"Search-based advertising has already exceeded traditional web advertising"

By EyeforTravel.com Correspondent, Beijing

While online buying continues to move upwards and surpass the overall growth of the travel market in China, it still has lots of room to grow faster.

According to Chen Chao Zhuang, co-founder and CTO, Qunar.com, a speaker during EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution and Sales China 2008 conference, being held in Beijing, many Chinese travelers continue to use the web as a source of information and to get a feel of prices, before completing their purchases either in person or making payment online.

"This presents a strong case for travel meta search portals like Qunar, who are able to provide accurate, up-to-date information on travel prices and reviews, while being able to present this information from a neutral perspective," said Zhuang, whose company currently receives 24 million unique visits each month, representing a 10x increase over the same period last year.

Providing an insight into how does the travel planning and buying profile of meta-searchers tends to differ, he told EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta, "Based on information from our own user base and partners, we found meta search users tend to be more flexible on their booking windows. Meta search users are more actively searching for early bird deal and last minute deal than the normal OTA users."

He said that meta search users normally travel four-eight times a year, hence they know more about travel market, feel more confident about their purchase decision and get better deals.

During his presentation, Zhuang termed the Chinese online travel users as a "valuable" segment, comprising highly qualified travellers.

"They (Chinese online travel users) represent a great market," he said.

In terms of geographic distribution, Beijing and Shanghai together account for 49 percent of this segment. In terms of age, 39 percent belong to 25-29 age-group, 28 percent to 30-39 age-group and 24 percent to 18-24 age-group. Gender-wise, 52 percent are males and 48 percent females. And 63 percent of these plan to make at least one international trip in the next 12 months (all figures part of Qunar 2007 user surveys).

Couple of years back, Zhuang had mentioned that over 60 percent of online consumers identified both Baidu and Qunar as avenues for "very useful" information for travel searches.

Elaborating on the same in today's context, Zhuang said, "The trends can be most accurately determined by watching where the money is going, in terms of advertising dollars. Search-based advertising has already exceeded traditional web advertising, which gives an indication of where web users are getting travel information and services. In 2007, 48.9 percent web users got to know travel news and made use of travel service introduced via search, which is an increase of 1.1 percent compared to 2006. Vertical search engines like Qunar are quickly becoming the first port of call for travel search."

During EyeforTravel's conference last year, it was shared that search shares top-of-mind awareness with OTA's percent of consumers that view these channels as "always" or "very" useful for travel research (relative ranking). However, there are differences in ROI's and conversion rates, with the percentage of customers who actually buy (relative ranking) being in favour of meta-search engines.

Why is the conversion rate higher?

On this, Zhuang said this is really a question of choice.

"Travel meta search provides users with more choices because they aren't beholden to any one supplier or a group of suppliers."

"The other big difference is in the idea of "neutrality". Because travel meta search is concerned with providing consumers with information, rather than closing a sale and making a commission, there is a greater perception of neutrality. Qunar, for example, provides not only a broad listing of options, it also provides consumers access to peer reviews of specific products and services. In a recent survey on how travel decisions are arrived at, recommendations from friends grew almost four percent in 2007 from 2006, and blogs or forums accounted rose two percent in the same time period. This is just how the 2.0 world works," shared Zhuang.