Goodbye Zoom, hello BA

Hitwise were quick of fthe mark this morning, sending out data to hacks which shows the main beneficiaries of Zoom's collapse, in terms of web traffic.

Following the announcement yesterday, Flyzoom.com became the eighth most visited airline website in the UK for a short while - ironically, the first time it had reached such lofty heights in its history.

Meanwhile, Hitwise data shows that British Airways has been the number one site passengers and other curious visitors have gone to after reading the messages on the Zoom homepage.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hitwise on Google's Trademark Changes

Hitwise has monitored paid search activity since Google changed its trademark policy in the first week of May (full report here).

In the first four weeks after the change, 11.2% of search traffic that the top 100 online brands received from their top brand term came via a paid listing on a search engine - compared to 9.2% before the change (up 22%).

The travel sector in particular has been one of the worst affected with travel brands increasing their paid brand search rate from 18.4% to 26.6% - the largest of any sector.

The bottom line is that while brand owners' websites have not been losing traffic they've been paying more to keep it front of mind with consumers.

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Perspective again please

Plenty and rather mixed coverage around the web today regarding the second anniversary edition of the Hitwise-IMRG Hotshops list.

The quarterly report of the top 50 UK online retailers is a handy benchmark of whose flying or dying in the online world, albeit from a share of overall web traffic rather than individual performance.

So what did the May 2008 report reveal, compared to that of May 2006?

There are currently eleven travel brands amongst the top 50 – a list topped unsurprisingly every quarter since it began by Amazon.co.uk.

TravelMole led with how Thomson Holidays is creeping up on easyJet as the most popular travel brand in the UK, while E-Tid said ‘Travel companies lose web presence’. [both require registration]

The report indicated that almost all the leading travel brands – with the exception of Thomson – had seen in a decline in position since the report began two years ago:

EasyJet – 8 to 10
Expedia – 7 to 12
Ryanair – 9 to 14
Lastminute.com – 12 to 17
BA – 11 to 19
Thomas Cook – 18 to 25
First Choice – 20 to 29

Quite a number of travel brands have dropped off the list:

MyTravel (for obvious reasons)
BMIBaby
XL.com
FlyBe
Jet2
InterContinental Hotels
Monarch Airlines
Opodo

The only newcomer in travel:

TravelRepublic

The apparent slump in the performance of travel websites led the Financial Times to headline with ‘Airlines lose web customers’. Lose?

What the FT failed to do is explain in detail why this has happened.

A call to Hitwise’s Robin Goad, co-author of the list, confirms the obvious: travel was an early adopter of e-commerce and consumers, likewise, felt comfortable with booking via the web, thus why so travel sites commanded a large share of the top 50.

In the past two years, however, other retailers have emerged – some traditional offliners, others created to service existing markets but purely online – and have attracted new users.

So while growth in online travel bookings may be slowing compared to other industry verticals, it is by no means declining.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: hitwise IMRG hotshops retail

The hotel company that never sleeps

So, here's Travelodge's new website. We had the exclusive story earlier this week

The (big) budget brand has invested £1 million in the service which now has Google Maps, destination information on the places where it has hotels and a facility, through Keith Prowse, to book theatre tickets and other events.

Why, you ask? The company gets 87% of its bookings via the channel and has been ranked number one by Hitwise for the travel and destination sector for the past two quarters. They also get 500,000 visitors a week to the site.

COO Guy Parsons says it's about not being complacent, giving consumers technology they use every day and erm, oh yes, nearly forgot, because they're opening another 4,000 rooms this year and similar numbers in the next couple of years.

The momentum is clearly there but with such aggressive growth plans it needs to stay there too!

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

All inclusive holidays popular in a weak economy

Guest blog post from Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise UK:

The combination of a weakening economy, falling house prices and a rising cost of living thanks to inflation mean that many British consumers are looking for ways to cut their expenditure.

Add in the impact of a strong Euro (although not Dollar), and it seems likely that one area facing a cutback in consumer spending will be travel. One interesting trend we have noticed which indicates that this may be the case is an increase in searches for ‘all inclusive holidays’.

As you can see from that chart below, the amount of traffic that travel websites are receiving from this price-sensitive / budget-conscious search term has increased by 24% compared with last year.

The table below illustrates the top 10 search terms containing the phrase ‘all inclusive holidays’, and it is noticeable that people searching for such packages are more concerned with the 'all inclusive' element than with where they want to actually go.

Six of the top 10 search terms don’t mention a location at all, whereas - by way of comparison - nine of the top 10 searches containing the term ‘cheap flights’ over the same period include a destination.

Another thing that jumps out is the low success rate for the term ‘all inclusive family holidays’. Almost two fifths of people searching for this term don’t find a relevant result in a search engine that they a happy to click through to, highlighting a potentially lucrative area for SEO or paid search activity.

As you can see, the people currently looking for location specific all inclusive deals are choosing warmer sunshine destinations around the Mediterranean and Red Sea: Spain, Egypt, and Turkey.

This leads me on to another hypothesis: as money is tight and the strong Euro means that European destinations are becoming more expensive, will we see a decline in travel to Europe and bumper year for domestic tourism?

Throw in 10 days of lovely sunny weather, and it seems likely that UK holiday bookings will be up this year.

Not so fast. I heard a representative from TUI (which owns Thomson Holidays) on the Today programme the other morning claiming that overseas bookings from the UK were up - and the company’s financial release bears this out.

Back to the Hitwise data and the news also isn’t great. As you can see from the chart below, the amount of traffic that searches for both ‘uk holidays’ and ‘british holidays’ send to travel websites is on the decline.

Maybe a few more weeks of good weather and some first hand experience of the strong Euro will help reverse this trend?

We’ll keep and eye on this and report back with any changes.

Robin Goad, research director, Hitwise UK

Read more of Goad's posts

Finding transparency in search

There’s a big difference between talking about ‘ improved conversion rates’ in a press release and using the same phrase in a regulatory filing. So when moneysupermarket group plc tells the London Stock Exchange that its travel vertical has improved revenue per visitor as well as revenue per transaction in 2007, the OTAs need to look at numbers as closely as travelsupermarket’s direct competitors.

Travelsupermarket.com’s 2007 numbers show big increases across its metrical board;

• visitors 37m (06: 19.7m)
• transactions 30.6m (06: 17.2m)
• click-based revenues £13.6m (06: £6.8m)
• total revenues £15m (06: £7.5m)
• revenue per visitor £0.41 (06: £0.34)
• revenue per transaction £0.43 (06: £0.40)

Looks like the millions of pounds put into TV advertising is working then! Analysts were shown a slide based on a ‘custom defined Hitwise report’ which ranked travelsupermarket as the UK’s most visited travel comparison web site in January – the key month for bookings in the UK.

So travelsupermarket.com seems in quite good shape for its new MD. Travolution Towers has learnt that there is a shortlist of three – former travel supremo Chris Nixon is overseeing the hunt and said he wanted someone with international experience at senior level. Travel or search experience – watch this space.

And what about the travel search generally? Kayak’s takeover of Sidestep at the back-end of last year showed the sector has legs when commentator such as Henry Harteveldt at Forrester pointed out that, in the US at least, travel search's market share was holding steady at 12-15% of the online travel sector.

Kayak.com had 5.72% of the UK market in Jan08, according to travelsupermarket’s Hitwise report. Sidestep, bless, had 0.94%. Kayak remember raised $196m as part of the SideStep takeover: Mobissimo is lurking with its revamped intuitive and customisable engine. SkyScanner – 11.34% of the UK market in Jan - picked up some funding of its own in November.

And with the market leader in Europe’s biggest online travel market confirming improved conversion rates and hikes in visitors and revenue per visitor, 2008 could be the year when travel search finds itself.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Blog Action Day - Online carbon offsetting

Travolution is pleased to be taking part in the first Blog Action Day - a scheme backed by the likes of Reddit and Google to draw together blog posts around the world on a single day under one banner: highlighing green issues.

For our post I've decided to look at how much the top travel websites in the UK promote their own green agenda from the homepage and/or if they use carbon offsetting through the booking process.

The top five online travel properties, based on the IMRG-Hitwise HotShops list for August, were selected for the task.

Thomson Holidays
"Greener Travel" information is available for users (but is the second to last item on the left-hand navigation. No passenger online offsetting programme (except with specialist operator Crystal Holidays)

Expedia
No links from the homepage to any environment-based content. No apparent offsetting programme (US Expedia site does use Terrapass system).

EasyJet
"Fly Greener" tab is the first featured on the site's horizontal navigation. No self-offsetting function available - EasyJet does it automatically.

Lastminute.com
Information about the Carbonwise scheme can be obtained via a link from the homepage - right-hand navigation, two-thirds of the page down. Users can offset during the booking.

Ryanair
Environmental policy set out in About Us section from the homepage. No self-offsetting programme for customers.

The moral of the story here is this: don't rely on travel companies to do any carbon offsetting.

Generally speaking some allow customers to do it; some will do it on their behalf; others don't give much credence to offsetting whatsoever.

Climate Care is a good, independent offsetting site.

Further details and a list of all the participcants are available on the Blog Action Day website.

Other travel-related bloggers taking part:

• Travel Rants
• Musings

If you've written a post, let us know via the comments section below and we'll run it here.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: green environment blog action day

Travel Survey Day #2

Another one: Travel websites represent 14 of the Top 50 retail websites in the UK, according to the IMRG/Hitwise Hot Shops survey for May 2007.

Leading the field are Amazon.co.uk, Tesco.com, Argos, Play.com and Amazon.com in the top 5 positions.

But positions six to ten are dominated by travel brands:

Expedia.co.uk (6)
EasyJet (8)
Ryanair (9)
BA.com (10)

Elsewhere in the Top 50:

Thomson Holidays (11)
Lastminute.com (15)
First Choice (20)
Thomas Cook (25)
MyTravel (27)
ThomsonFly.com (28)
Travelodge (30)
BMIBaby (33)
FlyBe.com (37)
Jet2.com (39)

Remarkably only two travel brands have lost their position in the Top 50 since the survey started in May 2006:

XL.com and Opodo.

No sign of Ebookers since the survey started.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: web traffic hitwise shopping retail

Move aside...Silver Surfers are coming

Interesting press release knocking about today about how Silver Surfers are likely to be the largest single block of internet users in the very near future.

Hitwise has found that the 55+ group now account for 22% of UK visits to all categories of websites, ahead of 35 to 44 year olds, who command a 23.5% share.

It is actually the growth figure that is probably the most interesting. Up 54% on the same period - four weeks to 12 May - in 2005, up 46% on last year.

And, unsuprisingly, one of the key cateogories they are heading towards is travel - cruise especially.

In fact, cruise websites received almost half (48%) of their traffic from the over-55s in four weeks to 12 May.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

It's an age of networks

...as Antony Mayfield, social media expert from Spannerworks, often says in his presentations.

Anyway, thanks to Heather Hopkins at Hitwise for sending over a link to this handy online gizmo.

TouchGraph is a web-based system that allows website owners to explore a visual representation of the network of links between them and other websites, based on Google's database of related sites.

Here is the Travolution Blog on TouchGraph:

It's actually quite a handy exercise to check out which travel brands are linked to others via the web.

Oh, and it's free...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Who gets their traffic from PPC?

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise has turned up some interesting data revealing how much traffic the top ten travel websites bring in from sponsored links in search engines.

The diagram below – from the week ending 21 October – indicates how much traffic the ten receive from search engines (horizontal) against how many of those same visits come in via pay-per-click ads.
The first site to stand out is price comparison offering Cheapflights, which brings in around 55% of its overall traffic via search engines, but only around a third is from PPC click-thrus.

The nearest any of the remaining nine sites gets to Cheapflights with its share of traffic from search engines is Airline Network, at around 45%.

Contrast Cheapflights with online travel agency Ebookers, which has admitted to serious problems with its search engine optimisation in recent months and is only bringing in around 30% of its overall traffic from Google, Yahoo! et al.

Ebookers’ share from PPC is around two-thirds of its overall search engine traffic.

Hopkins says: “The lesson for marketers is that there is no hard and fast rule for the right mix of paid and organic traffic. Instead, marketers should examine return on investment from specific campaigns whilst constantly testing and adjusting search campaigns.

[Read the full analysis here]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Stern Report and flight-eco searches

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise writes:

The release of the Stern Report two weeks ago, calling for eco-taxes and the curtailing of cheap flights, has caused a surge in online interest for global warming.

The share of UK internet searches for ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ each doubled the week the report was released (week to 4 November 2006).

Average session duration for the HM Treasury website increased 1 minute 24 seconds in the week the report was released to 5 minutes 12 seconds, indicating that consumers were reading at least parts of the 700-page report.

Will the Stern report dampen appetite for cheap flights? The following chart shows that searches for ‘stern report’ dropped back down last week, after a one-week spike. However, searches for ‘global warming’ remain high - ahead of searches for the most popular destination related searches that include the words ‘cheap flights’ - as illustrated in the chart below.

[I found these terms using the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion report to find all the top search queries that include the words ‘cheap flights’].

The young seem to be most concerned about global warming.

The share of UK internet visits to the HM Treasury website increased 3.5 times in the week to 4th November 2006 on the back of the Stern report and the percentage of visits from those aged 18-24 increased by 50% to 23.91%.

There is much talk in the news media about global warming and the level of chatter has been increasing.

According to Google UK News, there were 1,270 articles that mentioned "global warming" in from 29th October to 11th November, up from 518 for the two weeks before the Stern report. And, I should mention that Al Gore's powerful An Inconvenient Truth, was released before the Stern Report.

Concern seems to be growing about global warming and it will be important for the travel industry to watch whether this concern gains momentum in the lead up to the busy winter escape season.

One way to monitor this is to watch the share of internet searches for global warming and related causes.

Heather Hokins, vice president of research at Hitwise UK

Paid and organic search - Impact of ad copy on click-through rates

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise UK writes:

In my first post in this series [the first focussed on the finance sector] I walked through some of our data on paid and organic search terms for MoneySupermarket.

In this second post in the series, I will look at a couple of examples of the ratio of paid and organic visits to better understand the impact of different ad copy on click through rates (CTR).

Consider the following screen grab from Hitwise showing the top search terms sending UK visits to Expedia.co.uk in the four weeks to 30th September 2006.

Volume refers to the volume of visits that term represents to the website and paid rate and organic rate refer to the rate at which consumers reached the site from a paid or organic listing.

Brand terms offer a good start for analysing this as there are no issues of ad placement or competing ads. The brand, at least in most cases, is the only paid listing and the top organic listing. When UK consumers visited Expedia.co.uk from the term "expedia" in the past four weeks, 65.20% of the time they came from a paid listing. When they came from the term "expedia.co.uk" 8.54% of the time they came from a paid listing. Why the difference?

It seems to be down to ad copy and bolding and highlighting. Whilst we can't be sure what ads were appearing over the past four weeks, today, when I searched for "expedia" on Google UK, the paid listing featured the brand name in bold in the title of the ad, the URL and body of the ad (see screen grab to the right).

The result for "expedia.co.uk" was titled "Discount Travel" and the only mention of Expedia was in the URL (see second screen grab).

Similarly, for the term "expedia.com" which shows a high paid rate, the search term was bolded in the title of the ad, as we saw above with "expedia".

This points to the impact of ad copy on click through rates. Using keywords in ad copy that match those the consumer entered into the search box seems to influence CTR as those words will be highlighted in the ad presented to the consumer.

This needs more and careful study (which will follow in due course). It is also worth noting that this may be influenced by placement of the .com and .co.uk URLs in the organic listings.

I also looked at this for the generic terms "flights to alicante" and "cheap flights to alicante". The sites that get visits according to Hitwise from these searches are those that use the terms "flights" and "alicante" in the title of the ad and in the ad copy.

For the term "flights to alicante", BMI Baby was the #1 site receiving visits in the past four weeks and their ad uses both "flights" and "alicante" in the ad copy. Great Late Deals was the #2 site, and their ad title was "Flights to Alicante" today.

Heather Hopkins, vice president for research at Hitwise UK

Travolution@PhoCusWright Brussels - No risk, no fun

That's the message from Thies Rheinsberg, director of corporate development at TUI, when describing how the online travel agents are losing share to traditional tour operators such as Thomas Cook and, of course, Thomson.

Apparently Expedia is the one taking the risks as it is the only OTA, according to Hitwise data, that is still growing.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Travolution@PhoCusWright Brussels

Time for some live blogging again next week at the PhoCusWright conference in Brussels.

Following the success of both our coverage in June of the ITT Conference in Oman and Tricia Holly Davis’s trip to Chicago in July at the NBTA Convention, the Travolution Blog will be live on Tuesday 26 and Wednesday 27 September to follow events as they unfold.

Speakers during the two-day conference include Simon Vincent (Opodo), Dermot Halpin (Expedia), David Soskin (Cheapflights), Heather Hopkins (Hitwise), Tim Frankcom (Yahoo!) and Mike Nelson (Travelport).

Check back regularly for updates or take an RSS feed direct from the blog.

Travolution’s current favourite for aggregating RSS feeds is NetVibes – highly recommended

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Sky viewers learn about blogging

For fear of creating an unofficial Hitwise Day on the Travolution Blog, here’s actually an interesting clip of Heather Hopkins on Sky News this week, talking about Blogs.

[Shame she didn't mention the Travolution Blog - Ed]



Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Australia searches illustrate buoyancy in travel

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise UK writes:

In one of the busiest months for holiday makers, the travel industry was hit hard by an averted terrorist plot, stories and images of queues at the major airports, and now threats of a strike at Stansted this coming bank holiday weekend. [Since cancelled - Ed]

We prepared a brief analysis of the impact of these events on consumer behaviour online to help our customers understand the impact on the industry and to benchmark the impact on their own.

Overall our analysis reveals that fewer visits are going to travel websites, with the exception of websites for airlines, which consumers are likely contacting for updated travel information. The analysis also reveals that long-term travel plans, such as plans to visit Australia for the Ashes Tour, do not appear to be impacted.

Last week I posted on the immediate aftermath and so will focus today on the results in the week after the attacks.

The following chart illustrates the share of all UK internet searches for the ten most searched-for destinations (measured as searches that include the keywords "flights to") in the past four weeks.

Whilst searches for many popular destinations declined last week, searches for "flights to australia", "flights to tenerife", and "flights to turkey" all increased. Searches for "flights to Australia" were no doubt buoyed by the cricket matches over the weekend and anticipation of the Ashes tour.

New York was hard hit, with searches for "flights to new york" moving from position 5 among the most searched-for flight destinations to position 10. Searches for "flights to new york" also experienced the largest week-on-week decline in share of searches, down 56% week-on-week and 4% year-on-year.

Visits to travel websites declined last week but it is important for travel companies to be able to benchmark their own decline against the industry to understand if they are fairing better or worse - or the same - as competitors.

The following figures provide the percentage change in market share of visits to travel category websites comparing the week ending 5th August 2006 with the week ending 19th August 2006.

Since visits increased to travel websites in the immediate aftermath of the security alert, the comparison is done to the week before to provide a more accurate measure of change.

Travel – agencies: -17%

Travel – destinations & accommodation: -10%

Travel – transport: +9%

Aviation – commercial airlines: +19%

The top 10 sites in the travel agencies and destinations & accommodation categories all experienced a decline in market share last week compared with two weeks prior. Transport site visits varied, with some experiencing growth and others declines.

Thomson Fly, BMI Baby and Flybe all saw their market share of visits decline over the past two weeks, by 10%, 5% and 14% respectively.

British Airways, RyanAir and BAA all saw the highest percentage growth among the top ten, at 17%, 13%, and 203% respectively.

The top 10 sites in each of the travel categories for the most part remained unchanged last week. The only notable exception was that British Airways took the #2 ranking among commercial airlines, overtaking RyanAir by a margin of less than 1% market share of visits.

Heather Hopkins, vice president for research at Hitwise UK

Read more from Heather’s blog