Searching for travel's future
The internet is now such an utterly all-pervasive quantity in our everyday lives that it can be difficult to imagine a time – not so many years ago – when it was merely a glint in a computer programmer’s eye. In 2006, of course, the Net is being used to meet all manner of retail requirements, and so it is hardly shocking to find that travel and holiday arrangements are increasingly being made with its assistance and, at in the initial stages, that of search engine sites.
Despite this, recent research jointly released by comScore MediaMetrix, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Media Contacts does make for some surprising reading.
The ‘top-line’ results show that a three-month period from December 2005 to February 2006 generated 9.8m travel purchases by 7.5m UK consumers using web searches to help plan their trips.
Moreover, 85% of travel searchers reported that they had completed a travel purchase, online or offline, within 90 days of their initial search.
For Nick Jones, category development director at Yahoo! Search Marketing, the most significant aspect of the findings – published in June – is “the sheer weight of numbers of UK surfers searching for travel”, with seven out of ten people visiting a travel-related website in March this year.
“Around 8.8m individuals were searching for travel-related products and services in the period that we collected the research over – it’s about 15% of the whole UK population. It’s huge numbers.” From these findings, Jones reasonably concludes that the travel industry has been highly effective at using both search and its own websites to sell product “on a direct response basis”. With destinations (such as Paris and Florida) constituting the most searched category for UK users, there is also an element in which search engines are people’s first ports of call before they frame any kind of buying decision. “Just entering a destination into a search engine suggests looking for content,” says Jones.
He believes that the whole issue of content is crucial, meaning that advertisers addressing travel will now inevitably look at providing “rich content environments” that are likely to include, among other resources, destination details, a map and information about the weather.
Intriguingly, many of the users in the destination category are taking an average of four weeks to arrive at their final choices. “It suggests a pretty long research process [and a willingness] to engage with content on websites,” says Jones.
Given this extensive pre-purchase period, Brands wonders aloud if there might not be implications for retail purchases made around or during travel. Simply put, is there evidence that people are now using search engines to plan their travel retail purchases around journeys? “That would have been a great question to have asked people in the attitudinal side of things,” admits Jones, “but we didn’t, unfortunately. It’s something that the travel insurance industry has been keen to talk to us about, and I think that travel peripherals is definitely something we’d like to look at going forward.”
With many travel retailers now looking to establish effective pre-ordering services, and suppliers realising the importance of an impactful web presence, it can surely only be a matter of time before the issue of purchases adjacent to travel is similarly addressed. Moreover, those who can find ways of exploiting the immense revenue potential of users spending long, sustained periods online planning their trips really will be in line for substantial paydays.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
