An entertaining and professional 2 minute video about Facebook and Facebook marketing. Recommended:
Measuring The Impact Of FaceBook from the designists on Vimeo.
Snippets from OpenTravel Presentation
May 1, 2011 By 1 Comment
Robert Cole reports dozens of interesting datapoints in Snippets and Factoids from Henry Harteveldt’s OpenTravel Presentation. Here are a few of my favorite:
Travelers:
- 40% of travelers are seeking the lowest price
- “We (Forrester) have never seen a profitable Groupon deal for a travel supplier”
- 44% of travelers will consider upgrading to better products
- 25% of travelers are willing to pay a premium to save time or improve convenience
Websites:
- “Travel is the largest global online eCommerce category except for porn”
Mobile:
- Mobile devices have more computing power than Apollo 11
- 35% of leisure travelers and 55% of business travelers use smartphones
- 10% of travelers have downloaded a mobile travel app
Social:
- 60% of travelers use a general search engine when planning travel
- Travel sellers must craft “story-arcs” a combination of micro journeys within a single trip
Direct Connect
- Survey of electronic distribution executives predicts share of GDS bookings will decline from 21.7 % in 2010 to 15.5% in 2016
Visit the blog post to see many more.
Insightful data from Tripadvisor
April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Revinate Blog shares some facinating data from Tripadvisor that should be helpful to all hotels and all kinds of lodging properties.
The vast majority of reviews on TripAdvisor are positive. The average is 3.9. As of October, 2010 the breakdown of stars is: 1 star – 9% 2 stars – 8% 3 stars – 11% 4 stars – 27% 5 stars – 45%
10% of TripAdvisor’s traffic comes from mobile, mostly in the form of people surfing during the weekend or at night, when they’re not in front of their computers.
Properties with more than 20 photos get 150% more engagement.
When deciding between 2 hotels, 65% of people say that seeing a management response would sway them to book with the responding hotel. (Forrester)
Visit the post to learn more, including an interview about the Tripadvisor popularity algorithm and few tips that might help you handle your reviews more skillfully.
I usually don’t editorialize in these posts… but this content excited me. While it is hard to actually control your reviews, if you put up a bunch of photos AND respond to reviews, you can get a whole lot more out of the system. The percentage of hotels doing both those is in the single digits… low single digits!
60 Percent of Travel Industry Marketing Gurus Rank Search Tops
April 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
EyeforTravel has a new report “Travel Distribution & Marketing Barometer”
A massive 60% of Travel industry marketing gurus still rank search as the number 1 way to drive traffic.
Globally, organic search is the most influential marketing channel for online travel marketing followed by paid search, then good old email marketing, social media, meta search and lastly mobile marketing.
There are massive fluctuations across the different verticals within travel and across the size of the organisations. For instance:
- 43% of cruise companies rank email marketing as the most influential marketing channel whereas for hotels it is only 13%.
- In companies with a marketing budget of over US$ 51 Million, 84% see search as the key
- whereas only 44% of small travel companies (those with marketing budgets below US$25 thousand) rank search as the most influential channel.
Vacation Rental Review Data from FlipKey and Escapia
April 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
At the April 2011 North Carolina Vacation Rental Managers Association (NCVRMA) conference John Suzuki (VP of Sales, Escapia) and Bryan Goodwin (Account Manager, Flipkey) shared some unique data about guest reviews for the vacation rental market.
Between the two of them there are over 500,000 reviews in their research. Escapia is owned by HomeAway and Flipkey is owned by TripAdvisor.
Here are my notes:
John from Escapia went first and said:
- 362K requests were sent (from vacation rental managers to guests)
- 142K reviews provided for a 39% completion rate
- Higher satisfaction correlates to higher response rates
- Higher priced properties get higher ratings and lower priced get lower ratings
- The breakdown:
- 64% are 5 star reviews
- 25% are 4 star reviews
- 8% are 3 star
- Specifically, the highest ranking “part” of the stay was:
- Location 72% 5 star rating
- Services from the Vacation Rental Manager 73% 5 star rating
- And the lowest was:
- Cleanliness 59% 5 star rating
- Condition of property 51% 5 star rating
- 61% of property managers do not respond to negative reviews
- 4% of all reviews are actually responded to
Bryan from FlipKey reported that:
FlipKey has 320K reviews:
- 63% 5 star
- 23% 4 star
- 11% 3 star
- 4 % 2 & 1 Star
When they measured interest (by inquiry volume) according to how many reviews each property had:
- 3-5 reviews received 34% more interest
- 6-10 reviews received 159% more interest
- 11+ reviews received 246% more interest
More Mobile Usage Trends for Travel
March 21, 2011 By 1 Comment
Kevin May from ITB Berlin reports on some research and trends:
- Desktop and mobile show different peaks and booking patterns: highest on Fridays for mobile, highest on Mondays for desktops (mobile figures highest for “bedtime browsing”).
- 10% of Google search for travel is now on a mobile – looking for maps (especially at weekends), Google Places, Streetview, Google Goggles.
- 70% of mobile hotel bookings are for the same day, with the peak day on Friday.
- Hotels.com tripled mobile booking during Q4 2010.
- Almost 10% of TripAdvisor site traffic now on the mobile site.
- Growth of mobile:
- 40% will use mobile for destination information.
- 39% outbound travelers own smart-phones
- 30% will make changes to a booking during trip
- 25% for electronic check-in
- 30% for social networking during trip
Travelport polled over 600 corporate travel buyers, agents, hospitality and travel professionals around to world (although only 150 responded):
- 80% would like to see mobile applications offering suggested restaurants and bars around the hotel location
- 67% would like similar apps offering suggestions for recreational activities
- 71% rank Wi-Fi as one of the most important technology solutions that should be included as standard in hotel rooms – 82% of travelers expecting this service to be in all rooms within five years
Rob Torres, Google’s managing director of advertising and marketing for the North American travel sector, reports on hospitality marketing that:
- The number of searches in the travel category via a mobile device is up 1,200% this year
- hotel searches on Google Maps have grown 3,000%
- The number of mobile bookings in the travel space is accelerating: from $20 million in 2008 to $200 million this year, with over $80 million coming from the hotel category alone
Mobile Phone Usage for Lodging Websites
February 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Looking at Google Analytics Mobile reporting and aggregating the data for 70 lodging properties, here is how the mobile phone usage broke down, by device for the month of January, 2011:
The surprising number here may be the iPad usage at 42%. It defies the definition of mobile… it is kind of big and typically renders a website more like a laptop than a phone.
iPad usage certainly skews the results if we are strictly defining mobile. Another surprise is the small “other” slice. This may also be skewing the results, it is likely that some users are using “dumb” phones that don’t trigger the Google Analytics javascripts.
The number of visits for those 70 lodging websites averaged 1,581 visits per website in January 2010… up from 363 in January 2009. In terms of percentages, that is a move from 1.48% to 5.76%… seasonally adjusted in one year.
Whatever the case, and whatever the experts say, a lot of people are interacting with your hotel’s website through a cell phone. Make sure your website looks and works OK in an iPhone and iPad are probably the lowest hanging fruit… this typically entails NOT using Flash and making your website de-cluttered and easier to operate on a smaller screen.
Email Marketing Statistics and Research
February 14, 2011 By 1 Comment
Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist, shares real research data that will improve your email marketing performance in his statistics webinar: The Science of Email Marketing!
This webinar includes:
- The best (and worst) times to send email
- The best (and worst) words to use in subject lines
- Real data about sending frequency
- Actual proof about the importance of subscriber freshness
Here are some sample stats that are not industry specific:
- Weekends get higher click through rates
- Thursday is best (lowest) day for unsubscribes and Tuesday is the highest
- Click through rate (CTR) is highest for emails sent between 6-7am and lowest for emails sent at 4pm. The opposite is true:
- Emails sent at 4pm have the lowest unsubscribe rate and the highest is at 6am.
- 80.8% of people read email on their mobile phones
- Your Click-Through-Rate is higher if you have more links in your email
- More links also lower the unsubscribe rate
- The unsubscribe link doesn’t stand out as much if it’s not the only link in the email!
