UPDATE:
Hotels went live this week. New flights interface to follow in the next few weeks, apparently. Chris Nixon also says it is considering online personal travel assistants.
ORIGINAL:
Kelkoo is splashing out Euro 2 million to reinvigorate its travel search service, with the first results expected within the next few weeks.
The investment comes as owner Jamplant looks to bring the travel section of the cross-vertical site back to its old position as a high profile service to find hotels, flights, car hire and other travel-related products.
The first element to be relaunched will be the hotels section of the travel channel, with an overhauled design and interface by the end of July.
The new functionality will be rolled out in the UK first of all, following by other European markets within around four weeks.
New managing director, ex-Travelsupermarket boss Chris Nixon, says the flights section will be relaunched by the end of August, once again in the UK initially before being extended elsewhere.
The last element in the first phase will be car hire, expected by the end of September using the same launch strategy as hotels and flights.
Flights will continue to use a mixture of the Amadeus Metapricer technology and links to air fare merchants. Hotel results are expected to eventually come from around 50 different merchants and direct connections with hotel chains.
Nixon admits Kelkoo's previous owner Yahoo "didn't know what to do with it", but a year or so after the sale to Jamplant in 2008 the company realised it should do something with the brand's travel channel.
Part of the investment, alongside hiring new people, includes the design work as well as widespread re-engineering of content on the site to help improve its performance in search engines. The first fruits of this work included the recent partnership signed with Frommers to produce travel guides on the site.
Currently, Kelkoo's largest markets are the UK, France and Scandinavia, with around 70% of traffic focusing on flight search, 20% for hotels, remainder for other travel-related products.
An old favourite of TV advertising, Nixon says the company is currently considering whether to launch a dedicated TV campaign in early-2012 to support the new push.