Facilitating the Dream with Kango - Follow-up

After I wrote the review about Kango.com I emailed Yen Lee and asked him some specific questions about getting product into Kango.com. Yen was gracious enough to answer my questions himself and provided some useful insight into how the sight may grow over time. Here are the questions and Yen’s answers:

T4: How do SME suppliers add their product to Kango or perhaps the better question is how does Kango identify and add supplier product?

YL: Two different answers to a critical initiative for us:

1. SME suppliers will be able to add their product to Kango in the future through a self-submittal. We currently add when they send us email at feedback@kango.com. Any suggestions on how we can better facilitate this?
2. We identify suppliers when we crawl large sites (e.g. yahoo travel) and CVB sites, then we look for their own site and crawl their sites

T4: What things can SME suppliers do to make sure they are found and indexed by Kango?

YL: See (2) above. They can search for their product first, but that’s not necessary (and our name search isn’t great yet anyways)

T4: Will there be marketing opportunities for SME suppliers within the Kango platform?

YL: Yes! Not just pay per click or per reservation; we would like to work with SEM suppliers to take leads via phone, email, fax – whatever fits their current and preferred method

T4: Are there plans to integrate third party XML feeds for supplier product? If so, what steps would these parties have to take in order to partner with Kango?

YL: Yes! They can email me or feedback@kango.com. Definitely a win win as we can get them integrated and out onto Google and it’s generally the easiest way for us to get content. BTW, it need not be XML, for many more simple content-heavy sites, we can use simpler solutions

T4: Will there be a XML feed for Kango metasearch data for syndication?

YL: Eventually. At this point we have a RSS feed.

Thanks again to Yen for the answers. Kango opens up some very exciting opportunities for travel suppliers to connect directly with travelers. I’ll keep my eyes open to see what new initiatives come down the pipe with Kango in 2008.

Sphere: Related Content