Sell travel ‘like sweets at supermarket’

WTM Special Report: Online Travel Company (OTC) has boosted look to book ratios by nearly 200 per cent after making changes to its dynamic packaging offering in response to customer demand.

The online intermediary and technology provider undertook extensive customer research and evaluation of consumer buying habits in the first half of 2005 and has taken the comments on board. As a result, look to book ratios across OTC-powered websites have increased from 1 per cent to 2.75 per cent in the past six months.

OTC found that clients favoured improved hotel information, which indicated the position of the hotel to tourist attractions, such as the Empire State Building in New York. Additionally consumers wanted to make a booking in fewer clicks, and be less bombarded with ancilliary travel products while making the booking.

Consequently, OTC has improved hotel information, giving exact distances from key tourist attractions, added maps, and virtual tours for 1,000 of its properties. It has also pushed its sales drive for travel extras to the end of the booking.

“It’s just like selling sweets at the supermarket checkout,” said Vic Darvey, OTC group commercial director, during a presentation at the EyeForTravel conference at this year’s World Travel Market.

“These ancilliary products can increase the transaction value by up to 40 per cent,” added Darvey, who described the extras as anything from airport transfers and car hire to insurance, dinner and theatre tickets. But he says that the best point at which to sell these products is at the point of transaction, offering consumers targetted extras, such as one type of insurance, and one rental car. The consumer than clicks through to either book that one or make a selection from a wider choice.

To the packaged travel products, OTC or the relevant distributor, can then add a margin of 15 or 20 per cent, said Darvey, plus the package is bonded.

The research quoted by Darvey comes from surveys of 10,000 online dynamic packaging customers, carried out earlier this year on OTC-powered websites and analysis of six months worth of transactional data processed by OTC, which includes booking taken directly by the OTC site, plus bookings taken by the websites operated by Thomas Cook and Travelcare, which among others are powered by OTC’s dynamic packaging software.

“We are in the privileged position of working with a number of third parties which puts us in a position of accessing reams of transactional data through companies like Thomas Cook. We then use this information to improve our dynamic packaging offering, which in turn benefits our clients,” Darvey told TravelMole.

Report by Ginny McGrath