Sunnyvale, California — Search engine pioneer Yahoo Inc. is all set to burn-down more fat today by closing its travel bargains website FareChase, a service that assisted users find travel bargains, and will begin redirecting users to its main travel site instead, spokeswoman Bahareh Ramin said in an e-mail, part of its plan to tighten the company’s focus and cut costs.
Yahoo acquired FareChase in 2004. The service that enabled customers search for prices on flights, hotels and cars.
“Stopping FareChase will allow us focus our attention on strategic products and features on Yahoo Travel,” Ramin said.
The service helped customers perform comparative searches for pricing on flights, hotels, cruises and cars, but it was apparently not enough of a strategic product enhancement for Yahoo Travel, hence the company is discontinuing it altogether to tighten its focus and cut costs in these difficult times.
A post on the FareChase site makes the situation clear: “FareChase will no longer be available after March 25th.” The lack of a press release, blog post, or anything else or significance implies that the matter is not up for discussion.
The company faces steep decline in its online advertising and mounting competition from rival Google Inc., which dominates the Internet- search market. Yahoo’s recently appointed chief executive officer, Carol Bartz, said earlier this month that she was looking at cutting services to streamline the company.
“Everything is open for examination,” Bartz said during an investor conference in San Francisco this month. “I feel in this time, we need to make sure we are running very tight fiscally.”
For whatever reason FareChase is closing, its parent company is evidently trying to narrow its focus. “You can continue to find great deals on flights, hotels, and cars on Yahoo! Travel,” the post continues.
According to Travel Weekly, Yahoo inked a new pact with partner Travelocity in late February 2009, ensuring that the latter could continue its role as the primary booking engine for Yahoo Travel. In the past, Travelocity contended with Yahoo over the prominent role that Yahoo gave FareChase on Yahoo Travel.
This is the latest sacrificing decision from Yahoo in a long series of announcements. Yahoo also plans to shut down a storage service called Briefcase by March 30. In 2007, the company closed its Yahoo Photos service, redirecting users to the faster-growing Flickr site.
Prior to this, Yahoo sold shopping search engine Kelkoo. It also castrated social network Mash, Yahoo Photos, Ads in RSS, live video streaming service Yahoo Live, student community board KickStart and video editing service JumpCut.
Bartz, who took over the CEO job in January from Yahoo co- founder Jerry Yang, intends to bring back growth after three years of shrinking profits. Yahoo rejected a Microsoft Corp. takeover offer of as much as $47.5 billion last year, alienating some investors.
Yahoo handled 21 percent of U.S. Internet searches in February, according to comScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia. The company ranks a distant second to Google, which accounted for 63 percent of searches. Microsoft is third place, with an 8 percent share.