CEO Interview: Cheapflights and Momondo Attempt a Dual-Brand Strategy
Skift Take
The Momondo Group is in the early stages of pursuing a dual brand metasearch strategy with its Cheapflights and Momondo brands. Are they different enough from one another, and will they stand out sufficiently from their rivals to make a real go of it? Other players will be watching to see if any of this makes sense.
Imagine if Kayak acquired Skyscanner and they decided to divide up the world, pursuing different markets for their travel-metasearch offerings.
Or if Trivago decided to launch a second metasearch brand, and they decided to pick off different countries, targeting diverse demographics with different offerings.
Multi-brand strategies (see Priceline, Booking.com and Agoda or Expedia, Hotels.com and Hotwire) work well enough in other categories, so why not metasearch?
It hasn't really been tried before, but the Momondo Group, created in 2012 after 18-year-old Cheapflights Media acquired Denmark-based Momondo, is giving it a whirl.
UK-based Cheapflights, which has until now specialized solely in publishing negotiated flight deals, just launched what it hopes will be a harbinger of things to come -- a flight-metasearch site in New Zealand.
That's a huge departure for Cheapflights, which has been a Top 10 online travel agent site in the UK, according to Hitwise. Cheapflights has flight-deal sites in the UK and Ireland, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and South Africa, but wants to cash in on the hot, and presumably more lucrative, metasearch trend.
Meanwhile, Denmark-based Momondo, with its strength in the Nordics and Russia, has a presence in the U.S. and Europe,
