Wednesday, 24th December, 2008
Travel research reasons for good cheer - 24th December, 2008
Travel and tourism research highlights - What have we learned in 2008?
It’s Christmas. Time for peace and goodwill. Hope and joy.

So lets put travel sector doom and gloom aside for a moment. There’s cheer to be found in reviewing our knowledge nugget collection! All those things that have been learned about digital tourism and online travel trends that we didn’t know this time last year.
With the help of all those smart analysts and researchers out there, I am determined to deliver you some hope and joy in the form of information, insight and illumination.
Here are my four travel and tourism research picks from 2008 - and it is not all bad news.
1) Hitwise reports that the Economic downturn is benefiting budget Travel and Cruise companies. They explain:
UK Internet traffic to travel websites fell by 4.6% between September 2007 and September 2008, but certain sectors are thriving despite, or in some cases because of, the squeeze on household budgets.
UK Internet visits to budget travel providers, such as EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge, increased by 5.3% between September 2007 and September 2008, while the websites of Cruise companies experienced an 8.2% increase in traffic over the same period.
In the same report, they make another interesting and useful observation. Internet users aged 55+ have continued to flood online and are now the largest group of visitors to travel sector websites:
Internet users aged 55+ now account for 27.3% of UK Internet visitors to Travel websites, making them the largest group of visitors to the industry. The over 45s are the fastest growing demographic for Travel websites, and their tastes are different from younger Internet users. They are more likely to book through agencies than go directly to airline or hotel websites……the section of the online travel industry that most over-indexes with older Internet users is Cruises. Almost 60% of visitors to Cruise websites are aged 55+, with a further 16% coming from the 45-54 age group.
Doesn’t that bring you some hope and joy? Your online activities need not, must not be regarded as a niche sideline. Online travel content consumpion is now mainstream to market segments of all ages and all distribution preferences - for research, direct booking and booking via agents.
2) Despite the disatisfaction consumers have expressed with some travel sites (just last year Forsee reported that the online users were more satisfied with tax than airline websites) it is not all bad news.
JupiterResearch has found that the majority of online travelers believe researching travel online is easier now than ever before, with user-generated content now more influential on the choice of accommodation than brand among online accommodation researchers.
In their US Online Travel Consumer Survey, 2008 (reported in more depth in this Tracking Tourism post) Jupiter found that:
“the 42 percent of online travelers using user-generated content consider the opinions of other travelers to be highly trusted and influential in both accommodation and destination choices”.
For those using user generated content, reviews/ratings from other travellers were a major influence in the decision making process (after price and location). 36% named user generated content as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation.
While specific sites, social networks and communities may rise and wane in popularity, the role of reviews and ratings and “real user” validation seems here to stay for the tourism and travel sector.
3) Comscore reported that “mobile search is gaining in both popularity and frequency of use in the U.S. and Western Europe” with the implication that a much heralded shift in behaviour is finally underway, with associated opportunities for those able to capitalise on it.
comScore M:Metrics reported that “in June 2008, 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers accessed search during the month, an increase of 68 and 38 percent from June 2007, respectively. The U.K. had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search at 9.5 percent, followed closely by the U.S. at 9.2 percent.”
Their analyst, Alistair Hill clarified the relevance of theis, explaining:
“It is interesting to note that as we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing….. The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 and 63 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans.”
As we reported in Tracking Tourism, consumer behaviour is changing and tourism businesses can no longer assume that no one visits their site by phone (or Wii or TV for that matter). With shifting behaviour comes opportunity for those ready to adapt.
4) PhoCusWright did some much needed myth debunking in The Consumer Travel Trends Tenth Edition. Not only did they show that the number of online travel buyers was not declining, they also showed that all is not lost for online travel agencies.
The assumption that it is only supplier sites that benefits from online travel shoppers, or that people preferring agents are flooding offline, is challenged by their research, which shows that online travel agencies are making a comeback in terms of popularity.
Read more of their myth busting here.
So, its not all doom and gloom. There is hope. There is opportunity.
On that note, seasons greetings and a happy new year from Stephen and Vicky at Tracking Tourism.
Post by Vicky



















Let’s demonstrate this by taking our example above and adding a few more sites - visitbritain.com and visitsweden.com. It should now look like
So what’s this saying? It’s saying that, in this instance, people in Germany have show a greater propensity to visit the visitscotland.com site at a different time to the visitsweden site. That might be on account of a campaign by visitscotland in Germany…or it might just show a different ‘natural’ search pattern (and I’ll show you in a coming post how you can go about finding that out). If we assume on this occasion that German’s simply are more interested in visitscotland.com at the periods suggested, wouldn’t it make sense to have the website ready to react to this niche interest at the time? The data suggests that it might be wrong to assume that people think of destinations in a uniform way and that you need to be ready to respond to the customer when they actually come calling, not when you think they ought to be calling.




But how do you discover what people’s prejudices are and, more importantly, how can you change them?



