Having your travel products accessible to 55 million potential
customers may be like Internet heaven.
eBay Travel, launched in the first quarter of 2001, has been
reaching out to the travel agent community and, by all accounts, it
seems to have developed a good relationship, said Meena Ravella,
general manager of eBay Travel in San Jose, Calif.
“Entrepreneurial travel agents respond really well to our
platform,” she said. “They like the fact that they have complete
control over their sales and their customers.”
Ravella, who said she regularly calls travel sellers to make
sure the system is working for them, said she has been getting
great feedback, some of which is the result of eBay’s international
reach.
“An agent told me that he had a great deal to the Bahamas, but
that his local clientele was all tapped out,” she said. “So he
lists the trip on eBay and sells it in one day to a guy from
Portugal.”
While eBay is known as an auction site, travel agents on eBay
Travel, however, have several options: They can sell auction-style
over three-, seven- or 10 days, with the highest bid becoming the
sale price; they can sell the travel immediately in an
auction-style format, or they can set a fixed price and wait for a
buyer.
Ravella reminds agents that eBay customers want deals, so agents
should offer products that they can afford to discount
substantially. Also, she suggests bundling segments into packages,
such as offering a resort stay, tickets to a sporting event and a
rental car.
To use the site, Agents must register on ebay.com, then wait for
verification from a company called Square Trade.
Agents will have to provide agency names and ARC and/or IATAN
numbers. They can design their own sites, which should include
product descriptions and photos.
Buyers can purchase and pay agents directly or they can use the
eBay Pay Pal system.
The site’s pricing structure combines a listing fee and a final
value “success” fee.
Listing fees can be as much as $3.30 for products costing $200
or more.
The formula for final value fees is a bit more complicated.
If the final sale price of the product is $25 or less, the final
value fee is 5.25 percent of the closing price. If the final sale
price is $25 to $1,000, the value fee is 5.25 percent of the
initial $25 plus 2.75 percent of the balance.
And if the closing value is more than $1,000, the final value
fee is 5.25 percent of the initial $25, plus 2.75 percent of $975,
plus 1.5 percent of the balance.
An eBay example indicates that, for a travel product listed at
$100 and selling for $500, the total fees would be $16.58 or
3.3%.
A survey conducted online in July found that nearly 60 percent
of all eBay users purchased leisure travel in the preceding six
months and that 30 percent spend more than $1,500 a year on leisure
travel.
Agents who have specific questions about eBay Travel can e-mail
info@ebaytravel.com.
