Bezerker Crazy !

From all accounts, Kayak and SideStep are growing huge over in Europe – and FMV could guess it was just a matter of time until people starting eyeing the great prize of Asia. Two names that we keep hearing about are Bezurk.com and Qunar. While Qunar has focused more on the Chinese market, Bezurk seems to encompass more of Asia and are ramping up their activities:

1) They signed a marketing alliance with Carlson Hotels Worldwide. The deal will result in real-time rates and availability for all Carlson Hotels properties worldwide to their Asia Pacific-based audience.

2) They announced a marketing partnership with Qatar Airways, who will promote its fares on Bezurk.com’s flights search engine and deals channel. Bezurk will also access and display real-time Qatar Airways fares and availability throughout its network of Bezurk and partner branded websites.

This is definitely the stuff that FMV SHOULD be interested in - but we just can’t do much more than muster a nice golf clap. China and India have been hyped as the next new online travel market for years – but FMV sees this as a red herring / black hole. It SOUNDS great, but there are two huge stumbling blocks to success in this area:

Of immediate concern to meta-searchers is the complete decentralization of local private fares throughout Asia. While SITA does offer an automated fare distribution product, there are too may fares that are simply faxed to travel agents in their local market. We are told that certain fares may in fact be set by a local airline manager. These fares will often be cheaper than the airlines' own web fares and will really hurt the relevancy of Meta’s.

There is also the simple fact that too many Asians just don’t use credit cards over the Internet, and in China receipts are issued on government paper stock. Here's a conversation FMV had with a Chinese travel agent describing how they sell tickets online:

“A person buys a ticket on the website - we then send a bicycle courier over to their flat to collect the cash and give them the ticket.”

Seriously?!! How do you scale that?? Don't get us wrong, we really really hope these guys turn out to be wildly sucessful - but it's not going to be an overnight sensation. It's going to be a long slog, and it's going to require some macro market changes. The hope would be that after the market becomes more accepting, the first movers stand tall. The risk of course is that, "pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land".