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Is online travel failing customers?
Monday, 29 Sep, 2009
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TravelMole Guest Comment by Joel Brandon Bravo, Frommers Unlimited
In August the New York Times ran a report entitled under a headline “the worst part of a trip may be booking it on the web.”
This followed a Forrester Report which highlighted increasing consumer frustration and in which the analyst commented: “travel companies expect the consumer to behave like a travel agent.”
I completely agree with these views. We all still have a long way to go online. When deciding where to go, should the consumer need to read up on hundreds of destinations before finding out the airport code to put into a search box? I think not.
Online marketing should be a valuable tool in the drive to help customers find that information online.
Research we’ve undertaken shows what information people want when they are considering, booking, on holiday and on return from their trip and we know that at each stage of the visitor journey they need different tailored information and messages from their travel provider.
For example, when deciding where to go, price was the number one factor (an indication of leaner times perhaps?). This was closely followed by activities of interest and the weather.
So failing to provide this information seems a little like trying to sell a TV without saying how big it is. Information about the food, beaches and exchange rates all closely followed.
So if travel is to compete with other eCommerce sectors or more importantly, compete with someone answering the telephone, then sites need to step up and inform the customer about what it is they are buying. They aren’t renting a chair in a plane or the bed in a room, they are buying the experience of being there and all that it entails.
Even with all this information available, if the user has to wade through it all, Forrester’s findings seem justified.
Until online travel matures to offer recommendation tools, allowing users to indicate preferences and generating tailored suggestions, then the customer is going to get bored or frustrated trying to learn about everywhere in order to go somewhere.
Online content is supposed to act as the informative companion that helps the customer to plan and book the right trip for them. It’s also now a primary tool used in the battle for natural search engine rankings by using content interwoven with relevant keywords to gain high results and low cost marketing.
However, in the past year we’ve seen some major businesses create or change content to drive pure SEO benefit which actually means the content isn’t as beneficial to users themselves.
This can’t be right and unless SEO briefs and the customers’ content needs are really integrated marketers may be in danger of seeing their traffic go down rather than increase.
So this year in conjunction with Travelmole we’re asking marketeers to let us know about their online plans for 2010.
We’ll compare this with a study we undertook in 2008 and we’ll be able to let you know what the cutting edge marketers are planning to invest in for 2010. It will make very interesting reading.
Go to survey:
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