Posts tagged travel
Labor Day Travel Infographic – Winter Travel Indicator?
05 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Looking at this Labor Day Travel infographic from VisibleTechnologies, it’s interesting to see what their social media monitoring platform has pulled out for travel patterns for this holiday weekend. I do wonder about the 4% of people going skiing this weekend, but perhaps that’s a good indicator of what the upcoming winter ski season will be like, what do you think?
Source: Visibletechnologies.com
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Tourism Spending in the US
27 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I noticed via a recent Mtrip newsletter, that the US Department of Commerce recently released 1st quarter travel and tourism spending numbers and they have some “interesting” numbers to look at. To me, the most impressive data is this chart:
This is a pretty amazing way of showing that in terms of constant dollar spend, the US tourism economy has definitely not recovered and that the uphill movement that we saw through 2010 appears to be plateauing in the first quarter of this year. While that isn’t too amazing, considering rising oil prices and the fact that winters often are slower travel months, what is impressive is that in 2005 dollars, the spend in the first quarter of 2011 has not yet recovered to 2004 levels – yikes!
Also impressive is data found in the detailed report (PDF) in which “recreation and entertainment” spend/quarter can be compared from 2007 to 2011 and it moves from 89,622 to 77,051 (in millions of chained 2005 dollars), which certainly shows that ski resorts and other tourism recreation businesses should still have some serious concerns about the consumer’s pocketbook.
Obviously this report is looking at actual numbers and isn’t forward looking, but among prognosticators there’s some talk of a double-dip recession, and if that were to happen, one has to wonder how much lower the ski jump chart of tourism spending can go.
Interesting Things From #Mrktchat Participants #1
010 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
I’ve been tossing this idea around a bit and have decided to kick it off this week. It’s a listing of topics, links, items, etc that have been posted by #Mrktchat participants over the prior week or so. I don’t think I’ll have this as a weekly update, more like somewhere between a weekly to maybe monthly series. So without further ado, here’s the first list:
- via @ozskier, it’s the missing guide to Facebook’s new analytics for pages, official called Facebook Insights Product Guide for Facebook Page Owners, it’s a bit over 10 pages (lots of pictures of the various Insight graphs), but does clarify – a bit – what the various analytics provided in Insights represent.
- Now @skippyski didn’t point out this story entitled, “Gas prices put brake on spring break for many“, in USAToday but he did bring up the topic of the impact of high gas prices in the #Mrktchat group on Facebook last week.
- And to wrap up – a classic tweet from someone that didn’t realize that some ski resort do actually monitor their brand in the social media space – nicely done @jaypeakresort! Wanna bet? RT @megunder Anyone want a seasons pass to Jay Peak? Any female can have it for $30! It's got a grainy picture, so you're golden.
@jaypeakresortJay Peak
Please feel free to add any good “#Mrkchat Interesting Things” that I may have missed in the comments below.
PhoCusWright Day 2
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Day 2 of PhoCusWright brings yet another beautiful Arizona morning, and yes, I did sneak out to enjoy a quick run through the Kierland Westin neighborhood as the sun rose. Then it’s off to 3 morning Workshops and then this afternoon, the Center Stage part of the program begins. So, without further ado here’s what I’m checking out today.
9:00am – great to see a fellow (former Parkite) presenting this session – nice job Kevin!
Workshop #1
Exploring consumer behavior on the path to purchase
Expedia/Compete
Research – Expedia is at the top at bottom of the purchase funnel.
Nice example of OTA booking, someone from Pittsburgh bounced all around , even to visitsaltlake and utah.com before booking on expedia.
Compete study – looked for people that booked a vacation package at an OTA and visited a DMA site w/in 45 days of purchase
# of visits to travel sites w/in the 45 days was 50! Almost 1 visit per day, but it is almost incremental exponential growth up to week of purchase, 20.1 that week. OTA is leading the visitation in every week leading up to purchase. Were always at least 1/3 of all visits.
Share of Expedia.com (when breaking out OTAs by brand) was 36% and all expedia properties was 50%!
Number of search referrals to travel sites made by package bookers 45 days before booking = 13 (27%) is pretty consistent. Of this, the share of category is dominated by planning and review and then DMOs. This shows that DMOs are primarily dependent upon search for their main traffic source.
At least half of this segment had DMO and OTA site up during the same session, of this sub-segment each member averaged at least 2 such sessions during the 45 days. In nearly 60% of these instances, Expedia was the OTA involved in the double session.
Expedia case study involved essentially a NOLA takeover of Expedia, with wallpaper and package placement.
- Unaided awareness of NOLA as a travel destination rose 8-14%
- NOLA as a possible destination rose 31-41%
11:10am Next workshop…
Workshop #2
Local Mobile Social
Location 3
Need a comprehensive campaign that combines a variety of online placements.
“Citations are the new link” in local listing optimization – any mention online of your business, with or without links.
Hmm, stats on the importance of negative reviews and their impact on consumers…seems pretty obvious and the recommended response of taking negative offline seems pretty obvious as well.
Don’t know that the example of a 50% discount for a location based service will resonate with this audience, pretty sure most vendors are not going to be excited about dropping ADR even more.
Geez, another pretty obvious statement, send a user that clicks on a mobile ad to a mobile site, preferably one that’s designed for the mobile users’ device…hate to say it, but these things should be no brainers for anyone in the space.
On Site
SEO, use hCard, KML and rich snippets for optimal SEO.
Off Site
Submit to directories, get citations, encourage reviews.
A whitepaper with these items and more is available at location3.com/phocuswright
2:30pm Workshop 3 and now off to the Center Stage presentations – should be good!
Workshop #3
Consumer Sentiment Overload?
Experian/Carnival
29% of people use socnets to find relevant information and 25% use to find recommendations.
53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products with 48% delivering on their intention to buy that product!
Upstream sources of referrals for travel – 35% search, 23% travel, 6% social/forums, 5% email.
8% of traffic to cuise line sites is from social – highest in the industry.
Airlines receiving site traffic from Facebook – SouthWest leads the pack by almost double over JetBlue – lots due to the fact that they have a “Bags Fly Free” widget. Delta has a booking engine that helps, but they’re still 3rd. For hospitality, the large size of FB drives, repeat visitors to hotel sites – Marriott is the top hotel brand on FB, example of their Honeymoon gift guide widget, neat idea!
YucatanHolidays.travel used targeted FB promos to drive 22% of their site’s traffic from FB.
Users are actively searching for travel content – brands/destinations – within FB per a custom analysis of FB internal searches.
Love it – email is the perfect compliment to social media initiatives. Email is third highest driver.
TripAdvisor is top review site.
Consumers are cross-referencing reviews while researching travel. But, despite broad availability searchers are not always finding relevant results. Lots of searches for airline and cruise reviews, most traffic is going to TripAdvisor and Cruise Critic from these searches.
Takeaways:
SocNet/Forum category captured largest share of traffic in Oct w/travel at 6% of the mix.
Email is top driver of traffic for both travel websites as well as social networks.
Customers are actively cross-referencing reviews and UGC.
Carnival – Navigating the Seas of Social Networks
Had a social micro-site, but it’s much easier to use forums and UGC.
Have JohnHealds Blog is their cruise director who is the voice of Carnival – what happens if/when John leaves Carnival?
Carnival has 2 Twitter accounts – one for support and one for marketing – good pt of who wants to hear about another cruise if you need help!
FB fanpage has 382k fans, uses tabs for different promotions. Ex of using a tab to promote a new ship with all the new things it offers. Stays away from promotions, use that on the main site. Developed a FB cruise finder so that people don’t need to come to the main site, to find options, it will come to them.
The Splendor incident was the 3rd most popular search on Google on 11/9/10 day of the fire. On FB, they monitored intently, responded asap, but customer evangelists were also very quick to respond and back up the company!
6:10pm phew, I’m getting a bit whupped, probably getting up too early for a little jog, maybe staying up a bit late or perhaps a packed day of listening and learning, but I’m good for the last half hour stretch here…in any case, here’s all my notes from Center Stage, which has been
Center stage –
Philip Wolf intro is a lot of great quotes on the shift in travel and overall market trends to social and mobile. Best quote is, “The Mobile Social Web is the most powerful collaboration tool in the history of humankind!”
Last years’ innovators advice, basically is to stay focused and to make money!
It’s the vacation rental section of the program with Brian Sharples from HomeAway. Great lead in, “it’s always been chaos, we’ll all adapt and be ok.”
When HomeAway began, they took several months to examine where the market was.
Two models, old simple fee based is what HomeAway chose.
Travelers want choice, home owners want distribution. So while others were busy innovating, HA was busy buying. This is now come down to trying to create a global network. There’s been progress but there have been a lot of tradeoffs. Lots of dev goes to basics and not apps and the like.
Almost 30 million vacation inquiries across HA’s properties so far this year!
Goal is to increase the avg number of inquiries per property across their network.
HA therefore needs to start opening up and start navigating the new, by cherry picking new innovations.
HA is looking to bring in ecommerce – bought the two 2 biggest vacation rental property management software companies (buy, buy, buy).
IPad is the game charger in online mobile ecommerce, not phones, much easier to flip through photos and other media and then book on a tablet than on a phone!
Talkback w/ Julian Castelli of Vacation Roost and Erik Hovanec of Leisure Link
Vacation rental market at $100Billion world wide ($25-30 billion in US).
More vacation rental options with HA than OTAs have hotels…also less regulated than hotels, although that is changing. HA is involved in trying to shape implementation of rules/regs.
There are many markets where vacation rentals are the only way to go, but they do compete w/hotels in many others.
Sharples is the biggest critic of his companies’ own web properties (I have a similar feeling about the sites I help maintain as well).
75% of vacation rental business is families – value is the key.
HA advertised during the Super Bowl last year, and will do so again year.
What Google is looking to do in the hotel and airfare search sector isn’t there currently – shouldn’t be a problem, at least now…
HA doesn’t dip much into the “hotel” keyword ppc, too pricey, looks like they play hard in vacation rental terms, top of the list for that phrase. Search is definitely huge for them.
Majority of the customer of one of the software companies that HA recently bought are still on DOR! Coming from my background, that must be the former First Resort Software?
Wow, out of 6000 vacation rental managers in the US, 4000 are customers of HA!
Interview with Steve Hafner of Kayak
Goal of Kayak is to improve the online travel experience. Friction pts are still there in OTAs. Assisted booking is a first step, launched for mobile.
Pain point for consumers on Kayak is when they’re redirected to the supplier and have to re-enter info.
Kayak on mobile is good, but the purchase path is lacking in mobile.
Interesting that web devs for Kayak are 35+ and mobile are under 25, lots more movement in mobile dev for that reason.
Kayak started its 2 yr offline campaign last October and are already seeing results!
Wishing they would have launched sooner in Asia than they did.
Mobile path is the experience that Kayak is highly focused on.
Interview with Baney Harford of Orbitz and Hugh Jones of Travelocity
Barney emphasizes the growth of mobile.
Hugh echoes Hafner on the iPad and tablets being booking tools.
Major thing is making trip planning is simpler with a a mobile app – per Barney.
Orbitz working on a very in-depth recommendation engine w/rich data analysis – like your very best personal travel agent.
Per Hugh, Google is important in travel and is where they need to be, Travelocity does participate with Google Maps.
Google is dominant in search and w/the acquisition of ITA they will now be dominant in travel search, which will result in OTAs needing to spend more for customer acquisition and drive up travel costs – per Hugh.
Google-ITA leads Orbitz to how a customer gets to their site, not necessarily about increased cost of acquisition.
AA-Orbitz deals is forcing companies to access AAs info directly as opposed to through a GDS. From Hugh it’s about shifting costs from supplier to intermdediary and ultimately to consumer…
Keynote from Richard Barton Expedia’s founder and first CEO.
“Entrepreneurs among us”
Power to the people – if it can be known, it will be known. If it can be rated it will be rated.
Nice to here him saying that there is no hiding on the internet – good intro to Glassdoor.
Keeping with that theme, jumps to Zillow and how it shows home pricing around the country.
Then to, if it can be rated, it will be rated – Avvo is a way to find a physician or attorney. Then there’s RealSelf which rates medical procedures…uh, ok.
Barton disagrees w/Hafner about social being overhyped, thinks it may be underhyped.
It’s all about building product that really wows people. – Barton on if he were still running Expedia. Also, not spending on advertising forces to concentrate on product quality. “When companies spend on advertising they get lazy on product.
Jeff Clarke Travelport (Galileo/Worldspan)
Global travel search market is huge and much bigger than domestic…travelport does the traffic of Kayak (9 months worth) in 10 days.
New ways to interact with customers online and across multiple platforms – social/mobile.
Travel chaos is open system vs closed – ie opaque vs transparent.
Role of the GDS is to negotiate on behalf of it’s agents (65k) in the case of Travelport.
Clarke says industry consolidation is good in general – not specifically talking about Google/ITA though, could be good, but also dangerous.
6:40pm – just finished for the evening, here’s the last bit w/Stephen Kaufer – wow, great day!
Stephen Kaufer – TripAdvisor
Being able to go fast and drive execution efficiencies does not slow down as you get bigger.
Try a bunch of stuff, but be sure to cut off the things that aren’t working.
Talking about a Groupon style component that they’ve developed, non-competitive w/Groupon in Kaufer’s opinion.
No excuse to not have a culture of fast iteration.
Interesting pt about first page or two of results can be readily influenced by social integration.
Love to hear someone else say how often Facebook changes their API – Kaufer just said that they’re great to work with but somewhat frustrating due to how often they change API.
Travel Weekly 2010 Consumer Trends Report
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Travel Weekly just published their 2010 Consumer Trends report and there’s a wealth of interesting information contained within it. In looking at this from a ski resort point of view, I found several key takeaways:
- The average American traveller took 4 vacations in the past year and spent more than $3,500 on leisure travel services.
- Travelers are segmented into 4 attitudinal groupings of which I would consider “Familias” and “Touristers” as most likely to take a ski vacation.
- There is a drive to track down the best deal possible (consumer visit on average 20 sites before purchasing), but too much discounting by a travel provider can create cognitive dissonance in consumers and cause them to abandon their purchase.
- Women are the travel decision makers and are more willing to spend extra to make sure the whole family is happy.
- There is a disconnect between passion and practice in most consumers booking “green” travel.
- “Milestone” travel is gaining momentum, in part spurred by the ease of planning these types of occasions via social networking. I found it even more interesting in that there’s great example of a heli-ski trip planned for a 50th birthday in the article.
Finally, even with uncertain economic times, this report states that 16% of all travelers state that they plan to take more overnight trips this year versus 14% that they plan fewer and even better, among affluent travelers (those w/HHI of $125k or more) 20% plan more trips versus only 9% who plan fewer. Certainly good news for us ski resort marketers who depend upon the more affluent for more and more of our vistors.
Travel Data from the Bureau of Labor Stats
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I found this recently released report from the Bureau of Labor Stats (BLS) while reading the Uptake Travel Industry blog. The data is quite interesting when taken from a ski resort perspective in that it illustrates how small of a chunk of the average consumer’s paycheck might go to paying for a day on the slopes. Looking at the below chart, the small blue segment indicates how much relative to other travel expenses are available for “entertainment”, it’s not much until you get to the top 20 percent of incomes, and even then it’s still the smallest fraction after transportation, loding and food & beverage:
This seems readily apparent that there isn’t a lot of income available for lift tickets, particularly looking at the drop in overall travel expenditures from the top 20 percentile to the 2nd highest percentile – it plummets from $3,718 to $1,459, quite a significant change. The other takeaway I had is how small a percentage of overall household expenditure the average American spends on travel:
That percentage is quite tiny at just 3%, and the other thing to make note of is that this is as of 2008, which is a year in which the recessions’ impacts hadn’t been felt much in the travel industry.
What is the takeaway from this report? In my opinion, it’s that ski resorts should be very cognizant of the available dollars that they are going after with consumers – mainly those in the top 20 percentile of HHI. I’m sure there are opportunities to attract those in the lower quintiles, but the numbers certainly show the best chance is those in the highest, which is something that I’m sure most of us have always been well aware of.
An Argument for “Live Chat” on Travel Sites.
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
A recent Phocuswright report titled, “On Again, Off Again: Why Online Travelers Book Offline” shows that the biggest reason that consumer book offline is due to wanting personal service:
Certainly the growing popularity of using social media in the sphere of customer service should help drop this number, but does this not also show the potential for putting live chat prominently on booking sites to try to keep clients from leaving the web and transferring their shopping to a more labor intensive call center? I would argue that the next two reasons would be smoothed via online chat as well in that a company could assure their shoppers that there aren’t better deals available by calling and that customer service is just as good online as it is offline. Certainly this all assumes that a companies customer service is at an even level across all channels. Having dealt with a variety of travel companies I know that this is definitely not the case. Perhaps the solution is to simply concentrate on and ensure the same quality of customer service no matter how a consumer reaches the company, thoughts?
Staying Connected to the Web and Social Media on Vacation
51 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
My wife gives me a (probably well deserved) rough time about how I tend to bring my digital life with me when we’re on vacation. This has come in handy, like when I was able to pull up New York transit maps and directions up via Google Maps on our trip to NYC earlier this month, although I almost wish I’d known about this Android App. However, I know that there are definitely plenty of other times when my wife wishes I’d left my smartphone and/or laptop at home.
Now, I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who brings their tech with them, because according to this article, “Most Vacationers Stay Connected To Internet, Digital, Social Media” on MediaPost:
“No matter where vacationers migrate this summer, chances are slim that they will completely disconnect from digital media and communications.Indeed, 72.2% travelers in 2010 say they accessed the Internet, email or social media sites while on their last vacation, according to a new study from ad network Burst Media.
That represents a significant jump from 2009, when three out of five — 63.3% — travelers admitted to using the Internet while on vacation.
Men are more likely to go online while away — 76.2% — than women — 67.7%.
…”
With this greater level of connectivity on vacation, what are most of these people using the web for on their vacations? Keeping in touch with friends and family is first (my guess is this is a lot of showing off the great trip Facebook photos), followed by finding information on the local destination, then came news and sports sites and finally was checking in at the office. I believe that this shows that there is a very real and quickly increasing demand for information that travelers can use once they’ve reached a destination, like the Google Maps and MTA app I mentioned earlier. What are some ways that ski resorts can develop web content/services that cater to visitors once they’ve arrived at the resort? Are there any good examples out there? Personally, I’d love to see something along the lines of the MTA app – simple and useful!
Photo: Guilty! This is me being way too connected at work (kind of looks like vacation though).
Airline baggage fees and the ski industry
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
This post languished as a short draft through the whole winter. Then I took a trip to Colorado about two weeks ago on Delta, brought my own ski equipment with and realized that if I hadn’t been able to pack lightly (3 day spring trip), that I would have had to check an additional bag, putting my checked bag fee up from a not so awful $50 to $120 extra (round-trip), almost as much as the Salt Lake City to Denver fare itself! I ski with an NTN telemark setup, which isn’t available for rent in many locations, so if I want to ski on gear I’m used to, I have to bring mine with. With that, here’s what I had written back in December:
There’s an interesting article regarding the airlines’ baggage fees and their effect on ski retailers in the Dec. 1, 2008 issue of Newsweek magazine. While it was neat to see my colleague quoted in the article (Krista), what really struck me about the article was the fact that it just concentrated on the bring the skis/rent the skis question and didn’t even touch on the fact that some people might decide to not even take a ski or snowboard trip this winter season.
Based upon early numbers from the 2009-2010 season, people took more ski vacations this year than last year. But, as airlines continue to add fees upon fees, will this become an obstacle to further increasing destination ski visitors in 2010-2011? I know I would think twice about booking a ski vacation on any airline except for Southwest thanks to their being the only airline to still include two checked bags in every fare!
Photo credit:
Search and Display Campaign Results
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
The below graph is from a recent post in eMarketer called, Search and Display Advertising Synergies. The article talks to how marketers with limited budgets can benefit from understanding how to leverage online display along with paid search. However, notice how the “Travel” category is one of the few industries in which display conversions are less than those in search? Even though the article notes that the average internet user spends less than 5% of their time doing searches, travelers are much more influenced by search campaigns than other online purchasers. I’m not sure why travel is trending this way, but it’s certainly important information to weigh when penciling in a budget for search and display online advertising for a ski resort.
