Faisal Galaria was MD of Kayak Europe from 2008-9; having previously worked with several successful non-travel startups including Skype and Jaman. We decided to ask Faisal what he made of his time in the travel industry.
How did you enjoy your time in travel?
It was an intense experience rolling out in 9 new countries and I enjoyed it a great deal. There are a lot of very experienced and smart people in the industry building innovative propositions and that particularly appealed to the part of me that is curious. Most importantly we built a capable and dynamic team based out of London and built Kayak into the #2 travel search site in the UK. Number 1 would have been better but nonetheless that’s been very satisfying.
It’s a pretty diverse sector and you certainly got involved, what did you make of it?
We were focussed on the flights, hotels and car hire search space. However in many ways I think the most exciting developments we’ll see are in mobile and semantic search. In addition there is work to be done on bringing dynamic packaging and charter flight searches into the meta/comparison space.
Travel search is very competitive; with fly.com coming in can you see everyone surviving?
They are not the only ones! Across Europe there are already well established national champions like easyvoyage in France and Momondo in Denmark. The advent of increased competition from well funded new entrants like fly.com, Bing and Tripadvisor will make it harder for smaller sites to build a brand and attract + retain users. Some of them may well disappear or become absorbed into larger players looking to rapidly expand.
How crucial is the level of investment required to the success of search sites?
The bar has already been set high in the travel search space - building a differentiated search product and then marketing it effectively is going to require significant investment. Take for example the $1.8 million Travelzoo spent to acquire the fly.com domain name. With the right team and technology though it can be done and there are a number of very compelling early stage companies in Europe. That’s really exciting.
What do you think of Bing and its implications for travel?
I like the design and interface – but then I would because it looks a lot like Kayak. However they haven’t yet brought it to Europe and Bing has yet to capture any significant market share of the search space. It’s a shame they didn’t bring out any new features or compelling product improvements to really disrupt the OTA and search space.
There seems to be no love lost between TripAdvisor and TravelPost, do you think TravelPost can genuinely challenge TripAdvisor?
TripAdvisor is huge and do a fantastic job of aggregating user generated reviews. In Europe Marc Charron manages a formidable and likeable team.
You have worked with lots of startups, are there any new travel startups which particularly impressed you?
We’re seeing some great innovative companies gaining traction in Europe. The successful ones will need great teams in addition to great technology. Zoombu, a point to point search site, founded by an ex-colleague and Trustyou a German based semantic hotel search company come to mind.
What now, and would you ever come back into travel?
I’m actively involved as an non-exec director and have interests in a couple of interesting start ups so I haven’t really left.
