Travelzoo set to stir up Australian Internet travel market

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 24 October 2007 05:59

Your IT - Home IT

Travelzoo claims a membership list of more than 11 million travel enthusiasts in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong and the UK and to be the largest publisher of travel deals on the Internet. Its services include the Travelzoo Web site (www.travelzoo.com ), the Top 20 list (Interestingly it claims trademark ownership of the term 'Top 20'), the Newsflash e-mail alert service and SuperSearch, a travel search engine.

Travelzoo publishes offers from more than 600 advertisers and claims that: "Our team researches, evaluates and tests thousands of deals to find those with true value. We recommend only deals whose accuracy and availability we can confirm...We have deal experts (we call them producers) located in 14 offices across North America, Europe and Asia to work with these companies and to provide you the smartest information."

While it does cost companies money to have their deals listed on Travelzoo, the company claims that "no amount of money ensures that a deal will get listed."

For its second quarter, to 30 June 2007, Travelzoo reported revenue of $US20.1 million, up 16 percent year-over-year, and operating profit of $US5.8 million, down 18 percent year-over-year.

"Q2 2007 marks our 36th consecutive quarter of revenue growth," said Bartel. "In Q2, we continued to aggressively implement our strategy of turning Travelzoo into a global media brand. By doing so we incurred non-tax deductible operating losses of $US1.7 million related to the start-up of our operations in Canada, Germany, France, Hong Kong and the UK. We spent a record high $US7.9 million on subscriber acquisition and marketing the Travelzoo brand. We believe that going global is an opportunity to create attractive shareholder value in the future and we want to seize this opportunity."

Travelzoo was due to report its Q3 results on 25 October.