There’s been a bit of a retrenchment in travel private sales – not a lot of newcomers lately, but some notable news:

Jetsetter
Jetsetter continues to innovate and leverage its audience by becoming an expert travel site and moving revenue away from only flash sales. They also state they’re seeing success from non-hotel offerings (villas, etc) which is probably true. They’ve got the ear of Techcrunch anyway.

Andrew Harper Travel 
I missed this in January, but Andrew Harper, the members-only luxury travel site, announced a private sale offering. It’s different than their regular Auctions offering, which is members-only, because you don’t bid, you book directly. A bit late, but they’ve jumped on the bandwagon.

E-Booking.com
Looking very similar to everything else, e-booking.com is a very un-inspiring name for a new private sale site I first heard about through this blog's comments.  "Up to 40% off, luxury hotels you won't find anywhere else."  The company is located in Switzerland, and is already on the death row watch list as they haven't updated their Facebook or Twitter since December 2011.

I’ve updated my complete list of Flash Sale Websites for Travel here.

Thailand Fast Deals 
And last but not least, the first vertically (challenged) flash sale website for travel, created by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. ThailandFastDeals.com is a bit different because in addition to hotels, it offers flights, tour packages through Thailand’s travel partners. It also makes all pricing visible without registration, so it’s not a members-only site, just a clearinghouse for good deals.

 It will be hard to keep people engaged the same way other sites offer a broad selection of destinations to a captive email list – how often does the average American go to Thailand? But, globally this might be an interesting play, especially if they can get it to rank in organic search results and find travelers actively looking for Thailand vacations.

It seems that everyone and their brother is starting a flash sale website - why can't you?

Well, there's the issue - there are SO many flash sale websites out there, how can you get another one off the ground?  It's not so hard mechanically to build one, it's hard to get mindshare, and even harder to do it profitably.  The mega flash sale company The Gilt Group (as well as Rue La La and Lot18) just did a round of layoffs as they aren't achieving profitability like they thought - even with a ton of sales throughput.  In this business, margins matter, and the margins on discounts are razor thin.

I speak to flash sale subscribers every day and more and more of them are telling me they are unsubscribing from their daily emails - essentially forgetting about the service - because they're inundated with too many mails, too many sales, too many products to buy.

When there are only a few flash sale sites, it's easier to navigate the landscape.  All the products seem good, there aren't too many emails, and the quality is high.  We've gone so far off the deep end with shop, shop shop all the time, and it's starting to reach it's overhyped peak.  How many discount massages or workouts do you really need each week?

And now, even the national media companies are offering their own "local" deals, too, thinking they can get their media consumers to sign up to buy from them, rather than buy directly from the vendors advertising with them.  Why go through a media-company-middleman who has no experience in this arena?  Anyway, I digress.  If you feel you really need to jump on the flash sale bandwagon, you can make some money, or at least get your site and audience to the point where it's a nice acquisition target for Groupon or LivingSocial, who love to purchase smaller companies to grow.

#1. The first step to starting a flash sale site is:  have an angle.  Don't do what everyone else is doing - if it's not interesting and unique, don't bother.  Find a niche that has a big enough audience and is underserved by the current players.  It could be a geographical niche, demographic niche, product niche or something else, but you can't expect to win without something that's a little different in this crowded market.  You need to give people a reason to sign up for your service over everyone else out there.

#2 Your website.  People have to buy from somewhere - your website is where they will they manage their email subscription, keep their credit card on file, see their shipping status, and make those purchases.  The flash sale website is your central communications tool, so make sure it's customer-centric and customer-friendly.  My advice is find a great product manager with proven e-commence experience to design it to be simple, easy to navigate, and easy to check out with the goods.  Even though it's a single-product system per purchase, the basics of landing page optimization, user pathing and checkout optimization.

#3 Which comes first, the product sources or the audience?  Definitely the audience.  You need to start somewhere - with an opt-in email list so you have a base to start selling to.  The right lists can be hard or expensive to come by.  You could pay on a per name basis through email co-registration programs, market directly to other peoples's lists and try to gather responses, run a contest or two that you promote through social media, buy a list on the black market - there are a quite a few options.  You need a few thousand subscribers to start, at a bare minimum, assuming that you know that those people are really interested in what you plan to sell them.

#4  Decide on frequency.  You need to determine out how many deals per day or per week you're going to offer at the start, so you can align your sales team (you?) to schedule at least 2 weeks in advance of the sale.  You could go with one per week - that's not too few.  Quality is the most important factor, in the beginning, middle and end.  Volume is important when you're established, but quality is your first priority. People won't buy things they aren't interested in and aren't a good deal.  It's bad when they don't buy once, but not performing two or three times in a row will cause you will lose your captive audience - they will unsubscribe.

#5  Products.  Getting vendors to supply products for your flash sale is a true sales job - it's especially tricky when you don't have a (large) audience.  When you go to your first set of vendors with the pitch of 'We don't know how many we'll sell because we haven't tried yet.' you won't get a lot of takers. Talk it up, give them great terms - don't expect to make money on any of the deals until you have a rhythm going.  Make sure there's something in it for the vendors - give them a reason to play.

#6  There's more... but that's it for now - check back for more details on staring your own flash sale website.

New Flash Sale Site O' The Day
It seems that Travelocity is now in the daily deal / flash sale business too. It took a while. They were clearly taking their time to think of a great name, and have decided on "Dashing Deals". Nothing like name-choice-by-committee to really create a zinger.

So, what does it do besides tap into the millions-strong Travelocity customer base? Oh, something totally different: “Travelocity’s Dashing Deals program provides customers with deep discounts at great hotels,” said Carl Sparks, President and CEO, Travelocity Global.

Thanks Carl - that's nifty. (Sarcasm is 100% mine)

Oh, and they show you if the room is actually available before you buy. Read more here. Nice job!

With all that going for it, there's no way I'll miss out on signing up for this "me too" "also ran" daily deal. On second thought, I'm sure I'll avoid it.

Keeping track? Here's a complete list of Travel Flash Sale Sites.