Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Online customer behaviour’ Category

No longer can the Internet be viewed just as an add-on to marketing efforts - it is now an integral, critical part of travel distribution.

That was the view expressed by Diane Clarkson, Travel Industry Analysts at Jupiter Research and Bill Tancer, god of all things data at Hitwise, in this evening’s excellent webinar: Travel 2.0 Today, The Economy and the Evolving Travel Landscape.

More critically, Hitwise have found (through their clickstream analysis of internet users as they move from site to site) that traffic to the travel category of websites is actually increasing as people tighten their belts.

There has been no drop in travel website visits as fuel prices increase. People are instead researching their travel decisions more intensively online and are shifting to the online channel as they become more price sensitive.

Internet and online travel becomes more important in tough economic times.
Bill Tancer, Hitwise

Jupiter Research’s data backs this up. Their US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 suggest that the next 12 months could see a sharp decline in travel frequency - with 39% of occasional leisure travellers and 43% of occaisional business travellers suggesting that they are planing fewer trips in the coming year. But the impact, Diane explains, is that “the Internet will increasingly become a tool as people research more intensely”.

The business implications of that are immense - while you may have cruised by on a sub-par website in good times, as things toughen up in the sector, people are looking at more websites and so it is critical you can attract and retain visitors on yours.

Bill and Diane’s webinar covered three key topics:

• The impact on travel of the economic downturn
• The impact of user generated content on travel brands and travel consumers
• The potential for travel and social network sites.

They kindly gave permission for their content to be blogged openly, which is much appreciated as it is not always the case with such industry analyst briefings. When the webinar is available online, I will add the link as its really worth a listen. In the meantime here are a few of the conclusions from their respective research efforts that really tingled some brain cells for me:

1. User generated content is used by 40% of online travel researchers

Yup, 40%. Not hardly anyone, or a bunch of geeks, or a few back packing students - but 4 out of 10 of the people researching travel. Jupiter’s US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 found that for this 40% using user generated content, ratings were the most popular (used by 58%), followed by reviews and recommendations (49%). Next came user generated photo content (18%) and friend’s social networking websites (18%). Other travellers blogs we consulted by 12% and user generated video by 5%.

The impacts of this? Diane cited the importance of using this content regularly and systematically as a source of competitor intelligence. And as the next point will illustrate, she also highlighted the importance for the contribution of travellers to be included as part of brand strategy. Why? Because user generated content is highly trusted.

2. User generated content is nearly twice as influential as brand to accommodation researchers

User generated content is far more influential than brand or the recommendations of friends and family

After price and location, for those using ugc, reviews/ratings from other travellers was the major influence in the decision making process. 36% named it as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation. (Source Jupiter as above).

Hitwise’s clickstream data shows that visits to travel user generated content have increased 40% in the year since June 2007. They also reveal (perhaps no surprises) that it is TripAdivsor that is the heavyweight, accounting for more than 75% of the Travel UGC and 2.0 market share. (IgoUgo pales into second at 9.5% and WAYN at 8.4%). Bill made the point that while standalone Travel UGC accounts for only a small fraction of travel visits online (2%), its reach and impact is in fact much wider as people engage in user generated content on traditional travel websites.

3.The Travel 2.0 heavyweights are in the mainstream research to purchase mix

With a graph to die for, Bill combined the flow of clicks from travel site to travel site, with market share of those sites. From this network map, he isolated those sites that are driving traffic to the big OTAs such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity.

And a few Travel 2.0 players are having a big impact - TripAdvisor and the metasearch site Kayak and Sidestep. Metasearch, sites that search for price across muliple agency and supplier sites, before sending the search off to another site to book, are faring particularly well in these price sensitive times. Two years ago they were only used by the highly tech savvy, whereas now they are entering the mainstream as people research more intensively for the best prices.

However, what Bill’s uber-graph also shows is that outside these heavyweights, the smaller Travel 2.0 sites (from WAYN to WikiTravel) are very insular, with little cross flow of traffic and are currently outside the mainstream travel research traffic flow.

4. The social networking sites are not impacting as a travel planning resource yet

Jupiter (same source as above) found that only 8% of those online travellers who are using social networking sites do so for travel planning. 56% do not use social networks in any capacity whatsoever that relates to travel. The most common travel related uses come in the form of communication, with 23% looking at friends travel photos or videos, 22% keeping in touch while away and 19% posting photos.

Diane contrasted the high level of trust that people have in stranger generated reviews, which comes from critical mass. People can sift many reviews looking for patterns and things that resonate with them. In contrast, social networks have much lower critical mass.

Hitwise’s data has not seen significant increases in traffic being referred to travel sites from social network sites - Bill suggested that where it is appearing, it is potentially being caused by people that use their social networking site as their homepage.

And different segments and demographic profiles of travel researchers behave in different ways. The 55+ age group are more likely to use newspapers and magazines to find a new travel site that they haven;t used before, whereas younger users are more likely to use meta search. Website visitors, like travellers, can never be thought of as a single homogeneous mass.

So, thanks again to Hitwise and Jupiter Research for a great webinar and for allowing us bloggers to share their findings with the wider industry. I hope I’ve communicated some of the potential power of their data with this short round up.

But burying your head in the sand is not an option either…

Yesterday I met with a tourism business that has been spending a considerable part of its precious marketing budget with a search engine optimisation consultant. Results had been slow, but their consultant had said it would take at least 6 months and they thought things might now be starting to pick up, just as predicted.

Still, they had asked if I would take a look at their web analytics data and see if I could shed some light on how their 6 month SEO investment was going and whether I had any tips based on that data for further improvements they could make.

What I found, to mutual distress, was yet another tourism business who had been ripped off - either through ignorance on the part of the consultant, or quite possibly through deliberate greed and laziness.

I do not profess to be an SEO expert (though happily I know a few). But I am a web analytics and customer insight professional. I can recognise how people arrive at a site and the behaviour they undertake when they get there. I can also recognise when marketing expenditure has had no discernible effect in relation to its conversion objectives.

So, with those provisos in mind, I thought I would share these tips with you.

1. The search charlatans are still out there

There is no “no work” option when it comes to SEO. It is your page content, architecture, headers, titles, linking, images, videos, key phrases, relevancy etc etc etc that a good SEO company will work on.

When people promise no effort, no site alteration results, be suspicious.

Here’s some alarm bell generators:

Keyword meta-tags - “armed only with some keywords in the meta tag, we will magically search optimise your site, propelling it to the top of the search engine rankings.”

If you’ve heard this one, you’re not alone, for this is the one I come across the most amongst small businesses and was the issue yesterday.

There is much debate about what (if any) value the keyword meta tag has. It has been declared completely dead by many in the SEO field, while others make perfectly valid demonstrations that it is still a factor for some search engines in some cases.The point is that is just one of hundreds of factors that may or may not influence rankings and never the only one.

If keyword tags are the only thing your SEO consultant is proposing, get more proposals or save your money and tinker yourself. This SEOmoz post gives you hints on choosing a good SEO vendor and this post by Eric Enge has tips on how to spot the bad ones.

Tricks and naughty stuff that will make search engines frown

Keywords stuffing, whited out text, junk links, cloaking, nonsense content that clearly isn’t written for people - this is the world of bad SEO and your business will most likely suffer as a result.

This article has Top 10 Google Dont’s - things you (or for that matter your paid supplier) should never do for search engine optimisation, while this post from the Tri-city commerce group Web Development blog is a good round up on Avoiding common SEO rip offs.

It may sound tedious, but I think the most useful thing you can do is try and educate yourself just a little on SEO (a resource list is at the end of the post). If people are trying to exploit your lack of awareness, a little bit of knowledge will help protect you from the bulk of the ignorant and ignoble!

2. You cannot ignore search engine optimisation

Just because “there be dragons”, that doesn’t mean hiding is an option that will help your long term business survival. As I mentioned in the last post, just 25% of traffic typically arrives at your website through the home page - the rest come deep in, via search. Google alone drives nearly 40% of all UK Internet traffic.

Jupiter Research and iProspect’s Blended search results study shows that appearing on page one of the search engine results is now more important than ever:

“The data indicates that more search engine users click the first page in 2008 (68%) as compared to than in 2006 (62%), 2004 (60%) and 2002 (48%). Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) as compared to 2006 (10%), 2004 (13%) and 2002 (19%).

So more than ever, it is vital for search marketers to ensure that their digital assets appear within the first three pages of search results, and especially on page one.”

I’m actually surprised their data finds that many people making it past page one. I saw usability expert Jakob Nielsen presenting a few week back and his eye tracking data was showing that only a tiny fraction of people even made it below the fold of the first page (people basically do not bother, or do know know how to scroll). He also found that if they don’t get the results they need on the first page above the fold (that could only be 3 organic results in a highly competitive paid earch environment) they simply refine their search and try again, rather than bother to scroll or go to page 2 or 3 of the results.

You are only going to appear on those search terms for which your page or site is the most relevant. How do you get onto that front page? Well you either pay your way there through paid search marketing, or you optimise your way there to pull in “free” traffic. Your budget will determine whether you outsource that optimisation process, or whether it is another of your critical DIY web tasks.

3. Universal and blended search is changing the playing field

Google has designed Universal Search to present search engine results in all forms of media including video, photos, PDF files, maps, and news items, all in one result page. “Blended search” is what they call Universal Search when it’s by anyone but Google.

I saw search guru Mike Grehan speaking at the London eMetrics Summit last week and he was talking about vertical creep - essentially how Google’s univeral search results are pushing the organic results down below the fold of page 1 (into nowheresville).

As you can see in the image below, on my laptop, if I search for Edinburgh hotels on Google, there is now only one old style organic result above the fold - the organic hotspot to be for tourism businesses now is beside the map that dominates the page (and the eyeballs)!

The impact is that there is even tighter competition for the organic search spots on page 1 and tools like videos, images and map placement have a roll in that.

Add if you’re not on the map you can add your business free over at the Google business center - its simple and worth the effort.

4. Relevance, relevance, relevance

Ultimately a search engine’s ongoing success is dependent on it delivering to its users the best, most relevant results for the terms they are searching on. The search engine is looking for pages that are relevant to the searcher.

If your pages are well tailored to your specific customers’ needs, using the vocabulary they use and answering the specific problems they are facing, better search results will be a side effect.

Optimising for your customers (ie real human beings) mustn’t be swept away in the quest for search rankings - because once you win a visitor from a search engine, you next need to ensure that person can do what they came for (and what your site exists for).

5. Paying for a click is not the same as paying for a customer

If you pay £1 per click for paid search advertising, and 99 out of 100 people immediately turn around and leave your site without doing anything else, you are paying £100 not £1 for a potential customer. If only 1 person in 1000 actually does want you want them to - say buy a ticket - then that customer is costing you £1000.

Whether you are working on paid search marketing or organic search engine optimisation, judge your success not in terms of how many people click into your site, but by how many people come and then do what you want them to.

It is a waste of money if you use paid search adverts to drive people to pages that are not relevant to their needs, because they will turn around and leave again. Likewise, with organic search, you can have highly attractive content that pulls many people into your site (a game or giveaway for example) - but if none of those people actually convert into doing what your site exists for, is that really a success?

Importance of measuring your website

There is no need to only take someone else’s word for what is working and what isn’t - the web analytics tools are there that will let you see end results in terms of uplifted sales (or other conversions) for yourself.

Some elements of search are shrouded in mystery (the mythical components of Google’s algorithm for one!) However, “is this working for my business?” does not need to be one of those mysteries. I will follow up with a specific post on how web analytics can help you understand how your web visitor’s search.

In the meantime, here are some resources to help:

• A detailed beginner’s guide to search engine optimisation from SEOmoz
• Wikipedia on the subject
• A Plea to Stop Treating SEO as an Afterthought
• Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
• How Search Engines Work
• How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
• Why the Vast Majority of SEOs No Longer Target Individual Search Engines

How one online company found that small numbers of customer problems were often the tips of large icebergs…and turned this insight around to improve conversions and sales

I thought I would share with you one insight from the eMetrics Summit about how one travel sector company used feedback mechanisms to identify seemingly small problems…and then discovered that these were not isolated incidents but issues affecting appreciable numbers of customers each day, resulting in avoidable loses.

The company is a major Online Travel Agent dealing with a huge number of global transactions and queries each day. Their site has tools that capture (anonymously) all consumer sessions on the site so, if there is a problem, they can work to find out exactly what was going wrong in that specific instance.

In practice they have two big ways of capturing customer interaction data on site. The first is by offering the customer the ability to pass comment throughout the booking process. Therefore, if my valid UK address was not being accepted at the booking page, then I could leave a note to the site owners to do something about this.

The second way of capturing data is by effectively recording each user session for playback. The point of this is to see how the customer actually got to the position they did - something that becomes vital in those situations when the site really shouldn’t act in that way and an action seems to be failing for no apparent reason.

With this dual approach, when an issue was identified the OTA was able to define some parameters that allowed them to use all the data of previously recorded sessions to see whether other customers had also experienced similar problems but had not complained about it. Rather they had simply walked away from the site and possibly taken their business elsewhere.

What they discovered was that, in some cases, one or two people complaining were often the tip of the iceberg and that one small issue was in fact potentially affecting literally hundreds of customers. The company declined to offer figures but it is easy to imagine that if the average transaction was, say, a couple of hundred dollars, then this apparently insignificant issues would soon add up to serious money over the year.

By using the same analysis techniques that led them to discover the size of the problem, the company was able to monitor whether the problem was still occurring after a fix or whether its incidence had dropped to zero or acceptable levels.

So what?

We can’t all afford the kind of systems that this company was using but the business approach they took is available to everyone and I would summarize the insights as follows:

• Always take customer comments seriously and probably indicative of a larger silent body of suffering customers
• Have systems that allow these comments to be captured
• See if you can work out how many other customers this might be affecting
• Have a system that allows you to work out what the impact is on your bottom line - this will either help you to prioritize next steps or present a convincing case to your boss if larger steps need to be taken
• Use your Research RADAR to ensure that the problem has been solved – if you are still seeing it occurring, then it hasn’t been fixed. If you don’t look to see whether it is still occurring, then you won’t know whether it has been fixed or not.

As an aside, the company this post is about stated that anything written about them had to be passed through their PR department. I think this approach is a little heavy handed and not one I’m happy to participate in. I also sensed that their heavy handedness might continue had I gone down the compliant route and, frankly, that’s not what this blog is about. Which is a pity because I think they have a great story to tell but I’m afraid they will remain anonymous is in this instance.

Thoughts from the San Francisco eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

With my jet lag subsiding a little and my brain still buzzing with ideas overload, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights that I took out of last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s foremost gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.

This was the year that qualitative research came to the San Francisco conference - a clear signal that businesses are beginning to try and understand the hearts and minds of their customers as they optimize their online channel, as well as their click tracks.

For me, this was an exciting and overdue development, as I think it signals that the online sector is maturing to the point that it is starting to look at 360 degree view of the customer experience - and the business implications of this.

Tom Davenport, the conference’s first keynote speaker and author of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” , demonstrated how the highest performing enterprises are building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights. He cited the travel and leisure examples of Marriott and Harrah’s Casinos who are using analytics, data modelling and deep research to identify their most profitable customers, build innovative pricing models, manage customer experience and identify the true drivers of financial performance.

And as conference chair Jim Sterne explained in his wrap up, we’re passing the point of having to persuade the leading businesses why to measure their effectiveness online, because these firms are now using analytics more smartly than ever before and are “looking over the horizon at real competitive advantage”.

My top three picks

My top three practical insights from eMetrics were all qualitative in flavour and all different, but obtainable, examples of how so companies are tackling those fuzzy questions of “Why?” and “How do people think/feel..?”

1. Jakob Nielsen, paying attention to user behaviour in the moment

It was terrific to finally see usability guru Jakob Nielsen speak. I’m a great fan of his articles (you can read more at useit.com) and he inspired the user research approach we use in Highland Business Research (as described in this earlier Tracking Tourism post).

In his presentation Jakob made great use of video of accompanied surfs/user testing interviews to demonstrate the frustration and confusion people encounter as they negotiate their way through websites. He highlighted the importance when conducting user research of paying more attention to what visitors are doing, than what they’re saying - as users missed error messages, failed to find key information and physically recoiled from unexpected music and unskippable videos.

He made the observation that people may think they’ve successfully completed their task, even when they’ve failed (for example, by paying the wrong bill, failing to complete a transaction, missing an error message) - which is why seeing people’s behaviour in the moment has more practical value than self-reported data.

Another critical point from his presentation was the important of starting your visitor insight/user testing process with no preconceptions about the nature of the problems - because “the thing where people think the problem is, is often not where it is at all”. Instead of diving into what you think the problem is, simply get users to undertake the top five tasks on your site.

Just how relevant is this to travel and tourism businesses? Personally, if I could only do one type of online research with clients websites, I’d choose these accompanied surfs that Jakob demonstrated in his videos. The following quote is an excerpt from a research session in which a user booked a flight using his preferred airline, then some competitor sites - I hope you see what I mean:

“Southwest airlines? Best website ever. Other airlines just don’t get it…I quit taking other flights from other airlines because these guys get it right.
[Goes to another airline site]
Do I want to choose on price, flexible dates, schedule? They can just $*!*? off with that… They want to know where San Diego is? That’s just $*!*?… There are too many choices, I haven’t used this airlines site in years but it is still remarkably poor - who has the time for that? I won’t fly this airline, its web site is junk!”

Jakob’s presentation was packed with clear evidence that people aren’t going to work round a bad website, they’re simply going to take their business elsewhere!

2. Ebay, making themselves at home in your home

Elissa Darnell, Director of User Experience Research at ebay, did a great presentation on how they use a blend of offline and online research techniques to go back to the basics of who the user is, what they do and how ebay can deliver them the best possible experience.

Elissa talked in depth about a number of the techniques they use to get closer to customers and optimize their site experience accordingly, but I’ll just highlight two:

Follow homes - just like some offline firms have done for years, ebay are following their customers into their homes to observe them using the site in their normal way and in their normal environment (with all the distractions that come with that). Using a video camera and taking notes, they gain valuable directional, qualitative information that they can combine with their number based information sources.

Its not just the research team that take part, staff from right across the company - from CFO & CEO to developers and service reps - are taken into their customer’s own context, to learn for themselves that critical lesson of “we are not our customer.” The insights they glean from this regular follow home process means they learn things about their user’s needs and behaviours that they would not otherwise even think to ask about. They also gain direction on where they made need to focus further testing and development.

Cheap paper based user testing - before pages are even developed, ebay conduct quick and dirty user testing based on rough paper mock-ups of what the page might be like. The tester is asked to use their finger as the mouse and indicate where they might go on the page and what information they might expect to find as a result.

They can quickly go through rapid generations of the paper tests, quickly and cheaply, before ever spending money on software engineering. Jakob Nielson described the cost savings of this approach as being around 100 times cheaper than testing actual pages. So clearly ebay are using tactical pre-development testing make sure they get maximum user focus for their money.

3. Pay Pal, quantifying the qualitative

Pay Pal, the online payments provider, receives thousands of open comments each week from its user feedback pages. More than one person can manually react to and keep in their head at any time.

So their challenge (one I think many tourism businesses can relate to) is how do you quantify and semi-automate the process of analysing these open comments, so that you wring maximum value out of the feedback?

Step one, is they have applied a Google search engine tool to the data and made it available to internal staff to search through as they wish. This means that managers can at least get an overview of what is being said about specific interests (and in what volume) on a regular basis. The advantage is no training burden and no resourcing of the data analysis.

Step two, they have also semi-automated the process of categorising their comments, by bundling like comment types (through an in-house natural n-gram language statistical process). Once bundled into like themes (without needing to pre-develop a naming structure) they can get the comments out to all the right people to read, on a two weekly basis.

Step 3, now they are working out a system that automatically triggers alerts as new bundles of comment types emerge, or certain types of comments exceed their acceptable threshold.

It may sound complicated, but essentially with the help of a good statistician, they have built a simple system in-house that achieves most of their needs, but avoids using a highly expensive Meaning Based Computing system like Autonomy.

And finally…

As a final conference highlight (at least from my perspective!) - both Stephen & I were pleased to present at eMetrics this year (a kind of Highland Business Research double bill).

I was also honoured to be elected to join Web Analytics Association board of directors. So thank you very much to those WAA members that voted for me and I look forward to helping drive the organisation forward for the benefit of members and the web analytics industry worldwide.

Industry interview with Tina Fitch of EzRez

As we recently explored in this Travel 2.0 post, many of the recent online innovations driving Travel 2.0 have been demand led and consumer facing. The “killer-app” for the supply side, the thing that will improve the lives, productivity and profitability of travel and tourism businesses has seemed more elusive.

But as I have stated before that I see massive opportunity on the supply side of Travel 2.0 in delivering:

1) Joined up visitor data at a destination level (who is visiting, where do they go, what do they do, how does the whole consumption process look across a destination)

2) Cross sector/cross destination reservation analytics (ie supercharged benchmarking, predictive analytics and responsive pricing based on what is happening in the whole market, not just at the door of one attraction, hotel or destination).

Given that I’m currently in Silicon Valley, I’ve been catching up with leading travel technologists who are working to drive supply side value from Travel 2.0 technologies in these specific areas.

It was a great pleasure to catch up with Tina Fitch co-founder and CEO of EzRez Software to kick around some ideas and enjoy some fine San Francisco cuisine.

Tina leads a company which venture capitalists claim “is disrupting the online travel market through its next generation, web-based solution.”

EzRez is in essence providing a travel market place, supplying transactional services to a network of tourism businesses, along with deep analytics across that network that allow clients to get an end to end view of a visitor’s transactional behaviour.

Its software solutions include a plug-and-play solution that enables a company to sell travel components online, plus they bring inventory providers and distributors together through a system that syncs with the existing infrastructures of both parties. They have also developed a powerful set of analysis tools that allow businesses to drive deeper understanding and metrics from their loyalty points and transactional/merchandising data - and these tools integrate with web analytics products such and Omniture and Google Analytics.

Tina and her team of developers, business data analysts and travel specialists see the value of what they can offer in terms of the power of viewing a visitors booking behaviour not simply in isolation, but across the multiple travel experience touchpoints - from booking flights and travel packages, to car hire and attractions.

Because regardless of what a visitor may say about their intent, travel plans or intended purchases or expenditure (if you can even get that information) - nothing gives a clearer picture of visitor activity than the associated purchase trail.

She has the tools, she has the transactional information - now as EzRez grows, particularly fuelled by success in the Latin American and Asian markets, Tina is demonstrating to the industry in true Travel 2.0 terms that joining up their visitor data will reap rewards for everyone.

Tina took the time to demonstrate why this is so important and what the challenges of joined up data have traditionally been for the travel industry:

Vicky: Do you think that so far the travel sector has been slow to embrace web analytics and online business intelligence, compared to say the e-commerce sectors?

Tina: We do feel it has been slow – but not for lack of interest or desire from the travel community, but due to the fragmentation and complexity of the systems that power travel.

We have observed companies who embrace the concept of web and transaction analytics, but have a difficult time weaving the two together. It involves the challenge of tying something like Omniture or Google Analytics to their reservation system, and potentially their CRM program. Many of these tools can play well together, but need technical expertise and analysis of each system to have them really hum.

Many technologies in travel developed originally as silos – some are large, like Sabre, some are extremely narrow, like a car hire company’s proprietary database – but regardless of size, they are limited by lack of a common interface, tracking tools, and definitions across the industry.

In any event, our experience in the market place is that nearly everyone is looking for an analytics solution to help drive their business forward. Understanding of not only one’s own business, but the local market, competitive set and overall network performance is critical to the success of any analytics program. Most importantly, data must lead to actionable steps to capitalize on the insight gained.

Vicky: Given that travel is a sector where many different businesses interact to deliver the visitor their end to end experience, do you think the industry has to start looking beyond its own “data island” in order to best understand visitor behaviour and boost ROI?

Tina: Travel companies are frustrated by lack of context to the data that they can collect on their own site – even if a company understands what their own conversion rates are, or what types of customer profiles are purchasing which destinations or inventory types, it can not see how that positions them in relation to the rest of their industry segment, geography or even online travel overall.

Travel companies can also have a difficult time understanding how their own customer interacts with other systems, products and services outside of their silo. This is because there are few common platforms that give visibility to performance across different verticals, different locations and product types.

Why is this important? Without measurement, there is no management of your business – and without context to more global measures of success, you are isolating yourself to limited benchmarks for performance.

Without understanding how your customer shops and books travel wherever they are, you can’t determine ways to get broader share of wallet from the customers who already shop with you. Industry-wide, or more granular sub-set analytics, will give you a lot more information that can feed into your pricing, merchandising, and marketing strategies.

While privacy will always be a consumer concern, those same consumers have come to expect that a system is intelligent enough to factor in their location, basic preferences and previous habits – even on a generic level – to deliver the most relevant results.

Vicky: Could you tell us a little about how EzRez has developed this cross-network approach?

Tina: We work with a whole range of companies - such as legacy airlines, global financial institutions and hotel chains as well as boutique resort operators, regional wholesalers and niche travel sites.

Our position as the booking, rules and transactional engine across these different verticals, markets and inventory sources allows our clients to leverage greater visibility across their own activity, but also allows them to understand how they are performing against the network as a whole.

This gives EzRez customers a new level of network transparency that enables them to see consumer and agent shopping and buying dynamics and trends more quickly. This, in turn, gives them the chance to have the right product in the right place at the right time – and at the right price. This can drive real revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Vicky: Is EzRez only relevant to the global players or are you also targeting the smaller businesses that represent the bulk of the industry in terms of providers?

Tina: We tend to focus on companies that have an existing, captive audience since they can best leverage the range of tools and products that we offer. Large companies absolutely need business intelligence tools to learn how they can move the needle on their revenues.

However, smaller companies gain by understanding untapped potential in the market, and using data to make strategic and metrics-driven decisions on where to focus their emerging business. So, we are also relevant to local players trying to capitalize on market conditions while learning from similar companies in other markets.

Vicky: How do you think travel and tourism businesses can stop using data to “look back” and start using it to make forward looking tactical and strategic decisions?

Tina: This is the really exciting part about network analytics - when you can apply historical and current activity to predict or influence future behavior.

Imagine if you, as a travel company, knew that even though many competitors traditionally offer packages from London to Istanbul in the month of March, you have started seeing increasing patterns of search and booking activity from that origin market into Dubrovnik? What if you could further target the opportunity by understanding what the average spend is in that destination, what rating level is most popular for hotels, and then offer an automated merchandising tool to not only preference that offering to people who come to your site, but also send that package proactively to an audience from that origination point?

What if you are an airline, and you have a system that logs click-through and purchase behaviour on specific hotels in your hotel engine based on city pairs searched, or even which day of week or fare class air bookings are made. You could take that intelligence and offer a cross-sell tool in your air booking path that immediately offers up the most popular hotels for that user profile automatically and capture higher conversion and share of wallet from the same consumer.

This type of application of business intelligence not only drives more revenue to the companies who leverage it, it engenders more loyalty by way of convenience to the consumers who shop with them.

This type of business intelligence is actually already possible to obtain if you are on a platform like EzRez, and we are seeing more and more companies participate and benefit from that type of tribal knowledge.

To conclude

Predictive analytics used to be the holy grail for sectors like online retail and financial services. But tools evolved that started to allow online sellers to show first adverts then actual product offers/combinations based on likely best performance, all driven by the analytics data. Companies like Amazon have massively increased upsell by investment in their recommendation engines - essentially by pioneering predictive analytics.

What is exciting, in my view, is to see this emerging in travel in the way that EzRez are driving it - which is across a network of travel and tourism businesses operating in different touch points of the same visitors experience. Analytics is therefore not occurring in isolation (never ideal for an industry where the purchase and consumption process is as fragmented and complex as travel).

As Tina describes it, network analytics means participation in and benefit from a type of tribal knowledge. Sounds a lot like supply side Travel 2.0 to me!

Before you start measuring your website you are in blissful ignorance.

You probably have the assumption that people come to your website through the front door of your homepage and that they look at things in an ordered manner that somehow relates to your navigation structure. They find the things they are looking for before doing exactly what they’re supposed to do (like book or enquire). Finally they leave fully satisfied, bookmarking you as they go for an easy return.

Once you start measuring your site - whether by web analytics, surveys, user testing or a combined approach - that happy illusion is shattered forever.

Chaos seems to rule. People enter the site all over the place, then leave in droves without seeming to do anything much at all. The deeper you look at the data, the more fleeting and varied that visitor activity seems to be.

Web analytics and user testing provide more information than you know what to do with, yet exactly the right bit still seems to be missing.

So how do you make sense of how people use your site - and what can you do about it?

First, forget everything you know about your site…

The navigation and linking structure, the fact that everything is explained on the homepage, those driving directions clearly given in the 34th paragraph. Your visitor knows none of this.

Things may make sense from the homepage but is perfectly possible that only a low proportion of visitors see the homepage anyway. (Believe me, I’ve seen businesses spending 80% of their effort optimising a page less than 25% of people even see. Meanwhile, visitors arrive from search engines into long forgotten, dusty corners of the site).

A first time visitor typically starts lost and often the experience just goes downhill from there.

So, when survey respondents tell you “I couldn’t find the…” they’re not lying, even if you know exactly where it is. Things are much less obvious when viewed for the first time and its critical to remember that when trying to make sense of how visitors behave. If you’re struggling, why not try some DIY user testing?

Second, know thyself…

Why do you exist? What is the website for and how does it relate to what your business is for?

This isn’t philosophising for the sake of it - when people use websites they are looking to solve problems and achieve goals.

What problems does your site exist to solve?

Think hard about what your different segments of visitor are trying to achieve when they come to your site. Given every visit starts with a problem or a goal, how good is your site at helping visitors achieve theirs? Understanding this context will be invaluable in making sense of how visitors use (or fail to use) your website.

Third, tame your tools…

Taming your tools means identifying your key questions and using your tools (from web analytics to surveys) to answer those questions. What tends to happen is that people let the tools lead them - so they find themselves measuring what the tools hand them (page views, visits etc) rather than what they really need to know.

Start with what you really want to know - think about your question different ways and break it down into smaller parts if you need to. Then look at the tools and data that you already have that may help you to answer those questions. That way, you don’t need to worry about all the information you have, you can just selective measure what really matters to you.

You can pick a few Key Performance Indicators and stick with them. Trends over time are far more important than absolute numbers and will start to give you insight into what is really going on.

But it is important to also tame your tools by understanding their potential and familiarising yourself with how they work. Making sense of how visitors behave doesn’t happen at the top level of information, it involves drilling down beyond the superficial -getting beyond page views, unique visitors and 1 to 5 satisfaction ratings.

If you only look at the front page of your Omniture or Google Analytics, or don’t filter or segment your SurveyMonkey data into subsections of responses - you’ll only being seeing a very superficial view of your visitors.

Four, do something, do anything…

The difference between good websites and bad ones is that someone is generally spending time and effort to continually improve good websites, whereas bad ones are left to stay bad, until some giant overhaul in the far away distance.

An ongoing series of small tweaks and fixes (measured of course, so you know their impact) has a bigger impact on revenues and visitor experience, than a once a decade overhaul!

Now some stuff to help you:

• Jakob Nielsen on 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities and the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

• For those of you who don’t glaze over and twitch when I sat web analytics, check out Context is King Baby: Go Get Your Own at Avinash’s blog
• Getting your Google Analytics right at the outset, from the official Google Analytics blog: How you start is as important as how you finish
• And from Steve at Blackbeats blog: Why KPIs can not come from the bottom up. Management should always participate to the KPI creation and Drilling down into Analytics data
• Making sense of other travel websites’ visitors, courtesy of the compete blog
• Last but definitely not least, Matt Belkin at Omniture has a couple of great posts about knowing thyself and tying your analytics to that. See Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics Part 1 and Part 2

Terms like Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 get thrown about in conversation and it can seem that everyone but you knows exactly what they mean.

Yet push someone for a definition and people come up with all sorts of different explanations or they struggle to define it all.

So this post attempts to give a simple working definition of Travel 2.0. But more importantly, we hope to highlight what that really means for travel and tourism businesses and why you need to care.

But given that no two people seem to agree on precisely what Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 actually mean, we’re doing the blog equivalent of a duet. We’ll both throw our thoughts in and to avoid making you dizzy, I’ll indicate which or us is proclaiming, so you know who to argue with at the end!

So, we need to pin down Web 2.0 before we tackle Travel 2.0 …. so Web 2.0 in no more than 20 words please:

Vicky: Community, interactivity, reciprocity, two-way marketing conversation, the long tail, create, modify, self-publish, user generated content, rich media, collaboration, see Wikipedia.

Stephen: Technically: blogs, RSS, flash media (no flash = no YouTube). Economically: (almost) zero cost to entry. Socially: critical mass of chatterers.

So where does Travel 2.0 fit in?

Vicky: Travel 2.0 is a term coined by our friends at PhoCusWright, as CEO Phillip C Wolf explains in this article:

“Travel 1.0 started around 1995; it was characterized by the shift from offline to online reservations and was dominated for a decade by three things: price, price and price.…. Travel 2.0, our industry’s collective fulfilment of Web 2.0, embodies how companies can differentiate themselves in a vast, dynamic space…. New travel researching and planning approaches are empowering consumers in unprecedented ways…. Travellers are keen to take control and find/create the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip.”

What I take from that is Travel 2.0 is moving on to be more personalized, customer centric and experience centric. At the same time user communities and online tools have evolved for the traveller themselves to share experiences, to help search and define what it really is they are looking for and to pre-experience this though levels of multimedia content before they even make a purchase decision.

Stephen: I think it’s no coincidence that this is occurring in a period of sustained prosperity unparalleled in my lifetime. Put simply, western people have the time and money to be choosy about where they go and what they do. But people always need information in order to spend wisely and Travel 2.0 has effectively been about the vastly improved information flow to people making important investment decisions.

I have this notion though that it might be useful to speak of ‘Tourism 2.0‘ in describing the (consumer) demand-side experience and ‘Travel 2.0′ when speaking of the supply-side reaction to this, although I appreciate that they must meet in the middle!

Is it just jargon or does it represent a change in consumer behaviour?

Vicky: Yes and yes. It is jargon and that can be a barrier to understanding, but it does represent a real technology-enabled shift in consumer behaviour.

It is simply now easier, more satisfying and a richer experience for travellers to interact with other and share online – be that through video, images, reviews or other forms of exchange. Online social interaction lends itself so well to travel (the anticipation, the actual experience, the reminiscences). And the technology has evolved to allow interconnectivity and aggregation of services/content from many sites meaning that the research, anticipation and purchase have become far more fluid and closely aligned.

What it isn’t about is simply a bunch of tools, those of course these play an important part. (And for Travel 2.0 tools galore visit the Web 2.0 Travel Tools blog).

Stephen: Undoubtedly jargon. Some aspects do represent a change in customer behaviour (checking out peer reviews of destinations being a case in point) but other aspects are old impulses in new clothes (Flickr is the modern equivalent of showing off your holiday snaps…but only to people who are interested!). Ultimately, though, I think it is about increasing ease of access, whether that be to information, booking or new experiences.

Why should travel and tourism businesses care?

Vicky: Because its not just teenagers, geeks and weirdos or the “more advanced” North American market in this space – it is your customers, young and old, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. This is where they’re dreaming, planning, buying and reviewing. Sometimes a little edge by participation early on delivers a big advantage, where as getting left behind can leave you dead in the water.

Stephen: Well, if you don’t understand the role of review communities or metasearch for example (price comparison sites like Kayak.com who aggregate price data) then you don’t understand where customers are going to research their travel plans and what is motivating them to do that. That makes it harder to deliver the right message at the right time.

Do businesses need to do anything different?

Vicky: For me Travel 2.0 is also about recognising a shift in the marketing process and “control” of the marketing messaging.

From TV watching to travel brochures, media channels have become fragmented to the extent that the 1% response rate you could once hope to achieve with certain types of marketing/advertising, simply doesn’t deliver the volume of respondents it once did. The one to many model of mass marketing is being replaced by the one to few or even one to one model embodied by The Long Tail.

The old cliche used to be “people who have a bad experience with a service tend to tell 6 to 10 people, but those having good experiences only tell 1 or 2 people”. Word of mouth was generally limited to how many people one person actually came into physical contact with. I don’t think that stands up any more. People have any kind of travel experience, great or terrible, they tell Tripadvisor, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the blogosphere – they tell their online community.

As people are no longer limited to only telling or consulting the opinions of people they know in the real world, word of mouth has become super-charged and powerful. Your marketing, PR and advertising efforts are not the only thing shaping your reputation. As this post explains, You Don’t Own Your Brand - Your Customer Does. So, personally, I don’t think doing things the same old way is an option any longer, because technology has led customers to dictate a shift in the terms of the conversation.

Stephen: Businesses do need to behave differently but how they behave depends on a number of factors.

A small business (a bed and breakfast for example) needs to be smarter about how they are perceived in the world. Previously, they just needed to concentrate on product and manage their reputation that way but now they have a potentially global audience watching them…and they need to know how to react to that constructively if things go wrong.

Being of a more conservative disposition, I am not sure how much ‘own brand’ social networking in its current form is merely a fad or how much it will be integral to business in the future. I can imagine that things like Facebook will have their place but I’m not sure, for example, that a Hotel Chain own-brand social network really adds any value. Same goes for most attempts (not all) at corporate presences in Second Life.

But the bottom line is that these companies need to make travel easier for their customers - whether that’s at the research, booking, or experience stages.

Who are you Travel 2.0 heroes? Which companies are getting it right?

Vicky: I’m a self-confessed Tripadvisor addict, I also use Flickr for travel research and love sites that pull in Flickr images or permit users to upload their own. Community of Sweden from Visit Sweden are VirtualMalaysia are good for that. In terms of flights, I’m increasingly using metasearch site Kayak. If it was a destination I don’t know, I might consult a site like TripWiser or TravBuddy.

Stephen: I also like Kayak. At a local level I like Bob’s Blog because it is a great example of how a business should be working a blog.

Mmmm, I’m not sure how much harmony there was in that duet, but isn’t that Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 all over?

What do you think? Should there be a distinction between Travel 2.0 and Tourism 2.0? Who are your Travel 2.0 heroes? Am I deluded in thinking this represents a shift in consumer behaviour?

Update - you may also be interested in these Travel 2.0 posts from Tracking Tourism:

Travel 2.0 - the data, impacts and business implications

Striking a Travel 2.0 balance - how much time should a business commit?

How can you convey the real feel of a place online?

Over the last few weeks of conducting web research with real site visitors, I have been reminded that while facts are important online, decisions are made with the heart.

While exploring a series of sites, the users consistently told me “it doesn’t give me a feel of the place”, “its better on facts than feelings”, “I don’t really connect with it emotionally” and “I want to be able to imagine what it is really like”.

Anticipation, imagination, emotional connections - isn’t that a pretty tall order for a humble website?

Not really - after all, we’re talking travel, not concrete, enemas or animal feed.

The Internet is full of travellers already sharing their experiences and feelings about tourism destinations and businesses. Tapping into that (or simply learning from their vocabulary and examples) will help you ensure visitors can’t help but feel their hearts flutter!

So how can you inject a bit of soul and feeling into you site? Here’s a bit of insight I can share from my recent research - and I again thank the participants for their forthrightness!

1. “Show me, don’t make me read”

100 useful words and one useless yellow button and what do you think gets all the attention? People will read when they’re ready, but it is only one way to make an impression and a fairly considered one at that. Irrational excitement and anticipation comes from engaging several senses and igniting imagination. The users I was working with said “show me,” and who could argue that this display of the Northern Lights is better watched than read.

And the same could apply to “let me listen.” (Check out this evocative audio of waves breaking on Pebble Beach, Victoria, Canada and tell me you aren’t moved just a little?)

Text isn’t the only option online and potential travellers want their senses tickled!

2. Using images and multimedia

“TVtrip films your hotel (for free!) and your hotel is then featured on TVtrip.com… You also receive a copy of the video to use on your own website, again for free.”

So tickling senses is all very well, but video, audio, high quality images - that all sounds jolly expensive. And it is true that should you wish, you can quickly blow your annual budget by making stuff look really, really pretty.

But it doesn’t just have to be your content that you use. Before you call the police, I’m not suggesting you steal anything or use any content without permission. Because the fact is your visitors, people in you area, friends and strangers are taking all photos, making videos and uploading them to the web. Flickr and Youtube are some of the most visited properties on the web. You can choose to link to that content, or you can go further and either ask if you can access the content for your site, or invite people to submit it to you directly.

There are also companies like TVTrip who will produce cheap or free multimedia content for you. They make their money on the usual affiliate model, happy in the knowledge that multimedia content has a great uplift on hotel bookings. You can (but of course) see their explanatory video here.

3. Testimony - don’t just take my word for it

I’ve already written about why you shouldn’t be afraid of Tripadvisor and should be brave enough to share your user reviews direct with potential customers. But if that is simply a leap too far, you can still tap into the power of realistic, authentic testimonials.

The wise and delightful Sean de Souza has a great article called Is There Too Much Sugar In Your Testimonials? There’s a danger of on-site testimonials seeming phoney, but a sprinkle of realism and some photos for a personal touch make them far more credible. But nothing beats unbiased, off-site comments - and you can always link direct when you earn these. ExtramileScotland is a great example.

4. Ground the place in relative terms

“So where is it then?… Where is it near?… Where in relation to London?” Pretty obvious questions when you think about it, but you can really convey a sense of place when you ground yourself relative to a better known or more evocative destinations. Not only does this improve your search engine rankings, it allows potential visitors to make a mental map of where you fit in to the wider context of their travels.

5. Cater for multiple perspectives

People like pictures of people like them.

Hence me including this entirely gratuitous photo of travel bloggers.

But what is familiar, engaging and reassuring to some (like white water rafting or travel blogging) is dreary or downright off putting to others.

To build emotional connections for different segments in your target market, it is important to carefully choose a range of people focussed images that broadly reflects these different groups, their interests and tastes. You can probably narrow your key market segments down to between 4 and 7 groups, so there’s no need to go picture crazy.

Are your senses tickled yet?

Hopefully I’ve conveyed to you that web visitors are open to sensory stimulation on multiple levels. And when they find it, the results are typically greater emotional engagement and increased likelihood to buy.

Sadly I failed in my quest to tingle all your main senses, so if anyone knows of a smelly or edible website, please let me know!

We tend to assume that other people think the same as we do. That they see things the same, even use the Internet the same.

There’s a wonderfully simple way of challenging that idea. And that is to watch (quietly!) as other people use your website. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

I’ve spent much of the last week travelling to people’s homes and offices, observing as they use a specific website to try and achieve certain tasks. I’ve been researching what information is important to people as they explore the site, where they look for this information, the weaknesses of the site and the problems visitors have in achieving their tasks.

And even though I’ve done this kind of research many times, it still fascinates me how different people undertake the same online tasks in such different ways.

It is even more illuminating to discover how even well planned, well tended websites can still completely confound the typical visitor on a mission. You quickly discover that what is obvious to me may not be obvious to you (and vice versa).

Often I work with survey data, web analytics data and online search trends, trying to figure out what it was that the visitor was up to. But when you’re sitting in the home of a real potential customer, the realities of the problems people experience as they use a sit