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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 THE BUYING JOURNEY 4 HANDLING DATA 5 MOBILE 7 THIRD PARTY CHANNELS 9 WINNING AT SEARCH 10 SOCIAL MEDIA 11 REVIEWS & USER-GENERATED CONTENT 12 MONETISING CONTENT 13 AFFILIATE MARKETING 13 DISPLAY & RETARGETING 14 PROGRAMMATIC 14 PERSONALISATION 15 DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE 15 WORKING WITH OTHER INDUSTRIES 16 THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL MARKETING 17 CONCLUSION 18
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INTRODUCTION We don’t know what’s going to happen in the travel industry – it’s changing all the time and constantly presenting new challenges to marketers. What we do know is that accurate, comprehensive product data can help you take advantage of new channels and innovations quickly and in ever more creative ways, helping you become more strategic in your digital marketing. This report highlights how product data can play an important role in some of the biggest areas of digital travel marketing.
Traditional travel brands, airlines, hotels and even those online travel agents that sell their own holiday packages, are now competing with metasearch and review sites to hold the attention of their customer. This report is aimed at brands, like the clients we already help, who need a trusted partner to get their travel products in front of more consumers online.
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THE BUYING JOURNEY Google reports that travellers spend an average of 55 minutes booking a hotel and flights; they visit 17 websites and click four different search ads per travel search, and 90% of these travellers use more than one device during the booking process. According to Google, 65% of (leisure) travellers will start by researching online, and the top online sources of inspiration are:
The path to purchase is complicated, and doesn’t always involve a ‘brand’ website. FusePump… helps brands reach consumers in a huge range of channels.
“While they may spend less time on researching, travel customers now look at more sources, and 88% of those we surveyed expected booking to be easier when carried out online. Wherever they transact, they expect the experience to be straightforward. The most digital savvy travellers are the most likely to use search engines for their research and planning (50%), especially now that Google offers built-in price comparison tools and even booking functionality. Travel brands will need to keep up with innovations that extend outside their sector if they want to keep today’s digital consumer happy.”
TOM COSTLEY GROUP DIRECTOR
Basically, more and more travellers are researching and booking through channels other than your brand’s website. How can you influence these shoppers? Our answer is: with good product data – by sending up-to-date, quality information about your products, whether they are hotel rooms, flights or cars for hire, into as many useful marketing channels as possible. This report highlights some of the places where a smart API (or data feed) of your product inventory can help you win more travel customers online.
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HANDLING DATA The challenge, of course, is that travel ‘product data’ is generally pretty complicated. As opposed to selling one item in a number of sizes, or an electronic item in three colours, holidays tend to have a large number of combinations and adjustable options, selected by the consumer.
Travel data is complex but crucial to the customer journey. FusePump… understands and manages complex data for various travel clients.
Selling holiday packages means understanding the huge number of combinations of accommodation availability, start and end dates, appropriate travel options, and possible additional extras – and communicating this appropriately to your marketing partners. As this report shows, neglecting the final stage means you could miss out on a massive potential audience. For example: Luxury travel brand Secret Escapes has just 200 deals on their members-only site at any one time. However, this amounts to around 175,000 holiday combinations – dates, room types, additional features and so on. Similarly, brands need to understand a wide range of consumer needs, and build out the data that will help them target the right audience with the right products. With spending on ‘big data’ solutions set to increase, it would seem that businesses across every industry are keen to get a better handle on who their customers are and what they want to see. Without control of their product data, brands will struggle to take advantage of the many emerging marketing channels, and to turn browsers into buyers online.
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While some travel sites are using product data feeds for affiliate marketing and PPC, many of our clients are interested in bespoke APIs to provide data to their marketing partners. APIs are different for flights, car hire, holidays and hotels and all require different integrations. In metasearch, APIs are the standard integration format: requests can be made dynamically and return the specific information the user is searching for. An API ensures customers receive accurate pricing and availability, this is key during peak trading times when pricing can change more than 10 times a day. The offer data needs to be transmitted quickly to the partner (e.g. TripAdvisor, Trivago, Travel Supermarket): for example, in just 1 hour there can be 5000 to 50000 requests. Therefore, the API needs to be quick.
“As well as returning the right data in milliseconds, an API can connect travel brands to numerous partners, connect lots of different types of data, and provide a dynamic response, with all information kept up-to-date. An API places less demand on the brand’s site, as the partner doesn’t need to screen scrape the brand website to gain information. Also, we can set it up so that only certain partners can access certain data, with a unique log-in. It’s also very scalable.”
DANIEL GHIRBOMEAN ACCOUNT MANAGER
FusePump Hackathon 2015 Getting Creative With Travel Data In July, FusePump hosted its second company-wide hackathon, this time in conjunction with luxury travel client Secret Escapes. Four teams of FusePump staff spent just 24 hours building a new marketing tool for the client. Using the inventory of luxury travel offers from Secret Escapes, plus other data sets, they created and pitched ideas that would meet the brand’s various marketing objectives.
“We are really impressed by the ideas FusePump generated during the Hackathon, and by the quality of the pitches and presentations. It’s great to work with a partner who doesn’t just understand our commercial proposition and marketing challenges, but proactively looks to solve problems and suggest new ideas in a fun way.”
JEREMIE ROBLIN SEARCH MANAGER
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MOBILE Last year, 148.3 million bookings were made online, with 65% of same-day hotel reservations coming through a mobile (eMarketer). Euromonitor estimates that, by 2017, more than 30% of online travel bookings (by value) will be made on mobile devices. Econsultancy talks of a 50% increase in mobile travel bookings since 2013.
More people are using mobile to discover and purchase travel. FusePump‌ can build APIs to power mobile apps, and keep you mobile-friendly on partner sites.
Google says that, of all travel purchases made online, 67% of people will use a mobile at some point; but only 14% actually booked on mobile. There are some regional variations: 22% of Brits use a mobile to search for travel products, according to Bing, but that number increases to 35% in Italy.
“Nearly half of those who use their smartphone for leisure travel inspiration ultimately book through another method/device. Only 23% of those who encounter a non-mobile-optimized site actually push through to complete their activity.�
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The emergence of new payment options and smarter devices means that more and more people are prepared to use their mobiles to pay for bigger ticket items like flights and holiday packages – but only where it is made really straightforward for them.
“Companies that are already delivering great booking experiences are now turning their attention to easier booking on any device, deeper insight into customer context, flexible customer preference management, and extended involvement in the customer’s trip.”
Brands must also understand the context of different buying decisions – what people want to see on mobile (that is, on a smaller screen while they are on the move) may be different to what they would want from a desktop experience. Moreover, where brands are selecting which partners to send data to, they must consider the mobile-friendliness of metasearch sites – and what data they actually send. If your customer finds your product on a partner site, is there a mobile-friendly link to the correct page?
“Airlines and hotels own trust and still capitalize on those relationships via PCs. However, OTAs dominate the mobile space, despite suppliers’ strong branding and loyalty. While OTAs have a short-term advantage, travellers trust suppliers, and that trust – paired with a compelling mobile experience – has the potential to shift the competitive balance in suppliers’ favour.”
CRITEO & PHOCUSWRIGHT REPORT
People are not only researching and booking travel through mobile devices, they are increasingly mobile while they travel. Hospitality & Catering News reports that 45% of travellers carry 3 or more mobile devices with them while they travel: along with that, most people will spend 58% of their holiday budget while actually on the trip (Skift). Working with smart apps, beacons and appropriate targeted offers or advice, brands can reach these travellers while they are out and about, with more than just flights and hotels. Building a great app or mobile site to rival those of Skyscanner or Booking.com will be the next step for travel brands looking to retain customers, create useful content, and work more creatively with APIs (including their own) on mobile platforms.
“Building a useful app is no longer a vanity project. The ability to connect customer, product, transactional and preference data, all in the customer’s pocket, and send notifications through a built-in application… that’s why the major OTAs are building so much loyalty from customers.”
ROB DURKIN CEO
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THIRD PARTY TRAVEL CHANNELS One of the greatest challenges facing travel brands is making third party travel sites work for them and not against them.
Metasearch and OTAs are challenging brand websites for consumer attention.
FusePump… can distribute product data to As our CEO Rob Durkin argued last year, brands need to embrace third parties easily. We work closely with third party channels, and look to these travel aggregators as any partner and understand what they need. examples of effective digital marketing. Priceline (which made around $1.84bn in the first quarter of 2015) and Expedia are Google’s top two advertisers and Booking.com has often been heralded as the most persuasive website and mobile website in the world. The top aggregators tend to offer a good user experience, and will have huge teams of technical and marketing experts. (Indeed, giving consumers more of a ‘metasearch experience’ from your own brand website will undoubtedly help you secure more bookings if done well.)
OTA (Online Travel Agent) – Work with hotel and other travel brands to help travellers plan and buy flights, hotels, packages and more, through their own site. Brands featured here pay a commission. For example: Expedia and Opodo. Metasearch or Fare Aggregator site – Gather travel products from brand.com sites and OTA sites to produce price comparison information for consumers, who can click through to purchase. Kayak and SkyScanner are examples. Review site – Sites like TripAdvisor have turned their review sites into a place where consumers can click through to purchase; similar to a metasearch engine but via content rather than search. (Indeed, TripAdvisor is now testing direct booking).
“The online travel shopping journey is changing and the billboard effect that occurs as a result of hotels appearing on third party travel websites continues to play an important role in this journey. These OTAs act as a “soft brand” to promote your hotel listing.” Darlene Rondeau, Leonardo Many fare aggregators will use numerous searches and screen scraping to discover the latest deals across travel brands. If your brand wants to regain some control on how your deals are presented – and avoid issues associated with too many requests to your website – it could be time to work more closely with the sites that allow it If a metasearch site can’t properly access the details about your offering, what are the chances they will include it in a relevant package? If your flights are the best for a particular destination choice, but your competitor works closely with the OTA to provide as much rich product information as possible, will they choose to advertise your airline as heavily? Deloitte states that 59% of holidaymakers compare prices online (price being the key driver for purchase decisions), but we believe the key to presenting deals is looking beyond price. Differentiating products by additional features and making price a secondary consideration is something that brands – and metasearch engines – must consider. “Meta-search is another search engine... And like all search engines, content is going to play a major role in pageranking. Rich content including photographs, accurate property information and amenities in the brand site as well as listed OTAs will certainly help hotels to improve page ranking.” Michael McCartan, CEO at eRevMax
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WINNING AT SEARCH While popular OTAs and metasearch sites may be collecting a large share of the digital market, travellers are still using search engines like Google to research and even book holidays and business travel.
Metasearch and OTAs are challenging brand websites for consumer attention. FusePump… can distribute product data to third parties easily. We work closely with
any partner and understand what they need. 74% of leisure travellers use the internet to plan their trips, according to Google, and 60% of those shoppers use a search engine. 57% of Google’s respondents say they ‘always’ start the travel planning process with a search engine, relying on a mixture of branded and generic keywords throughout the process.
The number and authority of unique domains linking to your site will play a role in how you perform in search results – another good reason to be listed on third party sites. Being a mobile-friendly site will also count towards your site’s ranking. Paid search ads and dynamic retargeting through Google can be automated with a product data feed – and specific product features can aid conversion.
“We have found that steering clear of the more generic, subjective terminology that somehow typifies a lot of the travel sector (‘cheap’, ‘discount deals!’), and instead opting for more specific price points in plain English (e.g. “just £32 per person per night”) has worked well for our client. Everyone has a different concept of cheap, and this ensures we don’t waste funds on click costs, when the price isn’t suitable. Additionally it clearly shows if that client isn’t the cheapest vs. other competitors using price points, and attracts a customer who is more likely to covert as they are only entering the site because they are happy with the price on offer. We deliver a high conversion rate for this client by ensuring this tone of voice is maintained throughout the user journey, a vital part of the conversion process.”
AMY WILSON FOUNDER
Google As well as dominating the search market, Google has started cutting out the middleman altogether, offering travellers (in some instances) the ability to book a hotel room or flights without leaving the Google interface. When travellers search for a hotel on Google Search or Google Maps, they will be able to select the property and rate they want, and then book the room directly with the hotel without leaving the page.
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SOCIAL MEDIA 18% of total internet users use social media to research and plan travel, but that number rises to 44% among 16 to 24-year-olds, who focused on social media to select holidays more than any other age group. (ABTA)
Social media is used frequently by travellers for inspiration and research. FusePump… can get your data ready for commerce in each social channel, as required.
Travel brands are still not very visible across social platforms, despite the fact that travel offers up a great range of engaging visuals – from sun-soaked beaches to national heritage sites and those all-important food pics. It makes a lot of sense for brands to make more of this, and turn travel jealousy (and FOMO) into new customers. Instagram now allows brands to advertise to consumers, after years of being a platform that was pretty hard to monetise. Indeed, TUI was one of the first businesses to experiment with Instagram advertising. Stats from Econsultancy suggest that travel brands using Instagram ads are seeing strong results. Pinterest too, with ‘Buyable Pins’, is helping brands turn visual content into sales. Next up, surely, will be direct commerce on Facebook and Twitter. Marketers in every industry are now able to better track conversions from social media, even if it’s just enquiries or signing up for newsletters. Connecting content and commerce is easier – and arguably more profitable – than ever. However, with new channels and platforms emerging, and new ways of automating native advertising in these channels, travel brands need to be sure they have a handle on their product inventory if they want to take users further.
“Until now, social media has been about brands and soft marketing. With smarter tech and open APIs and advertising platforms, travel brands don’t just have to show pictures of beaches and hope for some ‘Likes’. They can serve dynamic adverts for specific flights or hotel rooms, and take customers directly to a relevant landing page. This is where the ROI will come from social in the next few years.”
SAM HODGES HEAD OF MULTICHANNEL
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REVIEWS & USER-GENERATED CONTENT According to ABTA, 27% of travel customers will use a travel review site such as TripAdvisor in the process of booking a holiday. Deloitte claims that 42% of holidaymakers use review websites and 59% say that these have the most influence on their booking decision. Plus: 31% of holidaymakers have posted a travel-related review.
User-generated content is generally more trusted than brand content. FusePump‌ helps brands to monitor and apply User-Generated Content, and merge data sets.
The quest for authenticity and to capture wallet share from millennials, the fastest-growing travel segment, means that brands are looking to share real stories and content from other travellers (user-generated content or UGC). There are at least 47 million travel-related images on Instagram, and 40% of millennials rely on UGC to inform their travel plans, according to Stackla. With several technology agencies offering platforms for integrating UGC with owned digital assets, and it’s theoretically possible to connect products (or product ranges) with the visual social content that past customers have shared. More difficult for travel companies than retailers, but still possible. Brands should also be collecting user reviews and using them to inform marketing decisions, and to personalise experiences for travellers. These can be added to product data feeds, for example, to enhance adverts across the internet.
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MONETISING CONTENT Taking people from awareness to purchase is one of the most difficult elements of travel marketing, but it can be done – look at how TripAdvisor has monetised its site of consumer reviews.
Content is still king… and OTAs are doing it better than brands. FusePump… can help you turn editorial into
Travel brands could be doing more to monetise their owned shoppable content, dynamically. content, on their own domains. While certain fashion brands are doing this well – with blog content linking directly to specific products on the site, for example – travel brands are still playing catch-up to the big OTAs.
Lastminute.com, for example, is investing in editorial and video content, to drive traffic to their site and keep people engaged. However, what brands need to consider is offering more interesting ways for people to discover travel. Looking at holidays as a series of inputs – dates, starting points, destinations and numbers of people – assumes that none of this is flexible. Meanwhile, offering a secondary approach – searching by activities, holiday type, personality, preferences and general availability – could be very profitable, while requiring little additional data.
AFFILIATE MARKETING With travel being something that people spend a while researching, it’s unsurprising that tons of travel blogs and publishers have emerged year on year.
Affiliate is still a useful channel for travel companies. FusePump… can help distribute product
Specialised travel blogs often deliver detailed local information to the consumer. These sites often allow advertising, which means that brands can capitalise on relevant contextual advertising opportunities that mop up the ‘long tail’ of consumer search.
data to publishers and networks, we can also help affiliates build their own engaging product-led adverts with our affiliate tools.
“As a travel publisher, we are always looking for different ways to engage with our customers. Good quality product feeds offer a perfect source of information that can be used in different ways to promote a product or brand – whether this is through dynamic/contextual advertising or more traditional content-led promotion. Data feeds enable publishers to be more precise and personal with the products they promote, which should be better for everyone.”
COLIN CARTER DIRECTOR To allow your affiliates to sell more of your travel products, help them create engaging adverts and site widgets where readers can peruse and filter offers.
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DISPLAY & RETARGETING SaleCycle states that travel has an 82.7% basket abandonment rate, making it (perhaps unsurprisingly) higher than retail and fashion, and the overall average of 75.7%. Of course, travel is a high consideration item. According to Qubit, the path to purchase in travel is more than twice as long (at 13.2 days) as a retail purchase (just 6.5 days)... but, in travel, the average order value is around ten times larger.
Abandonment rate in travel is higher than industry average. FusePump… helps brands to automate display and retargeting ads with their partners, featuring the right product details.
As well as a growing obsession with value comparison, leading to the use of more websites per purchase, it would be fair to say that travel shoppers are very likely to browse travel websites without a destination in mind. Indeed, much of travel ‘shopping’ is really inspiration gathering – hence the strength of review sites and social media. With so many people leaving your site, a strong remarketing strategy needs to be in place – whether that is through display adverts or emails. If you have a strong handle on your inventory and can deploy personalised ads quickly, consider how you can re-engage travel shoppers with a better deal, more detail or a related offer. FusePump has found that product-led campaigns – powered by product data feeds – tend to perform better for our clients than generic brand ones. Brands take note: a survey by Skift showed that 7.5% of travel abandoners leave because the booking process is too complicated.
PROGRAMMATIC With a long path to purchase (and many touchpoints along the way), your potential travel customers are a tricky segment to crack. Programmatic allows you to present the right product (that’s where we come in), at the right time, in the right place, to the right person – in real time.
“We are constantly trying to improve our marketing to be as relevant as possible; the right ad, at the right time, in the right place. Using a data feed has enabled us to run large scale programmatic ads, which are dynamically triggered based on a customer’s specific holiday search requirements. Meaning we are delivering highly targeted personalised ads to our remarketing audience and have seen a significant increase in both our CTR and sales volume compared to our standard ads.”
DIANE TAYLOR SENIOR BOUGHT MEDIA MANAGER
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PERSONALISATION “Bringing in personalisation at the early stages of travel inspiration, search and shopping influence and accelerate purchasing decisions.” (Amadeus 2014) At the discovery stage, every shred of data you can collect about a potential customer is obviously useful, if you have the information they want at your fingertips. One of the ways good product data helps travel brands is in ensuring that they can better target audience segments and CRM databases – by providing easy access to the range of products the brand has available.
“Thanks to its massive global reach, Criteo delivers exceptional results for all its clients in retail, travel and classified. Travel, however, is a highly mature market and our clients realise that they must adopt a personalised approach to convert lookers to bookers. To provide this personalised experience, it is vital to have the latest information that customers may be interested in. This includes everything from the price of package holidays, flights, hotels or cruises, to extras such as free Wi-Fi, all-inclusive dining and additional leg-room. Having a quality data feed helps us to achieve this and together we can continue to drive high-value, high-converting visitors to our clients’ website.”
PAULINE LEMAIRE HEAD OF TRAVEL & CLASSIFIED Of course, knowing who your customers are and what they want will also help in the post-purchase phases: providing a boarding pass to their phone, sending flight reminders, and up-selling ancillary products, perhaps, when they reach the airport.
DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE Whether you send them information or not, third party websites are likely crawling your brand site for offers and presenting them to consumers. Similarly, you may have competitors selling similar travel products at a lower price (but perhaps of lower quality), and stealing market share. It’s crucial to monitor what resellers and competitors are doing online. As things change so frequently, it may be worth automating the process of collecting information from certain websites, so you can ensure you are always presenting your deals in the best light, that third parties are complying with guidelines you’ve sent them, and how you stack up against other travel brands. This is especially important for hotel brands, as they can check how their indirect sales channels advertise their inventory.
“We can help travel brands understand how their marketing partners are presenting their travel products – and also let them see how they stack up to competitors. Our clients are not only interested in sending data to metasearch and OTA partners, but in checking for compliance and competitiveness before they bid too much.”
DANIEL GHIRBOMEAN ACCOUNT MANAGER
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WORKING WITH OTHER INDUSTRIES Travel customers are a valuable segment: they tend to earn more, they buy online and once they’ve decided to purchase a product, follow predictable and related purchase journeys (flights mean hotels, hotel leads to car hire, and so on). As stated in Digital Marketing Magazine, “The relative wealth of travel buyers, combined with their preference for online purchasing, means that travel data has emerged as a new and illustrative source of insight for marketers across every sector.”
Travel has much to learn from other verticals, and should consider more collaboration. FusePump… works across several industries, and we also have an in-house creative team for joined-up working.
Consider how you can, for example, present relevant holiday offers to people who have just bought a bikini from a fashion website, or get your car hire firm working with luggage brands. According to TripAdvisor, 1 in 10 people are waiting to get fit before they go on their dream holiday. There’s a connection you maybe hadn’t considered…
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THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL MARKETING? New Business Models Today’s travel consumer is frequently looking to go through the whole booking process quickly and easily – and without speaking to a real person, ideally. This means that the emerging companies like airbnb and uber, with pretty much no overheads to speak of and a completely new way of doing business – have plenty to teach traditional travel brands about customer service, optimising interactions and keeping the level of human interference to a minimum.
Wearables A trendy term, but how does it relate to travel marketing? Unlike other verticals, travel brands are possibly the best placed to make the most from new technology that connects people on the go. As well as smartphone technology, which is facilitating disruptive new companies such as uber, wearables, near-field communication (NFC) and connected cars are an ideal target for travel brands, who should continue to send relevant messages to customers who are on the move.
Augmented Reality The mobile Augmented Reality market is expected to grow to $5.1 billion by 2016. There are several new apps, websites and multi-sensory experiences that are hitting the market to help people feel like they are on holiday, when they are not. Travel brands may worry that augmented reality could mean fewer real-life bookings, but it could be a useful marketing tool. Reassuring potential customers with a 360-degree tour of their hotel room, helping them bring catalogues to life, and letting them ‘walk around’ an area first could actual persuade them to book (and perhaps spend more than they would have).
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Whatever happens in the future of travel digital marketing, it’s clear that brands need to be agile and ready to adapt. New channels, devices, technologies and platforms – reaching new and varied audiences – are appearing frequently, and a competitive advantage can be gained by getting there first. One way to ensure agility is to have a handle on your product data – with a trusted partner like FusePump, reaching your target audience in creative ways that help them decide and book easily is simple.
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© FusePump August 2015
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