/online in many cases.”
• Kei Shibata will be speaking at WIT Conference 2010. His profile can be viewed here.
Featured image credit (Japanese domain): Ockra/iStock
