Eye for Travel - Tuff Second Day

Uggg. Late post about the 2nd day of the Eye for Travel Conference.

You would have thought that organizers of conferences in Vegas would understand by now that the second day is just pure torture. You’ve already spent two hard nights in Vegas, and truthfully, you're really just trying to figure out which sessions you can skip to get an early flight home. It shows in the attendance as well – we bet the attendance is cut by half from day one.

But we're good troopers and are staying. It's all good since FMV actually feels vindicated in two ways:

First – We feel pretty good about our craps play the last two nights. We rode some hot rollers when they couldn’t lose - and then immediately shifted to the “Don’t Pass” betting line when the tables turned cold. The result: our biggest winning night in Vegas in a long while.

Second – We finally got some data on Meta-Searchers to bust the myth that Scrapers serve to “commoditize” airfares. Chris Degroot of American Airlines stated that the top players that they work with (Sidestep, Kayak, Mobissimo, etc.) all show higher airfare yields than their top OTA’s. In addition, they are pretty happy with the conversion rates of referrals from Meta's that sign up for the AAdvantage program.

In fact – Degroot has the money quote of the conference “Currently, AA is more aligned with the Meta’s than with the OTA’s”.

Wow. Almost makes the 2nd day of the conference worth attending…..