Background:
It’s not a surprise to find Beatrice Tarka as the CEO of Mobissimo. Beatrice is an entrepreneur who worked for 4 years in the travel industry and her sister currently works for a major airline. Beatrice’s second company had offices in 5 countries so she personally saw the pains of booking travel for 75 people through a corporate secretary who had to check multiple sites to find the best deal. In 2002, she met one of her co-founders, Svetlozar Nestorov. SideStep had just launched, but Beatrice says the site wasn’t comprehensive enough. At the same time, different travel sites showed different inventory.

Things quickly started to come together. Airlines such as Swiss Air thought the technology behind Mobissimo was a smart way to integrate all the disparate reservation systems. In fact, Lucia Carniglia, who worked for Swiss Air, joined Beatrice & Svetlozar to work on Mobissimo. E-tickets soon came out and the travel market was suddenly providing a great benefit for consumers who could now buy tickets and get real time consumption of the product. In October, 2003, Mobissimo officially launched. This summer the company plans to launch in Europe.

Mobissimo’s Strengths, How Mobissimo is Different:
“Mobissimo is focused on making its search engine very comprehensive. This is a major point. Our team has a very international and especially European background. The European travel market is much more fragmented than the US market. In the US, there are only a couple low-cost carriers such as JetBlue, in Europe, there are at least 50, and in Asia, there are 12. When searching for flights to Europe, the major hubs are often sold out, but you can still fly people [to their destinations] with dynamic flight combinations. You can fly into Geneva as opposed to Paris. It’s cheaper and there are more flights available once you look at the low cost carriers.”

“There are more than 300,000 travel properties out there, but the Online Travel Agents (OTAs) like Sabre only cover around 42,000. When you have a technology with good comprehensiveness, you can add value beyond Expedia and Travelocity. There are great hotels in Morocco called Riads. There are over 100 Riads in Morocco, yet most of them are not available through Expedia or Travelocity. Mobissimo is global. We view the international market as key, and that’s how Mobissimo is unique.”

“We’re innovating. We’re making things more comprehensive. We want to add a variety of properties that you won’t find elsewhere.”

“Mobissimo wants to be a virtual concierge making smart recommendations. Most people in San Francisco think of Hawaii as the best possible beach destination. Travelers have some idea of the price range, and if they don’t see trips falling into that range, they leave. Mobissimo will present those people with other recommendations such as flying to Nassau. Using actual data, user trends, and personal data [preferred airlines, dates, etc.], Mobissimo can present users with smart alternatives.”

“Many people want to fly to Europe during the summer. Mobissimo knows the patterns in terms of availability. While many times there are no more flights on the suppliers’ sites, with our technology [and flexibility on the part of the traveler], we offer the user more availability. “

On Expedia not working with the travel comparison engines:
“Most of the suppliers we bring on, we have relationships with. Expedia is not keen on it, so there’s no point in approaching them. Mobissimo can still carve out a niche. As market share shifts, there will be a shift in sentiment. If Expedia doesn’t participate, then it will complicate the user experience.”

On traffic to site – according to MediaMetrix, monthly unique users continue to drop:
“Mobissimo didn’t originally focus on traffic. We wanted to take care of the back end first. Distribution deals [like Kayak’s recent partnership with About.com] are great, but [early on] you had to make sure the travel sites could handle the traffic. Everyone will develop their niche. Right now, we are going back and looking at potential partnerships, especially international distribution deals. As opposed to going after the very large portal distribution deals, you might see us go after the AARP or female focused magazines. Other travel comparison engines have spent money acquiring traffic, but pay-per-click (PPC) prices are too high. Also, suppliers want traffic they couldn’t otherwise have gotten. We will go after distribution deals that are more powerful. Some deals will bring traffic, but traffic will also come because we have the good choices and the good deals.”

“We have a small advertising budget. Rather than battle everyone else on the PPC engines, we’re going after distribution deals and PR, we think these are better ways to educate the consumer.”

What are Mobissimo’s areas for improvement?:
“Traffic. User Interface. There’s always been a question of whether to give users more of a travel site look and feel or be more of a search engine and just keep it simple. We want to allow users to read reviews of hotels, but we want to be a gateway, not trap you on our site. Mobissimo wants to keep searches simple, easy, and fast. We don’t want to overwhelm you with other information [like Expedia and Travelocity do].”

Are you profitable?:
“We’re getting close. We’ll be break-even by the end of the summer.”

If travel 1.0 was putting the travel agents online and travel 2.0 is travel comparison engines, what’s next?
“Things are evolving because of technology – 2.0 is just the base. Travel 3.0 is a powerful recommendation engine because at this point users are more experienced, educated, and more demanding and picky about how and where they travel. They’ll start to evaluate whether the top deal is actually the top deal when you take into consideration the price of parking, the cost of internet access, etc. Everyone talks about the commoditization of travel, but there just needs to be better collaboration with the suppliers. A year ago, travelers were happy enough knowing whether or not internet service was available, now they need to know the price. Women don’t just want to know if there’s room service, they want to know if there’s room service after a certain hour.”

Travel 3.0 is the virtual concierge. Mobissimo will give you the regular search results, but we’ll also give you other options. We have a prototype at this point and we plan to launch the service this year.