By Michael Cohn

Hours before Yahoo saw a major shakeup in its top executive ranks, managers in Yahoo’s travel and PR departments said they had seen little effect so far from the infamous “peanut butter manifesto” issued last month by a high-ranking executive at the company.

The Sunnyvale, California-based portal company said late Tuesday that CFO Susan Decker would be taking over the responsibilities of COO Dan Rosensweig, who will be leaving Yahoo along with Lloyd Braun, head of the Yahoo Media Group, and John Marcom, senior vice president of international operations (see Shakeup at Yahoo, COO Leaving).

Earlier in the afternoon, however, Yahoo wanted to talk about how its travel unit is expanding and building links with other parts of the portal, including the Flickr photo-sharing service that Yahoo acquired last year, as well as the Trip Planner that Yahoo began testing last year and formally launched last summer (see Yahoo Debuts User Travelogues).

“We’ve seen the gas pedal stepped on recently around this whole idea of social media and how social tools are helping people do a better job of planning their trips,” said Scott Jampol, director of marketing at Yahoo Travel. “It’s gone from being a niche part of the travel-planning process and it’s gotten a lot more mainstream.”

Yahoo has seen revenue grow from airline and hotel bookings made through its travel site, which has long been powered by Travelocity. Earlier this year, though, Yahoo added a fare search tool to the web site to help people compare fares and room rentals across different sites (see Yahoo Adds Fare Search).

Mostly the company has been improving the social features of the portal to catch up with other social networks like News Corp.’s MySpace.com. Users can can network with each other to seek travel tips.

“They’re using it to connect with other travelers like themselves,” said Mr. Jampol. “People have traveled extensively and gained all this world of knowledge. The idea of trying to move some of that knowledge online and to give people the power to search through that knowledge is something that we think is enormously important.”

Yahoo created a personalized folder where users could store information and schedules culled from their travel research. Users can search through other travelers’ trips and make copies of their itineraries to plan similar voyages.

However, Yahoo currently does not make it easy to separate similar trips from one another, so users may have to spend some time sorting through nearly identical itineraries to find new suggestions for sites to see, but Mr. Jampol said the company would look into offering the ability to find unique itineraries more easily.

Users can print out maps and schedules from the site. They can also employ a blogging tool and upload and share their photos via Yahoo’s Flickr service.

In addition they can send a copy of the trip to friends and family. A new capability lets them create a Trip Planner “badge” with a postcard-like snapshot of their trip that they can add to their own web site or blog.

So far, Yahoo Trip Planner has attracted 600,000 itineraries. Yahoo has also integrated its Yahoo Answers advice service with Yahoo Travel and plans to integrate Yahoo Photos as well, but has elected to integrate the other photo-sharing service, Flickr, first.

Ad-Supported Trip Info

Yahoo has been making available copies of celebrity trips such as one taken by model Ivanka Trump (Donald’s daughter) to Dubai and a cruise planned by country singer Tim McGraw.

Advertisers have helped sponsor the information from these trips. The Trump Organization wanted to launch a web site called GoTrump.com and used Ms. Trump’s Dubai trip as a way to publicize the site, and Mr. McGraw’s talent management firm Creative Artists Agency (CAA) sponsored his cruise promotion.

Actor Andrew McCarthy also wrote about a trip to Ireland for National Geographic magazine and posted his itinerary on Yahoo Trip Planner along with some additional photos and notes on his trip.

Yahoo is also getting set to expand its much-ballyhooed Panama advertising technology for increasing the visibility, geotargeting, and most importantly profitability of the company’s search ads.

“Search advertising is a huge part of the monetization at Yahoo Travel and it will continue to grow,” said Mr. Jampol.

Consolidation Strategies

Mr. Jampol said he hadn’t seen any pressure about consolidating operations, as was emphasized in the recent so-called “peanut butter manifesto” from Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s senior vice president of communities, communications, and front doors (see Yahoo Plans Overhaul).

“We have a lot of different strategies that are going on right now,” said Mr. Jampol. “We have a really open culture at Yahoo so a lot of different suggestions were taken into account.”

“I don’t think that there is much else in the memo that people weren’t already thinking and talking about internally, so we’ll see,” said Kryssa Guntum, a senior PR manager at Yahoo. “I think it’s just business as usual essentially, so that was just an example of the open culture that Yahoo does have and the ability of people to share opinions and ideas.”

When asked if Yahoo was bracing for any layoffs, as the memo suggested were in the future, Mr. Jampol responded, “There have been none as of right now. We have a tremendous network of employees right now who are incredibly smart and dedicated, and I think that Yahoo is pretty resilient when it comes to our strategies moving forward.”