Customers Really Matter or do they?

What is it about customer relationship marketing that turns people off?

If you invited a load of people to a conference on social networking the room would be packed with delegates expecting pearls of wisdom from twentysomething year olds.

Conversely, if you decide to host a CRM event you attract some really articulate top level speakers ready to impart valuable case studies on consumer retention but delegates are likely to be thin on the ground.

And, so it was at the Travel Technology Initiative's spring conference earlier this week.

The room was fortunate enough to hear from Virgin Holidays general manager of CRM Helen Litvak on customer segmentation; Avis' Xavier Vallee on the blog and Peter Matthews from Nucleus on online techniques to foster loyalty (more on all that later).

CRM might not be perceived as sexy but there's a lot of people out there in travel talking about it behind closed doors at the moment. It goes hand in hand with customisation and personalisation which are both being hotly tipped to be the next big development in online travel.

Maybe it's just those words and we should simply call it something else - 'look after your customers or you'll go out of business', - not very catchy!

How about Customers Really Matter? Anyone got any better suggestions?

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Private tech firms led by HolidayRoomsDirect

Nice bit of coverage in the national press for one of the lesser-known online travel agencies in the UK: HolidayRoomsDirect.com.

The Doncaster-based agency is now - according to The Sunday Times - the fastest growing private technology firm in the UK.

The company achieved a whopping 514% growth in sales between 2005 and 2006.

Other interesting companies on the list [full PDF on the top 100] include G3 (provider of a reservation system for Center Parcs), Masternaut (British Airways cargo software developer) and Nucleus (web design and consultancy - managing director Peter Matthews is one of our regular columnists).

Price comparison site (or "online travel directory") Cheapflights also features, in 64th place, after securing growth of 71% during 2006 and sales of £12.3 million. Amazingly, Soskin and co have appeared in the list for four years in row.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: cheapflights times technology company

Travolution@WTM-The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Country western queen Dolly Parton once declared, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”.

Unfortunately, there are a number of travel web sites that can make the same claim, according to Peter Matthews, managing director, Nucleus.

Speaking during the Travolution conference at World Travel Market, Matthews explained that while design—be it for furniture, clothes or a travel website--was once a privilege of the few, today a good design does not have to cost anymore than a bad one.

The “democratisation of design”, as Matthews referred to this concept, is key to understanding what motivates consumers to buy one product over another, or, in the case of online travel, book a trip on one site versus a competitor site offering similar inventory.

Visitors who stay on a site for less than 15 seconds or who view only one page are commonly referred to as “bouncers”, according to Matthews.

This is a big problem for a lot of sites, including those which invest in what they think are sharp designs.

“If users don’t find what they are looking for instantly, or if the site is slow to load, they bounce. You are now in the business of instant gratification and a site's design is a compelling part of the user experience.”

A well designed site, said Matthews, will look beyond the Home Page and think about how to enter visitors at a deeper level and cut out the number clicks needed to escort them to the booking stage.

"If you are paying a fortune to Google to get people to your site, only to have them bounce once they get there, you are wasting a lot of money", said Matthews.

And here you thought Dolly Parton had nothing in common with online travel.

Tricia Holly Davis
Freelance Journalist