Yapta: Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant
Written by Ryan Carrigg (contact - e-mail) -- September 21st, 2007 | Recommend ThisYapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant), a new online travel startup, is looking to change how consumers compare and shop for flights. Users who download free Yapta software are able to tag specific flights as they research on online travel agencies and suppliers, the details of which are then saved to Yapta. Once tagged, Yapta keeps track of prices for the selected trips, silently returning to check prices, and then informing users if a change has occurred.
I must admit I have not yet tested Yapta so I cannot speak to the user experience, but I can tell you a bit about how successful the site has been in its early stages.
In June Yapta reached its high water mark of 109,000 US unique visitors. After the initial buzz there has been a steady decline in traffic and subsequently in downloads. Speaking of downloads, a look at the Download Interest numbers – people reaching the download page of yapta.com – shows that a healthy portion of Yapta visitors are interested in downloading but get cold feet when it comes to actually clicking the “Download” button (or they use Firefox and have to wait for a compatible version).
Will Yapta be successful? It is too early to say. Perhaps some Yapta users could chime in???
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September 21st, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I really think a lot of companines approach marketing in the wrong way and try to do a big “launch” or “buzz” campaign and do all thier activities and spending all at once. Marketing is most effective with repeated exposures, so a lot of marketing in a short time is actually less effective than marketing over a period of time. Also, if you only have a limited budget, you are much better off getting your message in front of 100 people 5 times, than 500 people one time.
So… in this example I bet they made simialr mistakes to what everyone did in 1999 during the last dot-com bom (does anyone remember those mistakes?) - trying to have a “big splash”. The result is a lot of interest that falls off rather quickly, and often this interest is from people who just love to check out what is hot but will not be good long term customers.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Hello
Very nice point of view! Respect!
October 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Personally, I think this would make a better plugin - where Yapta would just pick up your flight plans as you purchase from the browser.
Get idea, but people are lazy and the market for this kind of travel software it limited.