Yahoo! Travel

» see travel.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

yahoo travel sat in a region of yahoo i mostly did not use. in turkey the booking layer for actual trips in the late 1990s and 2000s was either the corner travel agency on a side street in kızılay or the airline's own website for the domestic legs (turkish airlines first, onur air or pegasus later). yahoo travel was an american-domestic booking vertical with american-domestic hotel and flight inventory. you could in theory book a flight from istanbul to vienna through it but you had no reason to: the local options had the same fares plus actual customer service in turkish.

that said, the vertical existed at scale. yahoo launched it in 1997 as part of the commerce-services push that also produced yahoo shopping and yahoo real estate. by january 2014 hitwise ranked it the ninth-largest travel booking website in the world by traffic. it was running on the back-end integrations with travelocity and amadeus that yahoo had been quietly maintaining for over a decade. the same year, yahoo relaunched it as a "digital magazine" with paula froelich as editor-in-chief and a tablet-friendly visual design, part of marissa mayer's bet that yahoo's verticals could become destination publications with editorial credibility rather than utility commodity sites.

the digital-magazine bet did not work. yahoo travel's editorial product was competent. it was running good destination pieces, photo essays, and recommendations from named travel writers, but the audience was conditioned to use yahoo travel as a booking tool, not a magazine, and the booking funnel was being eaten by tripadvisor, kayak, and booking.com simultaneously. by 2015 traffic was visibly declining. on february 17 2016 yahoo's company-wide reorganization killed travel along with six other digital-magazine verticals (food, health, parenting, makers, autos and real estate) in a single press release. the same announcement laid off about fifteen percent of yahoo's workforce.

my own use case for yahoo through this period was yahoo messenger, never the verticals. mssn messenger had eaten the turkish chat space by 2002 and yahoo messenger had a slightly older / slightly more uncle-and-aunt demographic in tr. the verticals (travel, autos, finance, sports) were not where turkish users opened yahoo. by 2014 when yahoo travel was running its big editorial relaunch, the turkish travel-content layer was already being defined by gezimanya, gezirehberin, and the tripadvisor turkey translation. yahoo travel showed up in my newsfeed once or twice via a paula froelich byline and was off the radar inside the year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

before the 2014 magazine relaunch, yahoo travel was a price-aggregator with editorial layered on top. you typed in a destination, the booking widget queried partner inventory (travelocity, amadeus, expedia at various points in the contract chain), and the page wrapped that widget with destination guidebook content yahoo had licensed or commissioned. the model was the standard 1997-2007 portal vertical: aggregate other people's commerce, take an affiliate cut, sell display ads on top.

the back-end booking partnerships were the actual value. yahoo travel did not run its own hotel-inventory system. it routed through partners and took commissions. when tripadvisor and kayak built their own integrations directly with hotel chains in the late 2000s, yahoo travel's commission share got squeezed from both ends.

~ the digital-magazine bet ~

paula froelich came in as editor-in-chief in late 2013, part of marissa mayer's broader push to make yahoo's verticals look more like editorial brands and less like booking-tool wrappers. yahoo signed katie couric as global news anchor in 2013 at six million dollars a year (renewed to ten million in 2015), brought david pogue in for tech, joe zee for style, and froelich for travel. each vertical got a redesign, a small editorial team, and a content strategy that emphasized original writing over aggregated guidebook content.

the journalism was good. the discoverability inside yahoo's own homepage was bad. pogue, zee, and froelich all later told reporters they could not get yahoo's product or ad teams to surface their content where users would actually find it. by mid-2015 the digital-magazine experiment was visibly underperforming traffic targets and the verticals were on the cut list any time a reorganization was discussed at the executive level.

~ how it actually ended ~

february 2 2016 marissa mayer announced the strategic plan that would lead to the verticals' shutdown. the formal vertical-by-vertical announcement followed on february 17. seven digital magazines killed in one note: travel, food, health, parenting, makers, autos and real estate. roughly fifteen percent of yahoo's workforce was laid off in the same restructuring. the timing was not accidental: yahoo's core search and display business was already being shopped to verizon, and mayer needed the operating cost line cleaned up before the verizon deal closed in june 2017.

froelich left yahoo soon after the announcement. couric stayed on through 2017 under reduced terms. yahoo travel's domain redirected first to the broader yahoo.com homepage and later disappeared from yahoo's url-routing entirely. some of the editorial content survived through external republishing arrangements. most of it did not.

~ what survived ~

nothing structural. tripadvisor, kayak, booking.com, expedia and airbnb already owned the consumer travel-research-and-booking funnel by 2016. yahoo travel's exit was a confirmation of a transition that had already happened, not a cause of it. the verizon-era yahoo (later renamed yahoo media group, then verizon media, then apollo's "yahoo" again) never rebuilt a travel vertical. the brand "yahoo travel" persists only in archive.org snapshots and in the small body of paula-froelich-era travel features that got picked up by other publications before yahoo's republishing licenses expired.

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