Promiscuous online travel consumers - how do we retain their loyalty?

Comscore and Google have recently announced the results of a survey into 20,000 UK online consumers and their behaviour in purchasing travel online. The research revealed that on average:

• 20 million people in the UK used the internet to research their holiday in the first quarter of 2007
• Consumers visited 22 (yes that’s right – 22!) websites before purchasing.
• Made 12 travel related searches using a search engine.
• Took 29 days from the time of the first search to make a purchase.
• Visited the site they eventually purchased from 2.5 times, rising to 3.9 times for tour operator sites.
• 54% of shoppers started the research process with a generic term (e.g. ‘flights to jersey’) rather than a branded search term such as ‘Easyjet flights to jersey’

For me, the key issue that comes out of this research is how fickle the online shopper has become when it comes to brand. The real challenge is trying to keep consumers loyal to your brand/website during the 4 week shopping process.

For repeat customers it’s fairly straight forward. If your data capturing systems are good enough then you should be able to communicate directly via e-mail and develop your relationship on a one-to-one basis. Encouraging first time visitors to book through your site is a much tougher challenge. Google predictably responded to the survey by suggesting the key is to improve your rankings on search engines and spend more on online advertising.

The other big development in this area is the growth of meta-search sites such as travelsupermarket.com and cheapflights.co.uk. These sites operate by taking a consumer search enquiry and going off to individual travel company websites & providing a comparison of price and availability, thereby reducing the workload of the online shopper. These sites are likely to provide a greater challenge to Google as they provide a one-stop shop.

Sadly, it looks likely that brand-equity, which has never been that great in our industry, is going to become even less relevant.

October visitors down - is it a blip or a sign of harder times ahead?

A Happy New Year to everyone who follows this blog. It's good to be back after the festive season.

Now if you were to come up with a list of days of the year to bury bad news, then Christmas Eve would come pretty near the top of the list. That may be why Jersey Tourism chose that day to release October's staying visitor statistics.

After a year of generally positive figures, October saw a significant drop on the previous year. Leisure visitor volumes dropped by 7% to below 30,000 and the average length of stay also fell by 3%. As a result the increase for the year dropped to just over 1%, or 4000 additional people.

More worryingly, business visitors also fell for the first time this year (by 6%). Business visitors' revenue makes an important contribution to the tourism pot in the winter months, when leisure visitors are less inclined to travel.

So what should we read into these figures? Did the credit crunch and Northern Rock publicity affect people's willingness to take a short break in the autumn? It would appear so. The loss of low cost services operated by Thomsonfly may also have had an effect.

Is it a blip, or should we be worried about the impact of UK economic difficulties for 2008? It's impossible to predict, but my guess is that it is going to be a tough start to the year. I expect peak season sales to be sluggish until the spring and the remainder of this winter to be tough with both leisure & business visitors thinner on the ground than last year.

Jersey Tourism's TV commercial started airing on Boxing Day. Let's hope it is having the desired impact. If it is, we'll probably hear about it. If not, then the spinners will probably wait until another good day for bad-news burying comes along.

Jersey.com - new site removed

Last Thursday, ten days after it went live, Jersey Tourism took the decision to remove the disastrous new jersey.com website and revert back to the old site. Today, Tourism's chief David de Carteret issued the following statement to the industry:

"I am writing to provide you with an update on the status of jersey.com following some difficulties which we have been experiencing in moving to the new site. The current position is that we are maintaining the old site whilst further work is being undertaken to ensure the quality and functionality of the new. When we are totally confident in all operational aspects, the new site will be introduced.

Unfortunately the new site still has too many bugs to risk live operation during a busy period and with the new television campaign being launched on Boxing Day it is essential that we delay to ensure that the booking engines and links to commercial sites are operational. We very much regret having had to make this decision particularly after the fanfare of the launch of the new site in November .

We are confident that the problems can be resolved and that the new site will be introduced within the next few weeks."

First of all - some credit is due to David and his team for biting the bullet and recognising the need to put the consumer first. However in due course there will need to be a full enquiry into the handling of the project which has clearly been poorly managed right from the initial decision to award the project to a London agency. At least we can be certain that visitors to jersey.com will be able to see the information they need.