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Travelocity aims for the sky
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March 8, 2000: 3:39 p.m. ET
CEO Terry Jones is pushing the travel company beyond traditional services
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Four years ago, the online travel site Travelocity.com opened for business in New York, and on Wednesday it reinforced its emergence as a national travel brand with the completion of a $2.2B merge with Preview Travel.
The move makes Travelocity (TVLY: Research, Estimates), the third largest e-commerce site and 50 percent larger than its nearest competitor, with a combined total of 17 million members. But the important issue is growing the number of people who use the service for their travel needs, Terry Jones, chief executive officer of Travelocity told CNNfn.
"Our competitor is the telephone. We have lots of people who come to Travelocity and I would like to get more to buy," Jones said. "Improving that look-to-book ratio is what it is all about, getting people to feel they can trust Travelocity."
One way, Jones hopes to do that is by offering its online visitors more than the traditional fare.
"We are trying to make shopping on the Internet better than shopping in the physical world, that's why we will send you an email when a fare's gone down, that's why we will page you when your flight is late. "
 A new Dream Map feature on the Travelocity's Web site lets consumers state how much they are willing to spend and then searches for an affordable vacation within the United States.
Jones said the total travel market is $220 billion. About 5 percent of that is online sales with a projected rise to 10 percent in 2003.
In 1999, Travelocity's sales were $1.2B billion with $90.9 million in revenue, so it is a growing company. Jones said the Our revenue in the fourth quarter last year almost equaled total sales in 1998.
Jones said the merger brings together two companies who compliment each other in many ways.
"Travelocity has been very strong in air, car and hotel, Preview has been very strong in vacations, sales, cruises, content and they have a great ad sales force ..." he said. "We also are bring together our focus on portals, so with this new merger we are AOL (AOL: Research, Estimates) travel, Yahoo (YHOO: Research, Estimates) travel, Excite Travel and, At Home, Roadrunner, so we power a lot of portals and we have 17 million combined members."
But in the ever evolving world of e-commerce, Jones said brick and mortar travel agents will still play a major role.
"Travel agencies who have a niche, who understand all about Italy or safaris ... are going to do very well," he said. "... People who simply sell tickets are not going to do very well, because there aren't many tickets anymore, most of them are electronic."
For more on Jones comments click [WAV 286KB] or [AIF 286KB] 
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Travelocity
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