An interseting development from the folk at Time Out , for a number of years they've served travel ad's on their site from the likes of Expedia & Venere and recently a search form started to appear across the sites from lastminute.com this would take the user of into the lastminute.com website to transact. This was managed by the affiliate network commission junction (CJ) and I understand was an a CPA basis. It seems though that Time Out have got a taste for travel and with lastminute.com are about to launch a co-branded white label at Time Out / http://booking.timeout.com. On paper it looks like a wise move for the iconic authority on the world's best cities, and for the lastminute.com distribution business a good fit. I guess we'll have to wait and see though if it can enter the travel space and be successful in getting it's new product across to it's user base. As both organisations have a very South East centric demographic of similar customer types aren't the users if Time Out already customers of lastminute.com? Is there not a chance of
- Time Out canabalising lastminute.com
- Time Out losing out to lastminute.com as the customer is already loyal to the OTA
If the site is still up on running in 12 minths time we'll have our answer.