TravelMole Interview: Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise

Travel agents can use internet data to improve sales and marketing, suggests Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise. “As the internet becomes more involved in everyone’s lives, tracking what people do on line can be correlated more and more with what people do off-line,” he told TravelMole. One example of using on-line data is to note when users are most active. “I tell travel companies, if their company is spending money on advertising in early April or mid-December, they’re probably wasting it. But if they’re spending money from May to June and in mid to late-December, they’re spending at the right time,” he said. That’s the case because those are the busier times when consumers are more likely to be using on-line services to research their travel plans. On-line demographics can also have an influence in other advertising decisions. For example, Mr Tancer’s research shows on-line users are skewed towards women (54 to 46%, men). It’s also an upscale market with 44% earning more than $75,000. “So you would want to skew towards a female audience with higher demographics,” he said. Another of Mr Tancer’s findings is that a large percentage of on-line travel researchers, or 33.5%, start their research with search engines. “That tells you that you should invest in your search engine as a way to get users to your site,” he said. Mr Tancer’s company tracks and reports on thousands of web sites to help its customers gain insight about competitors and to use online knowledge to their competitive advantage. Hitwise research of the top 20 travel sites shows Yahoo!Maps to be first in market share, with 7.6%, followed by Expedia.com, with 6.5 market share, and Travelocity.com, with 5.1%. Travel as a broad category is one of the fastest-growing on-line areas of interest, with a 25% increase last year, according to Mr Tancer. Report by David Wilkening