MapQuest is investing in an ambitious evolution into a full-service travel ecosystem, including a recently launched booking capability for hotels, airlines, and car rentals via a partnership with Priceline. The goal, says MapQuest General Manager Brian McMahon, is to become a major player in the travel space, right up there with the likes of Google.
The integration of booking capability with rich travel content, interactive social media elements, video, enhanced local initiatives, and MapQuest’s storied mapping functions are all part of a strategy to move away from a brand best known for digital driving directions and to a recognized full-service digital travel source.
“Moving from driving directions to travel directions is a big step for us,” McMahon said. “We're going to continue to offer more and more ways for people to buy travel services, introduce more travel content into the site, enhance 
our current products, and build new products that will bring all those things together.”
MapQuest has been introducing brand-building travel initiatives for several months, but it’s been flying under the radar in terms of marketing them beyond the site’s own users. McMahon describes the low-key approach as “testing the waters.”
Last November, the company launched MapQuest Discover, a social platform focusing on the inspirational phase of travel, including planning, exploration, and documentation/sharing via photos and video. MapQuest Travel Blogs was introduced in late February 2013, the same month the AOL-owned company quietly launched a white-label booking capability for consumers in partnership with Priceline Partner Network. The press release about the deal wasn’t issued until April.
Mobile app sharing was introduced in late May. At about the same time, the company initiated it’s one and only promotion to date of the site’s hotel-air-car booking capability created by the Priceline partnership, the 30-day “Book Now, Travel Free” promo. The “Book Travel” portal to the Priceline site is simply one of several banner widgets on the company’s home page.
Despite the low-key introduction of new capabilities in the travel space and almost non-existent marketing, traffic to the booking portal and hard-dollar revenue from bookings are “well above” what McMahon describes as “a very aggressive plan” for 2013. He declined to provide actual numbers.
The partnership with Priceline is just one component of the MapQuest brand development initiative. McMahon said cruise functionality and direct business relationships between MapQuest and travel suppliers, rather than via the current Priceline partnership, will be considered as part of the company’s longer-term strategy.
The company is putting its money where the plan is. MapQuest has hired upward of 25 people since the beginning of this year, many focused primarily on brand evolution initiatives, and there are more new hires to come. Enhancements are being introduced weekly, and the company is expanding its core search capabilities.
“We're clearly one of the largest players in local search, so in addition to investing in travel we’ve been investing in search,” McMahon said. “We’ve spent a good portion of the last six months completely rebuilding our local search stack. Over the next six months, we'll probably have rebooted the entire thing.”
This is the first excerpt from a discussion between McMahon and Diane Merlino, editor in chief of Travel Weekly PLUS, regarding MapQuest’s strategy and specific initiatives for developing the brand into a leading player in the travel space.
Merlino: What kind of traffic are you getting on the MapQuest site overall?
McMahon: We get a couple million people a day on average. Right now we're at about 44 million uniques per month across multiple devices, which is roughly 35 million on desktop, 12 million on mobile, and about four million who overlap between desktop and mobile. That's March 2013 data from ComScore.
Merlino: You compared several OTA brands before inking the deal with Priceline. Who did you take a look at?
McMahon: We talked to a bunch of different brands, the Expedias of the world and several others — all the bigger guys. We spent a lot of time with the Priceline team talking about how they treat their customers and how they run their product organization. We ultimately decided that the Priceline brand was a really, really good fit with the MapQuest brand, and the best partner for us to offer a white-labeled portal for our consumers.
Merlino: How does the Priceline partnership fit into MapQuest's overall strategy in the travel space? You're describing yourself now as “the online travel brand,” which is quite a bit broader than your roots as an online mapping service.
McMahon: We have two strategies when it comes to travel. One is our ultimate strategy, which is to become a full-service travel ecosystem.
We have a couple new products, things like MapQuest Travel Blogs and MapQuest Discover, that are content-related travel applications. What we’re doing is evolving the MapQuest brand itself and the MapQuest.com property 
to extend into the travel space and bridge all those things together.
One of the ways we're doing that, which has come from a shorter-term strategy, is shifting from driving directions to what we're calling travel directions. So you'll see us extend the brand into hotel bookings and flight bookings while continuing to provide services around those things. We're spending a lot of time getting to that place of the true travel ecosystem, taking baby steps to get there.
Merlino: What about your name? Will the name change as you implement these strategies to create a full-service MapQuest travel ecosystem?
McMahon: It won't. Actually we've been thinking a lot about the MapQuest name and the MapQuest brand. We’ve been joking about this internally; nowhere in the name MapQuest does it say “driving directions,” right? The name is about the map and the quest. We're going to bring more of the quest into MapQuest, and we think that ultimately the brand and the name will extend itself.
Merlino: What’s the time frame for implementing the short-term and long-term strategies you’ve just described?
McMahon: Short term, in the next six to nine months, we're going to spend a lot of time evolving the MapQuest product offering, fixing some stuff within the existing properties that will lend itself to a better travel experience down the road. By early 2014, you'll probably start to see us merge more and more of these properties together.
Merlino: Brian, this is a pretty ambitious strategy you folks have put in play to get into the travel big leauges. There must be a lot of excitement around it at MapQuest.
McMahon: It is really ambitious and it is very exciting. We’ve decided to invest in this brand again, and that means we've set ambitious goals, and we're very, very confident in our ability to hit them.
Merlino: How did MapQuest develop its current strategy for the travel space?
McMahon: There were some organizational changes internally. My boss, Francis Lobo [Senior Vice President, AOL Services], and I came into this somewhat as newcomers, and about a year ago, we sat down and talked about all the things we could do with the MapQuest brand, and we came up with a strategy initiative. When we looked at our MapQuest user data, we realized that we wanted to do more than just offer linkages to hotels. We thought about the ways we could grow the brand, and travel was not only a very logical way, it was also a very lucrative one.
Merlino: Logical and lucrative. Can't beat it.
McMahon: Exactly.
Merlino: What travel products can a customer book now on MapQuest.com?
McMahon: They can book airfare, car rentals and hotels from the Priceline inventory.
Merlino: For suppliers, the business relationship is with Priceline, not with MapQuest directly?
McMahon: Yes. Right now, we have a white-labeled portal that's powered by Priceline. It also includes the Booking.com inventory as well as some other inventory that Priceline has, but it's 100% powered by Priceline. We're having lots of discussions with Priceline about how that will look long-term, and you'll probably see us bring more and more of that functionality into the MapQuest experience.
We decided to test the waters and see how this type of service would perform on MapQuest. And we're very, very excited and happy with the way it is performing, so we're now continuing to invest in that and bring more of that functionality into the MapQuest experience itself.
Merlino: How does "very, very excited and happy” translate into actual numbers Brian?
McMahon: I don't think we're ready to share any numbers publicly. I will tell you that we're well above our plan for the year. We put together a really, really aggressive plan late last year, both from a traffic and a revenue perspective. We're pretty far ahead of that plan, so we're very excited about that.
Merlino: Are you ahead of your plan in both traffic and revenue?
McMahon: Yes. Other than the product features, we look at three things when we think about this space. We look at traffic, conversions, and commissions, and all three of those things are continuing to grow. We're really happy with the performance.
We're adding new features pretty much every week, and we're seeing direct benefit from most of those features, and we've really only just begun. The results from the initial tests we did in February have continued to grow, and that’s 
leading us to invest more, so within the next 60 days you'll probably start to see some bigger things coming out. And we haven't even begun with mobile.
Merlino: You launched the booking capability in February. Did you market it? That might have been one of the quietest launches in history.
McMahon: We didn't market it at all, and part of that was by design. When we launched this, we were really just testing to see if people would transact with MapQuest.
We have a ton of data in our search logs and our user logs that show us that people have been interacting with hotels and other travel-related services from the site. Travel is the biggest category by far. We looked at the data and decided to test to see if people would book directly from MapQuest, and we were pleasantly surprised. People are transacting much further than what we expected.
Merlino: Are you concerned that the great results you say you’re getting might be from that “Oh, wow, here's a brand-new, shiny online travel tool to play with" syndrome?
McMahon: No, and that's ultimately why we've decided to invest. We've had this out there for several months, and all the new features that we're adding on a weekly basis are showing improvement to the results. We’ve had from February to today to look at the data and at how people are interacting. The fact of the matter is that a very, very small percentage of our overall users are currently using this functionality, which to us means that we've got a lot of upside.
Merlino: Why have you taken such a low profile to marketing this brand expansion?
McMahon: We're doing a little bit more here and there. But we're not spending a lot of time marketing it because right now the majority of the traffic is organic, and we see that as a really good thing. When we've built out more of the product features you'll see us get a little bit more aggressive with the marketing, but right now it's about testing the waters.
COMING UP: Brian McMahon on MapQuest’s travel customer demographic and what they’re booking, the company’s strategy in the hot local sphere, and the potential introduction of a media model for suppliers.