Tuesday, June 19, 2007

...meanwhile, over at Thomson

Thomas Cook Group arch rival Thomson - soon to be TUI Travel, once its proposed merger with First Choice kicks in - held a press conference in London this morning to unveil its annual Online Booking Report.

Some scene-stealing stats were rolled out by its new media director, Graham Donoghue:

  • 60% of passengers are now booked online
  • Hitwise data shows it is the second most visited site in the UK during 2007 - behind Expedia, ahead of Lastminute.com
  • Running 1 million keywords on Google [someone said a few months it wanted 3 million, but Google advised against it]
  • 500,000 videos viewed every week
A PDF from the press conference and 22MB Powerpoint presentation are available. [Travel Weekly story]

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor has spent far less time negotiating with Thomson than it has with sister company Expedia, over a deal to share user generated reviews. It took around ten weeks for the pair to come to an agreement and TripAdvisor reviews on Thomson.co.uk will be seen from September this year.

By the time TripAdvisor reviews are made available on the Expedia UK website, at least 18 months will have passed since the online travel agency publicly said it wanted to run user generated content from TripAdvisor on its site.

We're reminded of the phrase: You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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