A couple of months ago, TravelZoo announced that they were going to join Groupon and get into the local deal game.
Their CEO, Chris Laughlin said this:
“Local Deals fits well within our strategy of alerting our 21 million high-quality subscribers worldwide of the very best deals. With Local Deals, we are able to further our coverage of local entertainment and lifestyle content and make it more relevant for our subscribers. For example, we can now cover more local spa and restaurant deals.”
Well it has been almost two months since they launched so we thought we would check in on how they are doing.
How Does The TravelZoo Daily Deals Program Work?
- For starters, their deals aren’t necessarily daily. Each deal they offer seems to vary between 1 and 8 days. Additionally, they don’t always have an active deal in each city. For instance, they have done deals in New Orleans, but their last New Orleans deal sold out over a week ago.
- They seem to be targeting high-end local services. These guys aren’t messing around with just the local Mexican restaurant. They are hitting the top-rated restaurants, spas, and local tours
How Are They Doing?
- They are selling a lot of deals and making a lot of money. Today for example, for their 10 active deals they have sold a total of over 3,500 deals at an average deal price of $62. In New York alone, they have a deal that has sold over 1,400. The New York deal has a price tag of $125, so that deal alone has grossed over $175,000. There is probably one happy sales guy somewhere right now.
- You can check out all their latest deals on our TravelZoo Local Deals page. You can also check out our list of all the TravelZoo Local Cities.
TravelZoo is clearly kicking butt right away with these deals, and the reasons should be obvious. First they claim over 21 million subscribers. Subscribers that are already pre-qualified deal hunters. Second, they have lots of existing business relationships that they can leverage. There are lots of companies that have either an existing large audience or existing business relationships, but only a few have both, and TravelZoo is one of them.
It will be interesting to see how aggressive TravelZoo gets in this space. Do they stick with the high-end deals, do they increase the frequency of deals? We think that long-term the successful deal sites will develop an identity around their deal offerings. High end businesses might be a great niche to claim, but it will probably require that they don’t substantially increase their frequency.
Of all the new entrants to the daily deal space, we think that TravelZoo is among the best. We are looking forward to their arrival in Atlanta (as long as they keep targeting the high end businesses).