Sound familiar?

TUI Travel UK and Ireland boss Dermot Blastland is always good value for money when talking to the press, and his ten minute speech at TUI’s first anniversary media bash last night was no exception.

XL Leisure Group’s collapse last week was, Dermot claimed, down to the fact that it “wasn’t a well-run company” and that it “couldn’t compete with the cost-base of large-scale companies like us”.

Scale? Hasn’t lastminute.com’s Ian McCaig made that word his own? Apparently not. Dermot went on to say that the market was polarising into big players such as TUI and Thomas Cook and specialist/niche operators and any businesses “stuck in the middle” will suffer.

TUI of course has a strong set of specialist businesses, so it’s got a good position at both ends of the market. So good a position that Dermot said the business was having “a cracking time”, as indeed is its rival Thomas Cook.

“We’re both having record years,” he confidentally stated.

I wonder if lastminute.com – or any of the online travel agencies - could say a similar thing?


Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

Loving the Thomas Cook personalised cruise video tool

We wrote about the new personalised cruise functionality for the Thomas Cook website last week.

It is currently in development and isn't expected to be live until November or December this year.

Despite only a demo being shown to delegates last week at the IAB conference in London, we persuaded e-commerce director Russell Gould to send us a screen shot.

Not great quality, but you'll get a sense of what is going on.

In our opinion it's one of the best pieces of consumer experience-driven functionality since British Airways unveiled their Silverlight project at the Travolution Summit in April.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The steady rise of thomascook.com

The Thomas Cook Group PLC interim management statement for the period since 30 April 2008, issued this morning, sheds further light on the growing popularity of thomascook.com.

We continue to see rapid growth in our two largest e-commerce businesses with a significant increase in bookings on the web. Northern Europe leads the way, with 48% of total bookings year to date made on the web and 53% in June.

In the UK, 26% of bookings for summer 08 have been online and early signs for Winter 08/09 and Summer 09 are encouraging, with total tour operator bookings to date through our main website, thomasCook.com, up year-on-year by 89% and 113% respectively.

These growth figures are impressive and indicate - if evidence were ever needed - that consumers are turning online in the mainstream holiday market even with a brand which still places - it says - a lot on its High Street retail presence.

Indeed, Thomas Cook is starting to mirror the same the thrust into the online channel shown by Thomson (TUI Travel) 18 months ago.

The obvious question is where will the momentum end? Or is it, in fact, really just beginning for Thomas Cook and its online aspirations?

The decision to make thomascook.com the primary portal for customers, many believe, is a wise one and explains last week's moves to close the websites of Manos, Panorama, Escapades and Aspro.

What will be interesting, of course, will be the impact of the new thomascook.com website, rolled out  in bits and pieces over the past few months, but almost universally agreed by industry watchers as a strong contender for one of the better mass market tour operator sites in the UK.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: thomas cook thomson

RIP: Panorama, Manos, Aspro, Escapades sites

According to reports, Thomas Cook will be closing the websites of specalist operator brands Panorama, Manos, Aspro and Escapades this week.

They were acquired by Thomas Cook as part of the merger with Mytravel, but a decision has been made to to bring the online presence of the operators into the main thomascook.com site.

Users will be re-directed automatically.

So here is your latest chance to see them before they are consigned to Web Heaven/Room 101:

 

  

 

  

 

May they rest in peace...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Thomas Cook digital mag-brochure - better than many

Thomas Cook's first every digital magazine is up and running - and it's pretty good.

The Ceros Media-hosted magazine has embedded video and direct links to relevant pages on the main Thomas Cook website.

The question is whether anyone will use it.

Have a look here.


[Disclosure: Ceros produces the digital editions of Travolution and Travel Weekly]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Thomson brand is rubbish say experts

Well, kind of.

Enormous interest in our story yesterday about Thomson-First Choice not being particularly enthusiastic about the Superbrands programme.

Within an hour or so of our story going out, Stephen Cheliotis, chief executive of the Centre of Brand Analysis, which runs the judging process for the Superbrands 500 list, was on the phone.

Cheliotis was keen to point out - as a PR rep had done repeatedly earlier in the day - that there is absolutely no connection between those who pay to be "members" of the Superbrands programme and those who appear on the list.

Fair enough. We had that in our original story anyway.

So then we got onto talking about the judging process for this year's Superbrands 500.

As we noted previously in our , a list of around 1,350 brands is selected by the TCBA from numerous sources. The list is then put in front of an Expert Council of luminaries from media, marketing, ad agencies etc, which decides on a list of the best 750 brands.

The 750 are then put to a public vote of around 2,500 people, which decides the top 500.

So it turns out that Thomson was a lowly 964th in the 2008 expert list and didn't even make the public vote. The experts clearly think of Thomas Cook in a much better light.

First Choice was in 1,039th position.

This means that the all-conquering Thomas Cook was 892 places higher - in the final list - than Thomson. Crikey.

The whole thing gets even more bizarre when Cheliotis revealed that Thomson managed to get in the 2007 top 500 list in 161st.

Some might call this a rather tragic fall from grace (hilarious, Thomas Cook would probably say).

Others will be looking to the Expert Council for an explanation as to why a company which featured in a reasonably high position one year can not even be considered worthy of the top 750 the next.

Cheliotis told us the make-up of the council changes every year, which will account for differences of opinion, of course.

There is "invariably some volatility" in the list, Cheliotis adds. Indeed...

Anyway, we suspect Thomson-First Choice won't be too distraught at missing out this year, as their comments indicated yesterday, but will be keen to see where they feature in the pre-public vote next year.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: superbrand superbrands thomson first choice

Mobile travel - public says aye; industry says, er, not sure

Guest blog post from Michael Lacy, boss of Handy Group:

The chap next to me in the queue outside the O2 store at 7.30 on Friday morning had sold his ‘old’ iPhone on ebay for £180 the evening before.

Ahead of us the sales director of the local Ford Dealership had taken the morning off so he could be one of the first with the new phone, and so it went on.

I probably didn’t need to be there but I wanted to know who these people were, prepared to stand in line from midnight for ‘just’ another phone.

There were fifteen people ahead of me and I turned up at 7.00am. At 8.02am, when the store opened, there were another thirty-five behind me.

At 8.05am O2’s computer systems crashed (again) so it took more than an hour to process just one customer.

And it was the same story at the other 399 O2 stores around the country.

About a third of the queue I was in gave up when it was announced they only had four 16GB versions in stock and others went when they realised they probably wouldn’t see their families over the weekend at they rate they were processing customers.

Yet very few in these lines were ‘geeks’, early adopters for sure, but an eclectic mix of ages, men, women and children (Mum’s were there, armed with ID), previous ‘iPhoner’s’ and those new to iPhone.

This readily available user group opportunity was too good to miss so an impromptu survey was taken – albeit from a ‘sold’ audience; internet access on the move was most important to 40%, internet access and voice was most important to 36%. Internet access was least important to 0%; 40% said they would likely buy travel products from their phone.

After demonstrating - on our own system - how easy it is to buy a week at a hotel in Paphos from Hotels4U or to book a car from Hertz, or a flight on Easyjet – this increased to over 90%.

To someone working in the mobile ‘space’ these figures probably aren’t surprising. But what surprised me was the amazement and acceptance of internet applications built just for mobile.

Most were willing to live with the limitations of viewing a fixed line site in miniature but when shown applications, freely available, with no download from iTunes, no pre-registration – and in full screen, adoption levels more than doubled.

Would any online travel company imagine that producing a website the size of a billboard would be effective? Yet in a recent travel industry telemarketing survey by Handy Group 50% had no mobile strategy.

Michael Lacy, chief executive, Handy Group

Follow-up to Thomas Cook web review

A few months back, E-Consultancy posted a pretty downbeat review of the Thomas Cook website.

The timing of the review couldn't have been worse as Thomas Cook was in the middle of making some major changes to the site.

Anyway, E-Consultancy has taken another look at the new site and re-posted.

Kevin May, editor, 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

Big two offer little (dot)comment

Europe’s two largest leisure travel operators, TUI Travel plc and Thomas Cook Group, both issued their half-year results this week. Reading through the numbers one would imagine that the internet doesn’t exist.

Listening to the calls with analysts, one would imagine the internet doesn’t exist.

And calling their financial PRs to ask for some more colour about their online business, one would imagine that the internet (to say nothing of Travolution!) doesn’t exist.

So what did we find out? For TUI Travel, online accounts for about 35% of its UK mainstream business. ‘It’s building, but it has slowed,’ said chief exec Peter Long. Requests for more details were met with a polite ‘it’s not the sort of information we give out’ response.

The UK is a mature market for both travel and online so a slowing in growth while volumes increase is no surprise. TUI has been reducing capacity on its loss-making seat-only operations. Fewer seats will lead to fewer web bookings.

So where is the growth coming from? Mass-market price-led fly and flop short-haul packages, or exclusive upmarket Holiday Villages/Sensatori products? Thomson.co.uk or firstchoice.co.uk?And what about the web side of its separately reported specialist and activity units?

Its consumer-facing dotcoms are doing well enough. Laterooms lifted its bed nights booked by 146% to 994K while hotelopia was 18% up at 1.3m.

A technical hitch prevented questions from being asked on Thomas Cook’s call with the trade press. “Thomas Cook is still on target to achieve 35% of group sales online in the 09/10 financial year,’ it said after the event, repeating comments made earlier this year. “In the year to end-Oct07 online accounted for 13%.”

Hopefully there might be some more details when the big two’s full year results come out at the end of the year. Travolution isn’t reading anything too sinister into their muted response this week, but it hasn’t stopped us from idly speculating on how important the internet is to Europe’s two biggest travel companies.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, 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

More twists and turns in Google saga

Google is protecting its position - in the face of legal threats from travel companies against it and between one another.

A short but very interesting statement we obtained this morning speaks volumes.

Information from Thomas Cook [contained in the same article] revealed that it is also attempting to crack down on activity against its brand name and those of its myriad of subsidaries.

The issue is such a hot one that a bit of keyword analysis at our end has shown that upstream search traffic to the main Travolution website is being boosted by a number of phrases such as "google trademark travel", "google brand name travel" and - astonishingly - "google PPC travel".

There are many senior figures who are preparing to dig in for a major battle with either Google or rival travel companies. This will run and run...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

What ThomasCook.com can do better

According to E-Consultancy.com.

Full analysis on the main site, but summarised:

• Avoid returning no results for holiday searches
• Provide some user reviews and feedback
• Load my search results faster
• Don't surprise me with hidden charges
• Allow users to save their previous searches
• Provide a contact number during the booking process
• Don't display unavailable flights
• Provide more useful information on airports/destinations
• Improve the calendar
• More flexible search options

Interesting piece. We've got in touch with TC to see what they think of the article.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: thomas cook e-consultancy

Leading travel stocks after a third of 2008

[UPDATE at bottom of post]

Some interesting stats...

Expedia: started 2008 on $0.31 a share. Now $0.25. -19%

British Airways: started 2008 on £3.09 a share. Now £2.48. -19%

EasyJet: started 2008 on £6.13 a share. Now £3.24. -47%

MoneySupermarket (owner of TravelSupermarket): started 2008 on £1.40 a share. Now £1.14. -19%

Orbitz Worldwide: started 2008 on $8.50. Now $8.78. +3%

Priceline: started 2008 on $1.15 a share. Now $1.26. +10%

Ryanair: Started 2008 on Euro 0.39 a share. Now Euro 0.30. -23%

SilverJet: started 2008 on £0.48 a share. Now £0.15. -69%

Thomas Cook: started 2008 on £2.82 a share. Now £2.66. -7%

TUI Travel: started 2008 on £2.94 a share. Now £2.41. -18%

Travelzest: started 2008 on £1.01 a share. Now £1.02. +1%

Travelzoo: started 2008 on $0.14 a share. Now $0.11. -21%

UPDATE:

Sam I Am asks in the comments about the market conditions as a whole.

FTSE 100: started 2008 on 6456. Now 6215. -4%

NASDAQ: started 2008 on 2652. Now 2464. -7%

So one might say that the Orbitz and Priceline in the US - and not Expedia - are bucking the trend, while airlines in the UK are seeing a decline in share price worse than the overall market decrease.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

People love using Wikipedia for information about travel companies

Wikipedia has created a tool which reveals the number of searches carried out for any keyword.

It's interesting in the context of the sheer number of times people are looking for information on individual travel companies.

Obviously one thing to ponder here is the extent to which consumers (let us assume it's primarily consumers for now) will go to learn more about a company.

Is this a question of uncertainty on the part of potential customers? Or the web just showing that if information is there, people will want to find it.

Anyway, here is a sample showing the number of Wikipedia searches in February 2008 for various travel related companies.

British Airways - 230,694
Eurostar - 23,980
Expedia - 21,323
Orbitz - 10,627
Virgin Atlantic - 10,194
Thomas Cook - 8,742
Lastminute.com - 1,273
Ebookers - 968
Opodo - 834
Kuoni - 24

One remarkable thing about this is that Google was searched 334,841 times - just 100,000 more than BA.

And now you can play around with the tool at the heart's content.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat-tip: Travelvine [side project of Darren Cronian of Travel-Rants] for flagging this up.

Technorati tags: wikipedia wikitravel wiki encyclopedia

Sun, sea, sand and search

Orbitz Worldwide, owner of ebookers.com, has added a feature to its (semi) eponymous US site which might raise a few eyebrows in Europe, not least among the big vertically integrated tour operators such as TUI Travel plc and Thomas Cook Group.

Orbitz.com features a link through to MyIdealBeach.com, where users can specify who they are (such as friends or honeymooners), what they want from the hotel (gay-friendly to all-inclusive) and what they want to do (golf to fishing).

‘Travellers want a different, better way to search for complex trips than just by dates and destinations,’ says Heather Leisman, Senior Director of Merchandising for Orbitz, in the press release.

Too right!

Travellers might also want to search more than the 450 pre-selected hotels currently on offer, but it’s a start.

TUI and TC have argued that one advantage they have over the OTAs is access to beach inventory - through the scale of their buying power, to say nothing of the fact they actually own or part-own a number of prime beach-front properties.

Even if this tool does turn up on ebookers in the future, it is unlikely that the balance of power will shift but it’s food for thought, particularly as Leisman also says that myidealbeach.com ‘marries the expertise offered by a traditional travel agent with the ease, convenience and breadth of options offered by an online travel site.’

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution.

Lifting the lid on Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook has been quiet for a while so we were excited at the prospect of catching up on all things online.

Russell Gould has been in the e-commerce director chair for not quite a year and has already brought many a Mytravel experience to Cooks.

Thomascook.com has been revamped and relaunched focusing on four customer segments:

• Those that know exactly what they want
• Those that are browsing for deals
• Those that are just browsing to see what's around
• Those who don't have a clue what they want

Like the work MyTravel has carried out on its sites in the past three years it was a three-stage approach focused on getting basics right in order to improve conversion. The stages were -improving the search and booking technology, navigation and design and the content.

The new Cook's site also moved to the three column approach with deals on the left, inspiration in the middle and the search function on the right.

In short, everything is slicker, speedier and much more thought out.

Surprisingly, prior to this project Thomas Cook redesigns had been based on opinions!

As always, Cooks are tightlipped when it comes to numbers so Russell couldn't say much but the following suggests he is pleased:

Since going live we have had record day on record day. When we did this for MyTravel, on each of four projects we saw in excess of 15% improvement in conversion. Thomas Cook has been greater than that.

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Number One or Number Two - the topsy turvy world of online rankings

Thomson is understandably chuffed to pieces after overtaking Expedia in the first few weeks of January in the Hitwise online agency rankings.

Being able to say "We are the #1 online travel agency in the UK", or similar, on promotional material goes a long way. Not that Thomson has used it in that way yet.

But the scene at the top of the pile changes often.

The top ten for the week ending 13 January went like this:

• Thomson Holidays
• Expedia
• Lastminute.com
• First Choice
• Thomas Cook
• TravelSupermarket
• Cheapflights
• TravelRepublic
• Teletext Holidays
• Ebookers

But here is a graph illustrating the relative positions of Thomson and Expedia throughout 2007.


One can read a few things into this:

Seasonality impacts on Expedia and Thomson in different and/or the gap between the two is incredibly close, meaning the positions change frequently.

The other thing to note with the remaining sites in the top ten is the presence of TravelRepublic (above Ebookers), the inclusion of non-travel agency sites (Cheapflights and TravelSupermarket), and the absence of Opodo (number 12 or 13 normally).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: hitwise thomson expedia

Pivotal moments of 2007 for online travel

The holiday season approaches - 2008 beckons...

We want to collect the opinions of the travel industry in order to compile a list of the biggest news stories and most important developments of 2007.

We will add ALL entries made via the comments section into the main post. Also, feel free to copy this post onto your own blog or site and re-post it with your suggestions. A worthwhile Meme to end the year.

The list begins:

• Thomas Cook-MyTravel merger (Travolution) - the start of a new shape for the European travel industry.
• MoneySupermarket-TravelSupermarket floatation (TravelRemark)
• Avis launching a blog (Avis)
  
• DoSomethingDifferent making their content available to OTAs (DoSomethingDifferent)
  

Good luck and thanks in advance...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: 2007 review online travel 2008

What to do with MyTravel.com

New Media Age today reports how Thomas Cook will redesign its main website in March next year.

Makes sense - especially with news that it will essentially merge its Thomas Cook TV and the website platforms so 17,000 hours of footage can be streamed online.

Exciting times...

However. What will it do with MyTravel.com? The site always performed pretty well in terms of traffic and has a page rank of 4 [same as the Travolution blog!].


But now in the shiny PLC world of Thomas Cook Group, MyTravel doesn't really exist.

What would you do?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: thomas cook mytravel