Yahoo Travel Shuttered as Part of Company-Wide Reorganization

Yahoo delivered on rumored job cuts and a company-wide reorganization today as it shuttered its Yahoo Travel product and laid off four of five travel staffers, including Editor-in-Chief Laura Begley Bloom.

Yahoo had spent the last two years building content-rich, magazine-like products with plenty of advertising in multiple verticals. In addition to Yahoo Travel, the company is closing its food, health, parenting, and tech online magazines. Yahoo’s general news product will survive alongside sports, finance, and lifestyle channels. The existing travel stories will remain live, but travel site itself will sunset.

Although the existing travel media product will go away, Yahoo may continue to operate in travel via its Project Index product that is currently in development. In theory, it will use Siri- or Google Now-like artificial intelligence to deliver a personalized travel planning and booking service. Yahoo has been using Hipmunk as a booking partner.

The end of Yahoo Travel comes less than two years after the company revamped all of its editorial products into topic-specific magazines and made big, splashy hires including the New York Times’ David Pogue and Katie Couric. For travel, Yahoo turned to Paula Froelich, a former New York Post editor who joined Yahoo in April 2014. At the time, Yahoo’s travel presence was a relatively stale jumble of stories and booking tools. Froelich and her team jumped into the relaunch half-way through and began publishing the new Yahoo Travel by the end of that month. The new Yahoo was packed with Buzzfeed-like stories on travel news, video features by Froelich and others, and, of course, lots of lists. This year, it won the North American Travel Journalists Association’s award for best online travel magazine.

Froelich left her position last October to become editor-at-large and was succeeded by Begley Bloom, a former deputy editor of Travel + Leisure.

Editor’s Note: Skift exchanged content with Yahoo Travel, as it does with other partners, from time to time.