Technology – Are we asking the right questions? TravelMole guest comment by Jon Cockerill

Is there a burning issue that dare not speak its name on TravelMole?

Although there is a technology section and much discussion of the impact of technology, how many travel marketers are hiding a dark secret – that they do not really know how much it costs to sell a holiday?

This thought was prompted by a recent meeting with a tour operator client who, like so many, is struggling to keep sales up in the face of competition from a lot of new online players.

There was real pain in the marketing director’s voice: “We do far more research on how effective our marketing is than our peers – I’ve checked”.

And he did – there were dozens of pages showing cost of sale by media type, advert type, you name it – and he had the stats down to the second decimal place. All proving the cost of sale was going the wrong direction, and offering not a crumb of comfort.

Then I compounded his misery by telling him his stats were a waste of time. Given the horrible results, the quality of the analysis was the only thing he had left to feel good about, and I was taking that away. . .

Nine out of 10 holiday companies sell far more holidays via a call centre than online, and 9 out of 10 of those companies have meaningless stats for their advertising cost of sale.

How can I make such a contentious assertion when I haven’t visited them? Because I can see how few companies are using unique URLs and unique telephone numbers in their ads. Without them, you are relying on call centre staff asking questions of people who can’t even remember what prompted them to go to your web site in the first place.

Oh, how simple it was when people rang and asked for brochures! Yet even then you were typically relying on staff to ask careful questions (“When you say the Mail, do you mean the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday?”) and not just click on the first source on the list. Even motivated staff could get it wrong, and managers in the holiday business aren’t renowned for motivating call centre staff every minute of every day.

Of course unique URLs and telephone numbers are just the start. There’s work still to do in knitting them together to get accurate tracking. When a person sees an ad, calls for a brochure, then calls again on the different telephone number they found in the brochure, you need robust methods of making sure the original ad gets the credit.

I was recently involved in installing a system for a large tour operator and debugging it to get all those issues right. For interest, we left the previous manual system running to compare the results. 48% of bookings – every other booking – were being misattributed.

That company is now running over 200 unique versions of their web site to track their advertising because guess what? Once you have accurate tracking in place, you may well find that quite a lot of your advertising is working.

In fact, unlike Lord Leverhulme’s famous dictum, you will know which half is and which half isn’t working. Which is enough to put a smile on a marketing director’s face, if only for a moment.

*Jon Cockerill has been a tourism consultant for almost 20 years, including five years as marketing and IT director Welcome Holidays before its sale to Cendant Corporation. He wrote the first-ever internet strategy for the British Tourist Authority in 1995, and remains fascinated by the impact of the internet on the industry.