Online Travel Market

European online marketing company Xotels have listed their top 20 best practices for destination marketing organization (DMO) websites and destination marketers.

Tourism Board, Convention Bureau and Tourist Office websites can be improved quite a lot, says European online marketing company Xotels. Most of them need a makeover to be able to compete with commercial travel and tourism websites. A local or regional DMO website should help to promote not only the destination as a whole, but also hotels, tourist attractions, restaurants, theatre, sports, activities in the destination itself. Ideally it would be possible to buy or reserve this through the DMO website.

But how can a DMO compete against commercial giants? Below are Xotels' top 20 best practices for DMO websites and destination marketers.

1. Sell Experience: Your destination website need to sell the experience of your city or region. The design needs to be of todays day and age and include multimedia and interactive modules. A great example of this is NYC's Official Tourism Bureau website www.nycgo.com.

2. Quality and Relevant Information: This is logical no? But too often vital information is missing, like a complete listing of restaurants and shops. The most important thing here is how to display the information. Lists or tables with names of establishments and attractions with their address phone number and website Url is not enough anymore. We need to go beyond!

3. Map Mash-up: This is a very effective way to spice up your site and give it a user friendly experience. Map mashups with filters depending on what you are looking for. A nice example is Visit Sweden.

4. Event Calendar: What is going on in your destination? When is it going on? Is your website showing all the upcoming events like races, concerts, festivals, local holiday's traditional festivities, expositions? Not only in a calendar, but also highlighted on the home page, like on www.nycgo.com for the Summer Stage concerts in New York's Central Park.

5. Search Engine Saturation: Building DMO websites we tend to put all listings of restaurants, tourist attractions etc in tables. Also hotels directories are being pulled in through an iframe quite often. Here we will have to think a step further. Ideally we would come up on the top of the first pages of search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing even if someone is searching for anything in the destination. Each click is another vote to the credibility of your site. It will help us build more authority on the more competitive searches and key words. Part of the strategy hence should be to saturate the search engines, and create a single page for each restaurant, museum, neighbourhood, beach, event, theatre play etc. It is just a matter of configuring the importation of the content from your database correctly. And it will give great results.

6. SEO and Meta-Tags: Another weakness with many destination marketing websites. They tend to have one title for the whole site. And sometimes even use the same meta description and keywords. Each page is a unique marketing opportunity to appear in the search engines. So they should individually target unique searches. If you are not experienced, don't try to guess. Use an expert to identify the best combination and order per page. It will pay itself back in no time with a very healthy ROI.

7. Languages: Where are people your city, village or region coming from? What language do they speak? You need to cater to them in their local language when it comes to your website. Not because they would not understand English or another language. Keep in mind that search engines will always show first sites in local languages, so if you want to penetrate potential markets translation is the name of the game.

If we look at the European market you should at least have your website in 7 to 10 languages. Of course this seems like a lot of work. We know this cannot be accomplished in one day of work. But you have to get at least the main structure of your site with the most important information translated. In time you can work on the more detailed pages.

8. SEO Longtail: The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson (see his blog at http://www.longtail.com) to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. The same thought process can be applied to internet marketing or search engine optimization. We should not only focus on high traffic keyword searches like ‘hotel+destination' or ‘destination+holidays'. There is a lot of traffic volume hidden in the sum of multiple keyword or niche searches.  Think of combinations like ‘family friendly hotel + destination', ‘romantic getaway+destination', ‘short vacation + destination' or ‘Easter weekend + destination'. There are many variations you can think of. Use Google Adwords to identify them, see where there is some traffic, and where there is none.

For each search you should be building pages with relevant content to this potential niche tourist or visitor market. You can use components from your database to complement a 1 or 2 paragraph introduction. Yes it is not so much extra work; you already have most of the content in terms of attractions. It is just a matter of writing a page intro and meta-tags and adding some suggestions.

The conversion ratio on average of these niche searches is higher than the general ones. So again the potential ROI will justify the effort.

9. Import Content: We all know the saying work smart, not hard. The same applies when trying to develop a tourism or convention bureau website for your destination. For instance, hotel reviews can be pulled though RSS feeds from TravelPost.com and TripAdvisor.com. Why would you try to reinvent the wheel? Use the information available to you on the internet. You have to make sure you follow their guidelines and give the appropriate credits.

Navigation: The tourists' preference of information content varies across different levels of DMO websites (country, state/province and city). So we really have to make sure navigation is well optimized and the site stays user friendly. Ease of use can be achieved with filters, text and visual navigation. It is important to keep the site well organized and intuitive.

10. Distribute Content: We have to step beyond the point that the content we develop is only for our own website. Just like importing content by using hotel review RSS Feeds, we can make our content available for other websites to use. For instance hotels could use our maps through GEORSS feeds for a tourist guide section on their own website. They could pick and choose what they would like to display by applying filters. It is also useful for tour operator and travel agency websites. It will save them the time to write this content once again. Using the RSS feeds they will create links pointing back to your site. Once again an effective search engine optimization strategy to improve your website's positioning.

11. Convert: As your website will become the undisputed expert and resource of your destination you should also focus in converting lookers into bookers.  We are talking not only about hotels but you should also sell tickets to cultural events, tourist attractions, museums, sport activities etc. You can use your own booking technology for this or use an affiliate partner to provide you with the inventory. Charge hotels a small commission; let's say 5% to 8% for arguments sake, or an annual fee. Any revenues generated can be reinvested in maintaining and updating technology and in online or search engine marketing. You could also redirect the consumer to the hotel website to book directly once they have made their choice.

12. No Double Work: Too often we see Tourism Offices, Convention Bureaus and Hotel Associations building the same destination content, and compete for ranking in search engines. We suggest more cooperation between the different institutions to avoid duplicate efforts, reduce cost and multiply results for the destination.

13. How to get here? Yes you should not only promote what to do in your destination but also make it easier to get there. You should provide more information than close airports, train stations and motorway exits. Think about integration booking engine of train and bus companies. Make an affiliate page with www.skylow.com, www.skyscanner.com or www.kayak.com. Also consider advertising pages for tour operators and travel agencies to promote their special offers. Anything to make it easier for people to book, and Book Now!

14. Integrate a Blog: If you are considering featuring a destination blog, you should consider integrating it into your site. It just makes sense from an SEO perspective. It adds to your page volume and overall search engine authority. Also it will be easier to turn lookers into bookers if you don't have to refer them to another website later on.

Don't forget to tell a story if you want to interest people. Don't push your destination, but pull them in!

We also recommend making use of local residents who are passionate about their local town or citizen journalists, or like to visit your destination. You can feature a main article once per 2 weeks for instance and have a bunch of guest writers in multiple languages helping you to reach a global audience. It will also add more credibility and a feeling of authenticity to the site. Putting a face to the bloggers will help.

15. Social Network Strategy: Many organizations are attempting to build their own communities or networks and to have people communicate on the stories they want or choose.  We are of the opinion this is the wrong approach. It is much more effective to participate in the discussion consumer driven groups or networks. Of course create your destination profile on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and travel communities. This is jump board from where you can do recommendations on people doing research on your destination. A simple example of people talking about Holiday+Barcelona on Twitter:

It is important not to be intrusive or to dominate a forum. Advice has to be objective and useful.

From your site you allow people to bookmark your url, share it with friends or become a fan of your FaceBook profile. Stories from your Blog can be distributed through RSS feeds and re-published on FaceBook, Twitter and FriendFeed. This is step 1 in viral marketing.

16. Photo and Video Sharing: Make some videos and put them on YouTube. Create your own channel as well. Do the same on Flickr with images and videos and create a stream. Search engines, and especially Google is showing images more and more in universal search results: berlin+brandenburg+gate or Amsterdam+red+light+district

Take it a step further and make a photo or video wall using the www.cooliris.com piclens. You can simply use the Flickr stream or YouTube Channel with you images and videos. You can also browse you tube and add user generated content or videos made by others to your channels favourites to also feature in your site. This way you can nicely mix up UGC with material created by you to well position your destination.

You can again consider making use of local residents and turn them into ambassadors and stakeholders in the success of your destination. Work together with a local photography club or school to get pictures and videos of local events and every day life in your destination. CNN http://www.ireport.com is a beautiful example of how citizen journalism can work well.

17. Post Trip Engagement: Now that you have built a solid infrastructure on your own site and have a following on social communities and a network of tourism blogs. Ask people for their feedback on their vacation or weekend trip. Request them to post their images and videos so you can publish them.

All their activity in relation to your destination will be noticed by their friends and connections on social networks and communities. The trick to viral marketing is to have the FaceBook generation doing the work for you.

18. Scan the Web: Set-up alerts and RSS feeds for people writing about or doing research on your destination. Using a reader like Netvibes you will avoid having to visit individual sites constantly. The search on Holidyas+Barcelona from Twitter we showed above can be turned into an RSS Feed. You can also set alerts through Google blog search or Google alerts. So many ways you can find information you want to react to or share with other potential travellers.

19. Plan First: Do your research up front. Find out what it is you want. Set some objective. Sketch it on paper to make it more visual. It will help you to figure out what it is you truly want and need.

20. International Strategy: Ensure you do not limit yourself using a local web designer. To develop a proper international destination internet marketing strategy you have to work with a company that understands multiple languages and has international experience in tourism marketing. Ask yourself the question if the local company is really the right one. You might also note my focus on marketing more then on the word design. Because the objective is promoting your destination, design is one of the tools. Design has to be driven by overall objective and SEO guidelines to ensure we get the required result.

Unfortunately we see often the choice being made for the cheaper local provider. But in the end this usually turns out costly as ROI is low. Remember you are competing in the international tourism market, so you will be better for working with experts. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, June 2009)

52% of potential travellers search 3 or more sites before booking their airfare, according to a recent survey by Bing Travel. 42% of travellers spend between 1 and 4 weeks weighing their travel options, and 17% spend more than a month. Bing Travel aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time consumers spend searching for travel information by presenting comprehensive results in one place, and to help consumers make more informed decisions with tools such as Price Predictor and Rate Indicator.

Some of Bing Travel's key features include the following:
- Price Predictor: Bing Travel uses Farecast technology to analyse more than 175 billion airfare observations and predict whether the price of a flight is going up or down. It offers people a recommendation of "Buy Now" or "Wait", including a confidence level and expected price increase or decrease over the next seven days.
- Rate Indicator: How does someone know if the rate for a hotel is a deal or not? The Rate Indicator analyses historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all.
- Travel Deals: Bing Travel features up-to-the-minute flight and hotel deals for nearly 40 cities around the world.
- Comparison Flight & Hotel Search.
- Fare Alerts. Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls.
- Original travel editorial content.
- Deals
(EyeForTravel, June 2009)

New benchmark data shows that hospitality sites are losing 50% of potential bookings, as usability hurdles and price sensitivity take a toll on the online customer experience, according to a report by iPerceptions Inc. entitled "Hospitality Industry Report Q1 2009" (http://www.iperceptions.com/en/resource-center). The report analyzes user-generated feedback from more than 137,000 visitors to more than 100 hospitality sites from January through March 2009.

Major structural shifts are under way in the hospitality industry, according to Duff Anderson, vice president of research and development at iPerceptions. Merrill Lynch projects that 45% of hotel bookings will be made online by the end of 2010. At the same time, social media is morphing the traditional relationship between hotel and patron. In addition, economic jitters pose a systemic challenge to the industry. The Hospitality Industry Report series is designed to provide the benchmarks and hard data that marketers need to navigate these changes and make the most of emerging opportunities.

According to the iPerceptions Hospitality Industry Report Q1 2009, booking is the leading preoccupation of hotel website visitors, who are primarily arranging leisure travel (70%) rather than business travel (30%). Also directly relevant to marketers and site operators are these key findings:

- Price Sensitivity Hurts Satisfaction Scores: cost sensitivity is already having a negative impact on hospitality website satisfaction scores. The report isolated and evaluated the ten key elements of the visitor experience on a satisfaction scale of 0 to 10. Of the ten, the lowest marks went to Bottom Line (this site supports my budget goals) and Starting Point (this site is an effective starting point for my travel plans). The weak performance of these attributes, which pertain directly to price and perceived sense of value, stood in contrast to other attributes like Convenience and Discovery, and brought down the collective satisfaction rates with hospitality sites.

- Usability Pitfalls Drive Down Bookings: visitors have real trouble completing basic tasks at hospitality sites. Most noticeably, 1 of every 2 visitors who came to a site to make a reservation reported being unable to do so. While some of the reasons underpinning this low rate lie outside the purview of the web experience, the top barriers reported by visitors were problems with site navigation, the booking flow, and insufficient hotel and room information, all of which fall squarely on the plate of interactive marketers and website developers.

- The First Time Is the Worst Time: 47% of site visitors were onsite for the first time and thus not acclimated to site navigation, architecture, and functionality. Hotel websites find it difficult to cater to this segment, as evidenced by first-timers' collective iPerceptions Satisfaction Index score of 6.85, notably lower than the score of 7.51 posted by the most frequent visitors.

(Travel Industry Wire, May 2009)

An analysis has been carried out by Amadeus into how far out from their departure date travellers purchase the different elements of their trip. The results compiled from 80 travel websites showed that customers purchased their flight 44.1 days from departure, their hotel 41.7 days from departure and their car hire 19.4 days out from departure. (EyeForTravel, April 2009)

Google recently stated that the average number of terms in a travel-related search phrase has increased from 2.5 to 4+. Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated searchers, and it is important for search marketers to embrace this opportunity to provide more relevant ads for long tail keywords, according to Kayak.com's manager search marketing Shehzad Daredia.

These longer, more specific keywords tend to be less competitive and hence less expensive; they also tend to convert better for advertisers, thus allowing advertisers to bid more for them accordingly. (EyeForTravel, April 2009)

New research from eMarketer shows that people are still searching online for travel, in many cases above all else, in spite of the credit crunch.

According to a recent study, of the nearly seven million Spaniards who’ve shopped online in 2008, nearly two-thirds used their time online to search for travel and accommodation. Second-most searched for were tickets to movies, theatres, and concerts, but this had significantly less search at only 36%.

Another study shows that in the US, the Hispanic population is beginning to go online in big numbers: over 40% of US Hispanics shopped online this year. And travel was the top category they researched. As Hispanics look set to represent 1/6 of the US population by 2010, this is not a category to be overlooked, and they continue to be underserved by Spanish-language sites.

In the US as a whole, online buyers continue to be “active but practical,” with 4/10 online buyers having made an online travel purchase within the past six months. Indeed, travel was the top category in online purchases and transactions among US adult online buyers. (eMarketer, November 2008)

1. Holidays/destinations: 61.9%
2. Consumer electronics: 58.4%
3. Travel (e.g. flights, trains): 56.9%
4. Portable devices: 56.6%
5. Mobile phone services: 56.0%
6. Computer software: 52.3%
7. Films: 49.8%
8. Music: 48.8%
9. Books: 46.2%
10. Cars/automobiles: 43.7%

• The "experience-hungry" travellers - the largest group, made up of 39% of those surveyed. These people try to balance business travel with personal interests, scheduling in as much free time as possible so they can explore new destinations. In their briefcase, the experience-hungry traveller is most likely to carry a camera, a city map and, most importantly, a shopping list. This group was well represented by all countries surveyed, peaking with 44% of French business travellers, it also illustrates that corporate travel now often incorporates personal priorities as well as business. In terms of position in the company, there are interesting differences: 41% of employees are experience-hungry, but this drops to 29% when it comes to top management.


• The "hyper-connected" tribe - comprises of 23% of corporate travellers. This group is most often married and although they don't necessarily enjoy travelling for work, they like the opportunity to develop business networks. Top managers are more likely to fall into this tribe than employees (30% of top management vs. 19% of employees). Not surprisingly this "hyper-connected" tribe tends to carry a BlackBerry and a WiFi-ready laptop, and they are very focused on their business objectives. At the highest, more than 1 in 4 (28%) of US corporate travellers belong to this tribe. In other countries the rate declines with the lowest being Canada (19%).


• The "cost-conscious" travellers - the third largest group, making up 14% of travellers. This group is most likely to work for a company with less than 50 employees and they make sure that value for money is the key priority in every business trip. 17% of UK corporate travellers belong to this tribe, more than in any other country. The least cost conscious being the French, with only 9% in this tribe.


• In the remaining 24% of travellers, three smaller tribes have been identified. The "home-focused group" makes up 7% of travellers and are the ones who enjoy travelling the least. 36 to 45 year-old corporate travellers are more likely to be in this tribe than any other age group. People with young children are also more likely to find themselves in this tribe. "Seasoned travellers" (6%) are the most frequent travellers, making around 25 business trips a year. For these people, travel is a core part of their work routine and half of them have assistants to help them organize trips. Finally, the smallest, yet potentially the fastest growing tribe is the "green travellers". At just 4% of those surveyed, this group only travel by plane if there is no other option and have frequently considered investing in projects to reduce CO2 emissions to offset their travel.