My sense is that here’s what’s happening:

- Travelers have found the major travel sites (Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz) usefull for booking commodity travel. At the same time, most users are not interested in all of the cross sell “opportunities” that are thrown at them, viewing them as impediments to completing booking their simple trip.

And those who are interested view these “special offers” warily.

For simple travel, however, the various tools that indicate what others have done can be useful (e.g., rather than paying the sky-high airfares to fly from Boston to San Jose or SFO, fly the much cheaper Jet Blue to Oakland).

- Travelers with special interests (e.g., a photo expedition in the jungles of South America, with eco-friendly lodging) have turned to niche travel sites where they can find like-minded travelers.

Here people trust not the “wisdom of crowds.” In fact, they seek just the opposite: Not a crowd at all, but rather the insight of an experienced traveler, perhaps even someone who lives in the region.

True, some reviewers may be biased, and those who write reviews tend to be motivated by a view that is on one extreme or the other, but in some ways these are more helpful, especially the strongly negative ones. After all, the trip is likely the only one of its kind that the traveler will ever take, and he knows that at the outset of the process. As such, the atypical events are the ones of concern to him. Reading these, he asks himself, Is this likely to happen to me, or is it relevant to me? Would I have been satisfied with the resolution that the reviewer describes?

- Finally, some travel agents have adapted their businesses to meet the needs of those seeking a special travel experience. Here the agents use the web as a tool to attract and service these niche travelers.

If this is what’s going on, “social search” tools such as Baynote should be able to help the mass market travel sites.

And with your work with Expedia well-underway, perhaps we will see a case study published here in the months ahead