m-Travel.com and Travel Distribution News

Archives for December 2009

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“Semantic search will be incredibly difficult to get right”

Attribution modelling is very important in understanding how customers consume media and how this consumption affects bookings on a site.

Based on these attribution models, travel companies decide upon the best search, bidding, and messaging strategies to meet their overall goals. 

It is definitely too simple and very misleading to have a ‘first click’ or ‘last click’ model, says Gareth Gaston, managing director, OctopusTravel.com.

“First of all you have to have good enough tracking that allows you to see all of your advertising traffic and how it interacts across the entire customer journey.  There is a compounding effect of multiple online channels (often referred to as the halo effect) that can absolutely be tracked with the right tools in place.  Then you need to thoroughly examine the customer journey and run multiple models and ‘what if scenarios’.  It is easy to analyse quickly and convince yourself that a particular activity doesn’t work.  The goal is to find out what does make or will make a piece of online marketing work,” Gaston told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta in an interview. 

Gaston also spoke about CPA and CPC advertising. Excerpts:  

What should companies do to ensure that their campaign result in higher click through rates and subsequently higher quality score and lower CPC (cost per click)? What should they be wary of?

Gareth Gaston: There is no rocket science here, a few basic principles that are a hard to get right due to level of focus required and quantity.  Click through is a derived from the awareness of your brand and the quality of your ad copy.  Quality score is then the relevance of the content once you land on the page.  Quality of the landing page is not only crucial in getting your quality score up (and therefore your ad cost down) – it should be no surprise that the higher the quality and relevance of the landing page, they higher the conversion.  The higher the conversion the lower the CPA.  I do think that focusing on CPC in itself is a red herring in a transactional site – its important to understand your cost of sale.  So if you get your conversion up then you can sustain higher CPCs because you are getting more sales.

What are the pros and cons of CPA and CPC advertising in terms of cost and the ability to track?

Gareth Gaston: I think the bigger issue is volume.  You can indeed argue to pros and cons of the cost – its very easy to justify CPA as it is ‘pay on performance’.  However you are potentially giving up a volume because neither you nor the advertising medium are going to take a risk.  In terms of tracking – if you pick the right tool then either should be just as easy to track.  The only complexity is when you are thinking about display advertising or any form of advertising where you want to track ‘post impression’.  Then the tracking tool you pick will potentially be a different. 

Landing pages are essential for a successful campaign. The most important element of a PPC landing page is to convince the visitor that they have landed on the right page and this page has the information they were looking for. What factors should one take into consideration for the same? 

Gareth Gaston: Again this is all about the detail.  Its not rocket science – the page needs to represent what the advert stated.  So if you are talking about 3* hotels in Prague, then their needs to be a good list of 3* hotels in Prague.  However the ability to search for real availability from this page is very important to drive the sale.  The difficult bit is not what to put on the page – its how many of these pages you need to get volume and also the ideal structure and layout of the page.

Do you think predicting user preferences is the biggest unsolved problem in online travel? How do you assess the integration of social search into online travel?

Gareth Gaston: I do think understanding consumer buying criteria is the first unsolved problem – but not the greatest.  The bigger problem is designing a user experience to match this potentially very complex criteria.  But the most complex of all is categorising hotels so that a user experience allows a customer to contrast and compare.  Think about busying any other product online – there are comparatively few variable.  A wardrobe: type of material, colour, size, configuration.  With hotels and holidays its potentially unlimited. 

It remains to be seen how the semantic web is going to shape up, but do you think it should make SEM a lot easier and more transparent to administer?

Gareth Gaston: It has long been talked about that onsite search is a good guideline to offline search.  Semantic search has a long way to go, but getting it right on the site will definitely have massive SEM (and probably SEO more so).  Not sure if it will make it easier – semantic search will be incredibly difficult to get right.  Just getting the various different ways of a simple destination or landmark is hard enough never mind phrases. But if you have a database of semantic search terms on your site, this will definitely be a great input to your SEM keyword pool.

Today Google's algorithms are still quite a bit of a black box for professional search marketers.  The semantic web should make it more efficient to create and manage online campaigns, because there will be less left to algorithmic interpretation. How do you assess this viewpoint?

Gareth Gaston: I think the Semantic web as defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is a long way off and we have a lot to understand before we can get to how this will impact SEM.

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Understanding the role of behaviour and predictive analytics

Companies are focusing on drawing real-time online audience insights, and enhancing their understanding of how consumers perceive and engage with their brands, content and marketing.

And they are delving into various techniques which allow companies to understand and predict customers’ desires and to more effectively serve relevant content and products in real time. 

In order to know more about these techniques, EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta recently spoke to Expedia’s director of business development EMEA, Cameron Jones  and Vicky Brock, co-founder, Highland Business Research. Excerpts: 

Can you provide an insight into behaviour analytics? How is it measured and how does it help in optimising website content?

Cameron Jones: Behaviour analytics help us understand and predict our customers’ desires and to more effectively serve relevant content and products in real time, ultimately increasing satisfaction and conversion.

For example if a customer is searching for a hotel in a gateway city for a two-night midweek stay, this is likely to be a business customer that favours certain types of hotels and is focused on making a quick purchase decision without the disrupting of ads…behavioural analytics helps us to initially segment and understand certain customer groups and then anticipate new customers needs when they display similar behaviour on the site. The sort order for hotels is a critical element of providing relevant hotels to customers. The hotel sort order at Expedia has benefited from years of development and utilises sophisticated algorithms which include behavioural data to display the most relevant hotels to customers.

Vicky Brock:  Any decent analyst is looking to identify how different segments of users behave on a website.  It is important to remember that not everyone coming to a travel agent site, for example, has come to buy.  Some are at the early research stages and are trying to figure out where to go.  Some are at the stage where they know where they want to go and are making price comparisons. And others have already booked and looking for specific information.

All these groups exhibit very different behaviours on a site and all have different success outcomes associated with them.  Some may not even be worth considering in the data.

Understanding why people come, how they behave and how they achieve purpose of visit requires an integrated suite of tools. But ultimately this is what users are trying achieve with an analytics programme:  Improve business performance by helping more users achieve what they came to the site for.

The next step is behavioural targeting.  When you’re confident enough about your data, segments and can recognise behaviours associated with those segments and specific purposes of visit, you can automatically begin to serve specific, relevant content to those people.  

If you can recognise I’m returning to a product that I bought 6 weeks ago, isn’t it better to try and sell me insurance, trips and other add-ons, rather than to show me that the product has now been discounted further?  Good segmentation, combined with multivariate testing and friendly web developers means you can at least make some inroads into customising what people see, based on how they behave.

This is one of the areas where in the coming years I thing the web will really change.  I think in the comparatively near future the one size fits all website will be dead.

What do you make of the usage of predictive analytics to mine and analyse the data gathered from web traffic and bookings on a website? 

Vicky Brock:  Once you’ve got really good at looking out of the rear window, your attention has to move to looking forwards.  This can be hugely complex and it’s an emerging analytics field in its own right, but it can also be done with existing analytics and booking data.

I’ll give you an example.  For a ski resort that has a high trafficked website, but most of its tickets sold offline, we have been able to use page view data to specific parts of the site and look at the correlations between offline sales.  By doing some cool maths, we have been able to determine that if conditions are fine, it is possible to predict how many people will show up Saturday based on the traffic on key pages of the website on Monday/Tuesday.  This means not only is it possible to better predict staff requirements, there is also a 3 day marketing “save” period if numbers look like they’ll be down.

Cameron Jones: Predictive analytics help to prioritise projects and investment in resource with expected revenue and profitability impacts. Each project we embark on has clearly set out objectives, goals and expectations which we measure against pre and post shipping an enhancement. 

Predictive analytics helps us understand the impact of enhancements on various parts of the business and enables us to plan more effectively search engine marketing strategies through to call centre staffing levels.

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Best Western introduces iPhone application

Best Western International has introduced its mobile offerings with the unveiling of its free iPhone application, titled “Best Western to Go.”

Features include:

• Reservations at more than 4,000 Best Western hotels in over 80 countries
• Create an itinerary and input addresses of attractions and restaurants. Once these have been entered, users can easily find their location using the app’s GPS-enabled map. 
• Capture and categorise favourite locations in specific destinations. Travellers can also upload photos and descriptions to remember the locale.
• Stay connected with family and friends by sharing an experience.

The company plans to introduce multiple upgrades to its iPhone application throughout 2010, as well as introduce applications for other mobile platforms including Blackberry and Android.

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Amadeus offers recommendations for improving customer interaction

Travel companies need to ensure that their product delivery and service offerings are well executed at all customer points of contact in order to be able to compete effectively.

Consistency between brand promise and product delivery is the most important factor to provide effective customer service in today’s travel industry, according to Simon Akeroyd, vice president, business development, Amadeus Asia Pacific. 

Akeroyd identified the four top hurdles at customer points of contact, and made recommendations on how travel players can utilise technology to address these challenges.

1.    Too many clicks in the online booking process

The online booking experience should be as painless as possible. Travel websites must be user-friendly and provide an integrated and seamless online shopping experience. Search mechanisms on websites should be more intuitive, enabling consumers to search by budget, type of activity, or geography, rather than only by a pre-determined destination and date. Search results should be in real-time and deliver a range of options on a single page. 

2.    Informed travellers have all the answers 

With so much information available at their fingertips on the Internet, travellers are increasingly going to their travel agents with the answers to their own questions. This means travel agents must maintain an expert level of travel knowledge and have all the necessary information in front of them. 

3.    Long waiting time at airport check-in

Nobody enjoys long periods spent waiting at airport check in, particularly business travellers who are particularly time-conscious. This can cause great frustration for airline customers. The solution is to utilise mobile devices to enable travellers to complete check-in processes before arrival at the airport. 

4.    Flight interruptions handled badly

One of the worst nightmares for any traveller is to miss a flight connection. When such incidences occur, they are often not handled very effectively, causing affected passengers more frustration and disappointment. Technology can help to minimise passenger delay and frustration.

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Wyndham goes for re-branding of its European rentals business

Wyndham Worldwide has rebranded its European holiday rental property business under the Wyndham Exchange and Rentals portfolio.

Formerly under the Group RCI banner, Wyndham’s European Rentals business operates the continent’s largest portfolio of holiday homes and holiday experiences with over 60,000 properties located across over 20 European countries.

The rebranding, which is effective immediately, was conceived to better reflect Wyndham’s leadership position in European vacation rentals, and to create further consistency across the company’s portfolio of businesses internationally which includes Wyndham Hotel Group.

“Our new name will provide a greater recognition to our organisation,” said Ian Ailles, managing director, European Rentals. “Our customer-facing businesses such as Landal, Novasol and English Country Cottages have always had a very strong position and identity within their markets, but leveraging the Wyndham name allows us to group these businesses under a common brand architecture for the first time and to share and promote our common values and customer offering more effectively.”

“No one company in Europe can match Wyndham’s rentals for the number of holiday homes we operate, nor their range, diversity and holiday experiences offered,” added Ailles.

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Dollar Rent a Car launches news travel blog

Dollar Rent A Car has launched a new travel blog on its UK website.

The company has taken this initiative in order to provide content to those customers who are considering driving destinations in the US and other “fun holiday spots”. 

“Our blog will share tips on what to expect when driving outside of one’s own country, plus we’ll make recommendations for sightseeing adventures, driving trips and idyllic stops along the way,” said Tom Knopek, managing director, European Sales, Dollar Thrifty Europe, Ltd.

The blog features content from travel writers inculding Jeremy Head and Paul Oswell.

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E-Clear told to hand over £35 million

Administrators of Scottish low-cost airline Flyglobespan, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has asked for the release of the £35million owed by its credit-card payment processor E-Clear.

Joint administrator Bruce Cartwright, of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said, “While some discussions with E-Clear have taken place and are continuing, progress has been limited. As a result of this, and to address concerns expressed by creditors of the Globespan Group, the administrators have requested that the funds held by E-Clear be placed in a joint account immediately.”

He added: “Our proposal provides a commercial and transparent approach and will help to address the concerns of Globespan creditors. It will also go some way to allowing the parties to demonstrate that they are approaching this matter in a co-operative manner.”

Globespan, the parent company of Flyglobespan, went into administration last week.

Globespan’s difficulty in accessing money is seen as key to its collapse.

Scotland’s Finance Secretary John Swinney has already demanded a “full and comprehensive” investigation into the collapse of Flyglobespan. He said the inquiry should focus on the role of E-Clear.

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Selling to your travel customer when they are on the go. Should the travel industry finally target this lucrative unowned market?

It’s funny how innovation in companies flows. Years a ago, when the web was young, lastminute.com rocked the travel world with its glamorous founders, well written quirky content and clever distribution power of  distressed and interesting inventory.

Since then they have remained a leading player and have done many exciting things. But not till now have they ever really grabbed my attention.  Then they come up with their Topsee app. This just struck me as incredibly simple and very clever. A potential blue print on how the industry should invest to sell more products once its customers are on the road or at their destination.

For those that don’t know it’s a mobile app for anyone who travels and knows what it’s like to be in a city where you know something fantastic is going on, but you seem to be surrounded by soulless, spiritless, overpriced tourist tat. The app can guide you in wonderful quirky ways to whatever you feel like doing. The most important thing is that it’s SO SIMPLE…no text search, no typing. It’s so easy my 6 year old used it last night. You just shake the iPhone and 9 pictures appear floating on the screen as well as their distances from you. The pictures are of food, coffee, sweets, some are statues, bars, signs, works of art, dancing, caves or beds or just about any of the wonderful things you can find in London, or any cosmopolitan city. When you select a pic it gives you a better explanation of the attraction and access to its address, phone number and a street map showing where you are and where you have to go. If you don’t like the selections shake it again and 9 more images float up to you. It’s a great mixture of good looking intuitive design, interesting copy and map content.

Currently the lastminute app is financed via advertising but what struck me is that this could be used by anyone that knows the traveller (so presumably the tour operators, tourism boards, hotels) to really influence and so make money from their buying choices.

This brings the debate back to mobile and how and when should the industry invest. Right now the facts are scary for the online travel industry. US mobile web browsing is growing by more than 60% and UK by over 32%. However travel sites are not benefitting from this. According to m-metrics UK, mobile travel web browsing was growing by a pathetic 4.3% in February this year (I am currently trying to find more recent stats). Travel led the online sector but is lagging woefully behind right now with mobile.  My guess is that this application, if pushed will work well. However, whoever starts to use this sort of technology and content and can focus on owning the trust of the traveller will make a heap of money.

To get an idea of where mobile could go take a look at this talk by Takeshi Natsuno, the father of the first, functioning, successful, large-scale wireless internet system, Japan's i-Mode. For us in the rest of the world it’s a bit out there, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

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Anyone wanting to shout about what they are doing in this space please get in touch. We will be covering this sort of innovation very heavily at a lot of our events in 2010. Call Tim on +44 (0) 207 375 7557

To see more about the Lastminute apps, Topsee and Snaffle, use this information:

topsee

Platforms: iPhone & iPod Touch initially
URL including summary: http://labs.lastminute.com/topsee
Twitter: http://twitter.com/topseelondon
Launched: 17 Nov 2009
Price: Free
Scope: Central London
Availability: Worldwide
Contributors: Around 15 London writers and bloggers now
Business model: Advertising in the app, revenue shared between lastminute.com and contributors
Postings:
1. Intro http://labs.lastminute.com/blog/introducing-topsee-london/
2. Design http://labs.lastminute.com/blog/the-design-of-topsee-from-treemaps-to-casinos-to-balloons/
3. Launch Party http://labs.lastminute.com/blog/topsee-gets-tipsee-at-the-exclusive-london-launch-party/
Videos:
1. that we've made http://www.youtube.com/user/lastminutelabs/c/3A3FEC84BC1E7D1D
2. Talk at CAT conference http://creativity-online.com/news/cat-london-video-marko-balabanovic-the-fun-of-choosing/141006

snaffle

Platforms: iPhone & iPod Touch initially
URL including summary: http://labs.lastminute.com/snaffle
Twitter: coming soon
Launched: 15 Dec 2009
Price: Free
Scope: Covent Garden (initially)
Availability: Worldwide
Business model: Retailers pay a small fee when their offer is downloaded within a radius of their establishment
Postings:
1. Intro http://labs.lastminute.com/blog/snaffle-a-deal-in-covent-garden/
2. Launch http://labs.lastminute.com/blog/snaffle-launches-today-deals-and-discounts-on-your-iphone-in-londons-covent-garden/
Videos:
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eLE5BI-6q

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Lanyon raises $10m, to launch automated rate integrity product

Irving, Texas-based Lanyon is reportedly planning to launch a new offering to help travel buyers overcome challenges related to hotel rate integrity, including improper rate loading in global distribution systems.

The new offering is expected to be launched in January. 

According to a report filed by management.travel, the tool is called Rate Bookability. Lanyon chief commercial officer Michael Boult said that Lanyon’s automated rate integrity product will enable corporate customers to create a customised review window, check all preferred rates and send automated emails to the properties noting what days they failed to offer the rate and in what GDS.

Earlier this month, the company had raised $10 million in expansion funding from Frontier Capital.

Lanyon has also signed a multi-year agreement with Golden Tulip Hospitality Group and Louvre Hotels. Lanyon has been selected to provide the common RFP platform structure that enables the two groups to efficiently manage their contracting process and leverage their distribution activities across their two portfolios.

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Singapore Airlines enhances its mobile services

Singapore Airlines is offering passengers an option to use their mobile phones to book flights and access selected KrisFlyer services using SIA Mobile.

KrisFlyer services include viewing of statements, and checking miles earned and redeemed. SIA Mobile booking and KrisFlyer services are the latest additions to the current SIA Mobile check-in facility, where customers can check in for flights using selected mobile phones, BlackBerry and iPhone devices. Customers may also select their seats immediately after making their SIA Mobile booking or during their SIA Mobile check-in, which is anytime between two and 48 hours prior to flight departure.

After typing “m.singaporeair.com” into the web browser of any Internet-enabled mobile handset, users will be given the option of either downloading the SIA Mobile application software or accessing services directly through their mobile handset’s web browser.

SIA Mobile services are available on all sectors of Singapore Airlines-operated flights.  

Interline, codeshare, multi-city or open-jaw bookings are not supported at this time.

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