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TravelZoo Local Cities: List of Active Cities

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In August, TravelZoo began offering local deals in select cities.  When they launched they were only in two cities, Des Moines and Minneapolis.  They have now expanded and are offering local deals in 14 cities.

Although there is not a deal in each of these cities each day, they do have them periodically.  And as we wrote in our TravelZoo Local Deals review, the deals are quite good.

TravelZoo Local Cities:

  • Chicago
  • Dallas
  • Denver
  • Des Moines
  • Fort Lauderdale
  • Houston
  • Los Angeles
  • Minneapolis
  • New Orleans
  • New York
  • Philadelphia
  • Phoenix
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle

List of Groupon Cities

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It seems like every week, Groupon is adding more and more cities.  If you go to their website, you will see a list of over 150 cities in the US and Canada.  However, many of those cities are not yet live.  Before Groupon goes live in a city they must first line up merchants willing to do the deals and also sign up thousands of people willing to buy them.  Some of their most recently launched cities include Columbia SC, and Wilmington DE.

For those of you who want to know what’s cities are active, we have created a Groupon city list page.  This page not only lists all the Groupon cities, but it lists all the active deals in each city.  We think we have all the active cities in North America.  If we are missing any, please let us know.

Here is the list of cities in North America from their website.

http://www.dailydibsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/GrouponCityList.jpg

Wow.com – AOL’s New Deal of the Day Site

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AOL recently announced that they too will join the hundreds of other daily deal sites that are following in the footsteps of Groupon.  We think that AOL is well positioned to make this work even if they are just duplicating what many others are already doing.

How is Wow.com Different?

As far as we can tell from the limited info on their website, they aren’t really different.  They say:

If you want a deal, we listen and offer up your bargain-of-choice on a silver platter at an astronomically discounted price, helping you stretch your hard-earned dollar to infinity and beyond. So be sure to stay tuned and prepare to be “wowed!”

What exactly does that mean?  Our guess is not much.  Judging from the image of a sample deal on their site, $25 for $50 worth of food at a Seafood restaurant, we don’t exactly get the vibe that they are about to turn this model on its head.

Will AOL’s WOW.com Succeed?

If you define success as making a good chunk of change at high margins,  then the answer is yes.

We are assuming that between existing email lists and tons of available ad inventory, they will be able to acquire a very substantial number of subscribers.

For the here and now, lots of subscribers means lots of money in the local daily deals business.  If you have a couple hundred thousand subscribers in a city, a certain percentage will open the email and a percentage of that will buy.  Those percentages usually equate to a high margin cash generating business.

The quality of the deals they offer, though important, is not the key part of the equation.  Sending emails with good deals to hundreds of thousands of people will result in an impressive influx of cash as long as this continues to be a 30% – 50% margin business.

As soon as Wow.com has live deals we will add them to DailyDibs.com

Radio Station Daily Deals in Orlando

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Our Orlando deals page has been up for a while now, but just today we noticed there is another deal site in Orlando we were missing.  They call themselves O Deals Daily.  Presumably the O stands for Orlando.

There’s nothing particularly interesting about yet another daily deal site being added to the mix, but it appears from their contact us page, that this is a Clear Channel site.  This is the first time we have seen a local radio station, or collection of radio stations do their own daily deal site.

In reviewing their recent deals page, it seems they have been offering deals since July 2010.  Today’s deal was at a local restaurant called BB King’s – yes that BB King.  As of this writing they had sold 67 deals.  That doesn’t seem like much, but you have to have a pretty large distribution list to have 67 purchases to a local restaurant.  They also show one other deal on their site to a bowling alley that claims 273 sales.  If these numbers are accurate, the program appears to be performing admirably.

OpenTable Spotlight: Deal of the Day from OpenTable

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OpenTable has now joined the ever growing list of sites that are offering some sort of daily deal or deals of the day.  The OpenTable deals are, of course, focused on restaurants.  The OpenTable daily deal program has some slight differences than other similar programs.  In this review we will tell you how the OpenTable deals program works and how well it is performing for them.

OpenTable’s Deals Are Not Daily

The first obvious difference in the way OpenTable is approaching daily deals is that they aren’t actually doing daily deals.  The Open Table deals, now active in 9 cities, are offered for a single day only, but they are only offered once weekly.

Each Tuesday evening, OpenTable reveals the deal that will be offered the following day (Wednesday).  The deal will then be available for the entire day Wednesday.  At midnight on Wednesday the deal will expire and no longer be available.  After the deal expires, OpenTable will then preview next week’s deal as what they call a “Secret Spotlight”.  Basically, they give a hint about what restaurant will be featured next, and allow users to guess the restaurant.

OpenTable Spotlight Deal

How Good and Unique Are The Deals?

Every OpenTable deal that we have seen has been the same $25 for $50.  We also took a look at the restaurants they were signing up in Atlanta and compared them to Groupon.

We looked at 6 restaurant deals they have offered in Atlanta over the past 2 months.  Of the 6 deals, Groupon had previously done a deal at 3 of them – the other 3 have not yet appeared on Groupon.  Two of the 3 deals that appeared on Groupon, one in March of 2010 and one in June of 2009, were both slightly better on Groupon.  One was $15 for $35 and the other was $15 for $40.

How Well is OpenTable Spotlight Performing?

I think that by any measure you would have to say that it is performing quite well.  The number of deals sold for the 6 deals we looked at averaged 640, with the top deal selling 1282.  At a 50% commission, that is an average of $8,000 in revenue per deal per week for a total of $416,000 in annual revenues for OpenTable in Atlanta.  When you assume that their distribution list will only continue to grow and their number of cities will grow, the revenue amounts will be substantial.  This is a no-brainer business for OpenTable to be in while it remains hot.

If you are a DailyDibs subscriber, we will deliver you the OpenTable deals each Wednesday.

Here is a list of active OpenTable Spotlight Cities: