Expedia.se marketing FAIL
Spotted an interesting billboard advert in Malmö tonight. Expedia Sweden can get me to Copenhagen and back with a flight + hotel deal – 3 nights in a 3 star hotel for only 2534 Swedish Crowns (about £199), fair enough perhaps but the flight is leaving from Stockholm – 6 hours drive from Malmö.
Think I’ll take the 25 minute train ride from Malmö to Copenhagen instead thanks.
Expedia Sweden Marketing Billboard
Travolution Summit Twittered
The Travolution summit was held in London today, here is my own summary of the event.
The Travo Summit
First on the airline side, there was some talk that airlines were failing to give enough destination information to customers, especially info for airport transfers. I don’t really agree that is the case but if it is, there is a great opportunity for affiliate marketing sites to provide the content and sell the transfer services…. trainline at tradedoubler, holidaytaxis at affiliate future come to mind not to mention car hire, e.g. carrentals (comparison site) at webgains.
Holiday Home Rental advertising is growing at quite a pace, and there was some nice data on that. Here are some tweets from the summit on the matter:
- Average holiday home used just 30 days a year says HomeAway
- New holiday home rental sign ups driven out of necessity – owners can’t sell & are over stretched. (43% of renters told holiday-lettings they are renting out of necessity).
- Recession is big opportunity for holiday home rental companies to boost inventory and take on hotels
The presentation from HomeAway, the biggest and global player in the holiday home rental market, pointed out that confirmed online booking generally doesn’t work so I guess if they are looking to work with affiliates it would have to be on a pay per enquiry / lead basis and also for new rental sign ups by owners.
And some data that HolidayRentals were kind enough to send :
- Booking enquiries for UK properties up 90% this year
- In the UK, the top 10 destinations on Holiday-Rentals are: Cornwall, Devon, the Lake District, Edinburgh and Lothians, Dorset, Gloucestershire, East Sussex, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Somerset and Bath, and Norfolk.
. . . .So here you might want to take a look at Blue Chip Vacations at Affiliate Window as well as Hoseasons at Affiliate Window or Tradedoubler. If you have access to holiday home owners, maybe though an expat or finance site then the Holiday Rentals affiliate scheme provides both good commissions for new owner sign ups and also offers dedicated to the affiliate channel
On the topic of content, Frommers, who produce destination content for sites including Virgin Atlantic, revealed their survey said that 50% off travellers are more likely to book from a site that has useful content. Frommers also revealed that the biggest complaint about travel sites is insufficient pictures.
On the subject of search, very important to almost all online business these days, Google said that the average holiday booked online takes 29 days, 12 searches, and 22 different travel sites. To be honest, I’m not that bothered about data like this as it’s just an average that will be hiding all sorts of extremes varying by destination, product, demographic doing the booking and much more. All an affiliate marketeer need to know is how to get the visitors onto their site (and off again to the merchants site) as close to the time of booking as possible.
The Tweeting
Having a look at the # search for travsummit, there was a huge amount of tweets there. I really enjoyed “watching” the summit on twitter and was the best use of Twitter I have had so far. Will be interesting to see what affect twitter has on conferences in the future. We still need people to be there in the flesh though, otherwise there will be nothing to generate the tweets !
Next week I am lucky enough to be going to a4uexpo in Amsterdam, will be curious to see if that is tweeted as successfully as the Travo summit.
New flight agency homepage design
The Canadian part of Flight Centre have given their blog readers four snapshots of potential new website designs for their homepage. They are running a survey asking for more feedback and opinions on each of the mock-ups.
It’s well worth a look as they have some interesting ideas.
I have also seen the idea of letting people decide the design of the website used by Socruise.com a couple of weeks ago.
Clicks and Mortar 2009 ?!
Is Lastminute.com getting a piece of the high street while it’s cheap ?
Just when I was thinking the UK high street was going to go all boarded up shops / charity shops, I see an interesting Tweet from Lastminute_Com saying that “the good stuff is coming”.
When I look on the Good stuff page at the Lastminute website I see that they might be opening stores in London, Birmingham and Manchester. Pretty strange when other travel industry players are shutting shops as much as they can. At first I thought they might be taking advantage of some low lease rates and opening up showcase / inspiration stores something like the Apple Store. Should the affiliate marketing community be worried, are Lastminute.com going to lose the .com ? I don’t think so.
Now I reckon, unlike poor Woolworths, these stores will have a very short lifetime, just a couple of days to get some word of mouth and in your face – touch and feel – brand awareness.
More will be revealed shortly I am sure !
Pay what you want hotels
Choose your own price for hotel stays
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 3 businesses that had experimented with letting consumers pay what they want and I tried to see how this might be adopted by the travel industry as it struggles with a mis-match of capacity in 2009 which will surely be a low demand year.
We didn’t have to wait long. Someone left a comment on the original post that a new hotel in Singapore is using the pay what you want philosophy as part of it’s lauch strategy. The “Ibis Singapore on Bencoolen” is running a promotion on a dedicated website http://paywhatyouwant.com.sg where potential guests can name their own price during dedicated promotional periods each day. If successful they get to stay a pay the price they have chosen. No idea how the pricing is going but in a press release it is claimed some bids are as high as $100 or what the no-show rate is going to be.
Sorry this is going a bit off the topic of affiliate marketing for the travel industry but there is plenty to come on that.
The next pricing model for airlines ?
Pay what you want for flights, hotels, cruises and car-hire?
In these days of over capacity in almost any market you care to mention, except maybe bankruptcy administrators and liquidators, it could be time for a new pricing model to be applied. In the travel industry, the owners of inventory face the challenge that they can’t stockpile the product. When the 10:15 flight to Tenerife departs, every empty seat is zero revenue, zero ancillary revenue and zero chance of a repeat customer. Worse – it could be extra revenue and customer ownership by one of your competitors.
Over at the Big Apple Times, they are reporting on an real life trial of a pricing model called ” Pay what you want ” in which a team of researchers studied the affect of offering the price promotion at three different businesses – a cinema, a deli and a Chinese buffet – near Frankfurt, Germany. For some products consumers actually paid more than the previous prices, and in the case of the Chinese buffet average price fell but the increase in custom made up for it.
You can read the executive summary of the report here, I have also copied some of the conclusions below :
“Overall, the results of the experiments indicate that PWYW might be suitable as a price promotion tool and may also help improve the seller’s credibility by letting the consumers decide about the prices of products. Implementing PWYW, the seller can demonstrate to consumers that he or she believes in the quality of the products because lower prices can compensate for lower quality without signaling low quality by lower posted prices. The application is also simple and easy to communicate to consumers. This may increase the chance of word of mouth and build up a positive pricing image among consumers. However, PWYW poses a risk that the price buyers pay will be much lower than the seller’s cost or even equal to zero. Especially for high-priced products, PWYW does not seem to be an appropriate pricing mechanism, because the incentives to realize a large deal profit may outweigh aspects of fairness. In such a situation, revenues will probably suffer if the seller cannot set a minimum price threshold.
In the three field studies of this article, a personal interaction between seller and buyer exists and potentially supports the applicability of PWYW. Further research should analyze the importance of such personal interactions on consumers’ decision process. Furthermore, PWYW might be a profitable alternative to free samples for new product introductions or money-back guarantees. “
If airlines adopted the scheme on certain routes on certain days ( e.g. Tuesdays ) they would at least attract good PR, and if the flying crew deliver a great product then the revenue might just surprise the bean counters too. Some airlines are already giving away flights in various ways, so how about this – 10 seats on the worst flights given away on a PWYW basis. .
Who will be first to give it a go ?
Hitwise Travel Stats
Hitwise Flight Search Data
A lot has been written in early January about some headline grabbing figures from hitwise that said that searches for flights were 42% down in the week after Crimbo compared with the year before.
Original article by Robin Goad at hitwise
Disussion at Travolution and TravelRants
My thoughts on the matter:
People don’t need to search as much as they used to :
- XL are gone, and the big four travel multiples and down to two and are reducing capacity.
- Airlines better than ever at sending relevant emails to their customers at the right time.
- Meta search engines have been bookmarked by customers.
- People are leraning that cheapest way to get flights is direct to airline. Sorry agencies.
So there is a lot less reason to look for flights via a web search than last year, doesn’t mean that bookings will be lower though. People will book they just need a bit more time :
- The period compared and the ways the day fell gave people less back to work time than than the previous year.
- Other concerns compared to last year have surfaced, job security etc so people have other things on their mind at the moment.
The turn of year booking period is all about people booking the peak period travel, school summer holidays. To do that they need to get back to work and agree the dates with their boss.
This got me thinking about searches for flights and holidays so I did a spot of research:
I have taken the below graph from a google tool called Google Trends. The blue line is for “holiday” and the red line for “flight“. One observation I have from this graph is that it seems the pre Christmas period is getting worse and worse each year. Maybe this is a case of consumers being educated to wait until the turn of the year for the big discounts to be turned on. Time will tell how big the spike in Jan is. Hitwise have promised to provide info at the end of the month.
Source for graph :
http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=holiday%2C+flight&ctab;=0&geo;=GB&geor;=all&date;=all&sort;=0
Another interesting one is looking at searches for ATOL…. Very low until XL went belly up :
http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=atol+&ctab;=0&geo;=GB&geor;=all&date;=2008&sort;=0
2009 Travel Industry Predictions Roundup
HAPPY NEW YEAR !
A round up of crytal ball gazing on what 2009 will bring for travel and tourism.
Feel free to use the comments section to make more predictions for the travel industry in 2009.
- shorter holiday durations
- shift to more competitively priced hotels
- destinations to do well – UK, Bulgaria, Tunisia, Czech Rep, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa
John McEwan, Advantage Travel
- Financial security, sound advice, great service and competitive pricing are high on customers agenda but people will still want to travel.
Simon Hargreaves, MD TTA
- It will be more important than ever to decide which part of the market to concentrate on and which part of the market to expect problems in.
- Cruise will continue to grow – but more slowly than in recent times. It is hard to cut capacity in the cruise sector.
Chris Brown who works at sunshine.co.uk
- sunshine.co.uk will become the largest, purely online travel agent selling cheap holidays to the masses.
- Despite the state of the economy people will still go on holiday, however they will spend less, resulting in good volumes but lower turnover when based on, year on year sales.
- Non web based travel companies will launched websites in a bid to widen their reach and web savvy companies will spend more time and money investing in Search Engine Optimisation and online bookable websites and they will spend less on PPC.
- Agents will look at widening their product range selling more ancillaries and destinations they wouldn’t normally deal with.
- A swathe of travel agents not willing to adapt to the changing market will close. This includes high street agents who still think the Internet is a fad! Yes they do exist.
- Ryanair to go bust – well we can hope can’t we!
10 predictions from nileguide blog includes
- mobile goes major “2009 will see new travel planning tools, GPS-based proximity searching, and traveler ratings, reviews and photos finally reach their potential on mobile devices”
- Personalization = Empowerment. “2009 will be the year that one or more travel sites breaks through to empower consumers to find recommendations that are right for then, quickly and easily. Consumers will be turning the knobs and dials themselves, with a better end result.”
27 industry experts forecast the future in an in depth article for travolution. Includes :
- Graham Donoghue “Customers will be more promiscuous. Whereas they may have looked at four websites before making a decision on their holiday in 2008, they will be looking at probably at least eight in 2009.”
- Matt Cheevers “All Inclusive market – this area of the market will continue to flourish as consumers seek better insight into the total cost of their holiday.”
- Alan Josephs “Google algorithms change dramatically to better incorporate relevant content, driving Travolution headlines and causing a big disruption to (and opportunity for) the online industry.”
- Richard Carrick “Every travel cloud has a silver lining for someone – this time it will be UK holidays (I hope)”
Travel affiliate blog thinks there will be strong growth in affiliate schemes, lots of new faces and some good content being generated.
Travel programmes to promote in the credit crunch
As we enter 2009, the £ moves ever closer to equalling the €, more and more people worry about the cost of living and losing their jobs and major travel players cut capacity it might not be the best year to be a travel industry affiliate. So below I am looking at what the canny affiliate marketeer can do to make the best of the situation.
Consider Kelkoo at Tradedoubler, you can deeplink into specific travel categories
Also the travel search engine Henoo at Affiliate Future.
Consider Park holidays and Blue Chip Vacations at Affiliate Window, Legoland holidays, Corus hotels and a whole lot more at Affiliate future.
Enemies of Travel Industry Affiliates
- Cashback sites - These sites offer customers a split of the commission paid out from affiliate schemes so even if an affiliate has worked hard generating compelling content on their website to encourage a booking at XXXtravel merchant, the affiliate doesn’t get the credit. Now big media companies including Kelkoo and TheSun have cashback offerings meaning an even wider potential of losing a sale at the lastminute.
- Vouchercode sites - like the cashback sites they come in at the end of the customers journey / decision making process and via a google search for “discount code for XXXtravel merchant” end up being the last click before sale and so get the affiliate commission.
- Megabrands - There is a trend in the travel industry for the owners of inventory (i.e the flight seats, hotel rooms etc) to regain control of their stock and distribute it themselves through their own websites. The worst example for travel industry affiliate and travel agent alike is Ryanair who have such a well known brand and excel at PR that they don’t need help generating traffic to their site. There is no real example in the hotel side yet but increased consolidation could mean we see that day.
- Travel Companies Call Centres – There will always be a certain amount of leakage caused by customers that the affiliate has delivered to the website booking with the travel supplier – but by the phone so the affiliate gets zilch. As a rule of thumb the more complex the product the more likely the leakage to the telephone, e.g. flight only, not likely, deluxe cruise, ‘fraid so. Look out for a lack of an online booking discount, prominently displayed telephone numbers as 2 factors that won’t help the affiliate feed his or her kids. Affiliates can try and reduce the leakage by answering as many questions customers may have on their landing pages. Some merchants are kind enough to provide a version of their site without a phone number for affiliates.
