March 2006 Archives

PING! An email arrives that sends the Travolution team into a frenzy: we may have been dealt the same fate as other travel companies suffering from brand sabotage!

A keen reader – frighteningly keen, in fact, judging by the anxious missive – noticed that a search for “Travolution” on Google had revealed a curious link to a website for US indie rockers Linkin Park.

An investigation, launched immediately by Travolution’s Brand Protection Team (!!), revealed that a fan had registered on the band’s website and chatrooms under the name “Travolution”.

Who is this metal-loving, resident of Ohio with a fondness for quirky names? Please get in touch. We’re not angry – we just want to congratulate you. There is even a handful of Travolution sweets in it for you.

Interestingly our research has since discovered Travelution (“Your Destination Solution”), a fine travel agent based in Edinburgh, plus Travolution.com, which links directly to a website for Deutsche Telekom.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Another coalface day – this time at the Association of British Travel Agents in London, where 60-odd independents and small to medium sized tour operators gathered to learn a bit more about online advertising.

Two specialists from the search marketing world – Lewis Lenssen from Accord Search Marketing and Arjo Ghosh of Spannerworks – spoke for 30 minutes each about paid-for and natural search respectively, as Travolution kept order.

All very tame and relaxed for the first hour or so. But as with many of these types of events the harsh reality of the online world only became apparent during the Q&A session.

A show of hands during my introductory speech revealed that perhaps a half had used a third party or had tried doing the complicated search marketing themselves to propel their companies up the search engine listings.

Good news perhaps for Lewis and Arjo, who would probably like to pick up a few leads for new business at an event like this.

But one delegate, who – judging by the reaction of many in the room – had a pretty good strategy for a new travel website, hit the nail on the head.

When Lewis revealed that the average monthly fee for a start-up campaign for paid-for listings might cost around £2,000, there was a noticeable shift in mood within the room.

“I simply can’t afford that,” the delegate said, triggering a collection of nods around the room.

The big players in travel can clearly fork out what amounts to thousands each month to ensure they are in the faces of internet users and their range of searches. For others it is an intimidating world.

Thankfully there are solutions to help natural search rankings, the panel suggested quickly: smart ones that use such rather less tangible methods, such as PR, to create interest in companies and naturally increase their search friendliness.

Another method is to use Blogs, Arjo proposed. Indeed the delegate with the soon-to-be-launched, “intriguing” proposal – we all agreed afterwards – for online travel was ripe for a Blog.

And right on cue: “Can you explain what a Blog is, please?” came a plea from back of the room.

Lewis and Arjo explained how Blogs can actually be used to create a community among consumers, triggering a new round of nodding in the room.

“I’m still not sure I know anyone who writes a Blog though,” Lewis suggested cheekily.

Thankfully Travolution Blogger was on hand to point the audience in the right direction.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Preparing breakfast one morning, you hear some mewing on your porch and discover a cute, hungry kitten. You don’t know where she’s been or why she showed up at your house, but you’re a kind soul and you pour her a saucer of milk. Bravo!

A few days later the cat returns, and soon enough she appears like clockwork to lap up your offering. What a loyal kitty!

Unbeknownst to you, however, in that parallel world where cats spend most of their lives unseen by humans, this kitten gets web access. Eventually she finds her way to www.milkadvisor.com [this address doesn't really exist, obviously - Ed], where she learns that the retired lady down the street offers warm milk and a pleasant scratch behind the ears at no extra charge.

These puss ‘n boots are made for walkin’, and you, kind soul, never see the kitty again.

Did the fickle feline stop being loyal? No, the clever cat stopped being ignorant. Access to information allowed her to determine that your neighbor could better address her needs.

The kitty’s so-called loyalty to you depended upon a poverty of information about the alternatives. (Combined with not a little bit of fear: She could have tried the other porch any time – but what if they had a dog?)

Application of this allegory to the travel business in general: Same thing, but with fewer hairballs.

There appears to be a widespread belief that the Internet undermines, erodes – or just destroys – customer loyalty. By providing 24/7 access to a virtually infinite universe of information about destinations, travel product providers, and prices, the Internet all but seduces loyal customers to investigate alternatives.

But: As the tale of the cat shows, genuine loyalty can’t be founded on an absence of information. And it follows that it can’t be threatened by an abundance of information. On the contrary: real loyalty assumes that the customer is informed about the options and then chooses (and continues to choose) a particular product.

(Yes, Web travel research is often motivated by price. But a travel consumer that is driven exclusively by the cost of the product is by definition never going to be loyal.)

So the popular opinion has it precisely backwards: The Internet doesn’t threaten customer loyalty – although it might release repeat customers that were bound to you out of ignorance or fear. On the contrary, the wealth of information about options and alternatives easily available on the web in effect makes genuine customer loyalty possible for the first time.

Of course, getting the right information to the right prospect remains a major challenge for providers – and the topic of a separate Blog entry.

Tim Walters, director international marketing and strategy, FatWire Software

Graham Donoghue, one of Travolution’s occasional Star Bloggers and head new media at TUI UK, posted this response to a post earlier this week.

He raises interesting points about Google and its – consistently denied – plans for a travel portal (Troogle) along the lines of the Google Finance service launched this week.

Thought it might be worth reproducing here the results of his search on the US version of Google.

Simply type in any departure and arrival airport, a date, and the rest is very intriguing. And no wonder some are getting hot under the collar about it.

Alongside the usual sponsored links and above the natural search results is a deep-link connection for the flight and dates in question direct into Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline or Travelocity.

Most will probably be wondering what deals have been struck to give those five sites such prominent positions; others will be equally curious as to when a similar piece of functionality will wind its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the UK and Europe.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

I noticed John Battelle [Searchblog] and Danny Sullivan's [Search Engine Watch] posts on Google Finance this morning and took a look at Hitwise to see how much traffic Google sends to Yahoo! Finance and to the Business and Finance sector as a whole.

Last week, 10% of UK visits from Google UK went to Business and Finance sites. Yahoo! Finance figured at the 499th site downstream from Google UK, receiving .02% of Google UK's traffic. With such a small percentage of visits going to Yahoo! Finance, why launch Google Finance? Something that John said in his blog caught my attention...

"Apparently this started as a 20% project in Google's Bangalore office, after Google consumer testing showed that the product was wanted by Google users.

"Well, OK then. I recall a fellow by the name of Jerry Yang and another by the name of Tim Koogle telling me that when they wanted to start a new publishing venture at Yahoo, they would watch what the users did after searching. Where the tracks were deepest - finance, sports, travel - they built a new section of the ....uh oh, here it comes...the PORTAL. "

I have included a table below that shows downstream visits from Google UK last week. Google's product development does seem to be filling gaps based on visits downstream from Google.

* 19.75% of visits go to Computers and Internet - this includes search engines, email, online communities, and image search. The obvious Google sites in this category are Google Images, Gmail, and Google.

* 13.63% of visits go to Shopping and Classifieds sites and Google Base and Froogle fall into this category.

* 10.58% of visits go to Entertainment sites and Google Video is categorised in the Entertainment - Multimedia sub-category.

* 10.07% go to Business and Finance and Google has just launched Google Finance.

* 8.94% go to travel.

* 5.78% go to Education with Google Scholar the top Google site in this category.

* 5.45% go to Lifestyle - with Google Blogger the top Google site in the category.

* 4.61% go to News and Media with Google News long-established.

The last category I'll mention is Sports, receiving 2.40% of visits from Google, and Google recently launched Joga with Nike Football.

A quick review of this list makes me think that Google Travel, rumoured to be called "Troogle", may not be far off.

Heather Hopkins, director of research at online analyst, Hitwise

Read more from Heather here

It seems the rather flaky issue of “brand protection” is becoming an important one for online travel companies as they battle in an increasingly competitive market.

Someone called in yesterday to ask if Travolution had heard of a rumour doing the rounds regarding a medium-sized tour operator and its request to Google for Trademark Protection.

Whether or not the company has recently filed for such a procedure could make for a small-ish news story in the coming weeks as we finish off our magazine.

Indeed, it is by no means the only travel company to have done so in recent months.

The interesting part to all this is that most internet users would probably not even notice the lengths websites are going to across the retail sector to protect themselves from what some argue is commercial sabotage, but in reality is simply a cunning use of marketing.

It works like this: a website persuades a search engine that it should be given Trademark Protection, which in turn means that only they – and close strategic partners – appear in the sponsored links on search engines such as Google or Yahoo!.

Type “First Choice” into Google [here] or Yahoo! [here] and, of course, there will be a heap of returns in the natural search results [646,000,000 on Google and 303,000,000 on Yahoo! this morning].

But there is no sign of a sponsored link from anyone else apart from First Choice or a partner.

This is also the case across the travel sector – such as British Airways, EasyJet, Thomas Cook or TUI.

It becomes rather quirky – and shows even smarter use of branding – if you type in “Lastminute.com”. Google returns only one result, Lastminute.com, due to the search engine’s URL rules and because the company’s brand name is in fact the full URL [as Brent Hoberman et al at LM Towers keep reminding us trade journalists].

There are, of course, interesting implications for this.

In looking to protect a company’s identity by cutting out other sponsored links, are travel websites in fact reducing the channels users have for reaching them, be it through an aggregator or price comparison site that features their products?

On the other hand some would argue, rather more controversially, that the direct sale is becoming the increasingly preferred option.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

So it is the end of another hectic but interesting week in Travolution Land.

We’re finishing the April edition of the magazine soon so our wonderful team of freelancers [“I didn’t realise you wanted paying?!?”] have been busy filing their copy – and all on time.

Traffic figures for our website are increasing rather nicely and the Blog is doing extraordinarily well.

[My mole at AOL denies a link to Heather Somerville’s post this week was sent around the company. But a spike in traffic immediately after a new entry is always welcome!]

And then there have been a string of meetings with about as diverse a group of people from the travel industry as possible – a price comparison site, a search engine, an online research company, a hotel booking site, a usability firm, a handful of freelancers, an analyst, and a few others.

But perhaps the most intriguing encounter of the week was with the head of an online travel agent, who will clearly have to remain nameless but will be referred to as The Boss for the moment.

I sat with The Boss in their London office this week discussing, among other things, the complexities of marketing a medium-sized online travel agent.

The Boss said the traditional method of stuffing Sunday newspaper travel sections with classified advertising is over – response rates are slowing, the papers themselves are losing circulation but prices remain the same.

So obviously the best and only way forward now is through search marketing, The Boss claimed.

The Boss admitted to spending a sizeable sum on its optimisation for Google and Overture – sorry, Yahoo Search Marketing – to ensure top billing among the sponsored links.

I decided to put The Boss to the test. “So what if we type in the name of one of the hotels you plug – where will it come on the results?” I asked.

The Boss shifted nervously behind a desk, but eventually agreed. The relief that swept through room was obvious when hotel after hotel we searched for brought up the travel agent’s site in the top sponsored rankings.

“So how much have you paid for that one?” I decided to ask, clearly on a roll after putting The Boss on the spot a little bit.

Another nervous shift in the chair, but The Boss decided to play along and called the search marketing wizard sitting elsewhere in the building.

“Can you tell me how much we paid for [name of hotel]?” The Boss asked. A slight pause, before “yes, I know, it’s a long story but can you found out for me, please?”

We waited anxiously for a few moments, before the reply came. “Ok, thanks, 37p per click. Bye.”

The Boss leaned back in the chair, impressed that the team had got the top slot, for a good price.

[Not bad indeed as the keyword "Dubai" is often going for £3.50 a click these days]

“Well, let’s take a look then to see if it deep links?” I suggested. But The Boss replied swiftly: “Oh for god’s sake, we are NOT going to click on it!”

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The travel industry has been touting the benefits of “dynamic packaging” for some time, hailing this as the “killer app” of online travel booking.

Consumers have never had so much choice; they now have more flexibility, more visibility of pricing and this puts them firmly in the driving seat.

Travellers can build and book their entire holiday through one site, selecting the options that best meet their needs on price, dates, convenience and location.

Dynamic packaging allows them to juggle flights, accommodation, car hire, excursions and more from just one visit to a website.

Research from Multicom from 2005 predicted that dynamic packaging sales will total £2.4 billion and account for almost 35% of the UK travel market by 2007.

But do consumers even know what “dynamic Packaging” is? Do consumers understand the benefits? Do they want it?

At AOL UK we’ve just completed some research into our members’ attitudes to online travel in general and specifically into what they make of dynamic packaging. With nearly 2.5 million members out there, we’ve perfectly positioned to find out what consumers think about online travel topics.

We used a mix of in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted over a period of 2 weeks, with participants being asked for their knowledge and experience of using dynamic packaging, for their opinion on it and whether it was something they were using now or were likely to use in the future.

Most were unfamiliar with the term “dynamic packaging”, which comes as no surprise since this is a term that tends to be limited to the industry. Nonetheless they were favourable to the concept, although the majority had yet to book in this way.

The over-riding concern, however, was the suspicion that there were hidden margins and the majority said they would still prefer to shop around, visiting 3+ of their favourite sites to ensure that they were getting value for money.

So, looks like we’ve still got someway to go to encourage consumer confidence in this product, and while convenience is a key factor in purchase decision making, the main driver still seems to be price, consumers are still prepared to shop around to get the best deals.

Heather Sommerville, head of lifestyle and travel, Interactive Marketing, AOL UK

Here is a great article from BBC Online that pretty much sums up the dilemma facing online businesses as the internet grows.

[The "kitten lovers" in the headline above is a reference to a paragraph in the piece, in case it raised any concerns!]

The piece raises a number of interesting points that the travel sector should consider, particularly how start-ups are being snapped up by the big players almost immediately after launch.

It argues that this is simply because the established online brands don’t want to miss out on the “next big thing”.

So would it be a huge surprise to see major companies going for the likes of the so-called Meta search engines/price comparison sites next? Or perhaps even Blog providers?

[And something else to ponder: When does a Meta search engine become just a search engine?]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The Forbes annual list of the world’s wealthy was unveiled this morning – produced, perhaps, to give everyone else something to strive towards, although in reality it actually just gives Forbes a heap of publicity once a year!

Unsurprisingly, travel-related entrepreneurs have a modest presence among the 793 billionaires the US magazine has found for its latest list, up from just 140 of 20 years ago.

Also coming into the market in recent years have been those on the technology scene, such as Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, from Dell, Apple and Microsoft respectively.

Indeed, propping up the richest in the technology sector are the search engines and internet portals (“Do they really make most of their money from sponsored links?” a non-web savvy friend asked me recently).

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, have a net value of almost $13bn apiece; their new chief exec Eric Schmidt can also relax with his own $4.8bn.

Meanwhile Cosmos founder Sergio Mantegazza is 317th on the list with $2.4bn, Virgin boss Richard Branson has $2.8bn and hotel moguls Richard Marriott and John Marriott Jr are sitting pretty on $1.5bn each.

So here we go…a trimmed down, Travolution-picked list of the world’s wealthy [courtesy of Forbes, of course]:

[Click on a name to read how they made their billions]

Spiro Latsis and family (PrivatAir/PrivatSea) – $9.1bn

Micky Arison (Carnival Group) – $6.1bn

Jack Taylor (Enterprise Rent-a-Car) – $6bn

Shari Arison (Carnival Group) – $5.2bn

Robert Rowling (Omni Hotels) – $4.8bn

Jim Pattison (Ripley’s Believe It or Not/new Niagara Falls attraction) – $3.5bn

Gianluigi & Rafaela Aponte (MSC Cruises) – $3bn

David Filo (Yahoo!) – $2.9bn

Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) – $2.4bn

Robert Pritzker (Hyatt) – $1.9bn

Gabriel Escarrer (Sol Melia Hotels) - $1.7bn

Arne Wilhelmsen and family (Royal Caribbean Cruises) – $1.6bn

Naresh Goyal (Jet Airways) – $1.5bn

Henrique, Joaquim, Ricardo and Oliveria Jr Constantino (GOL Intelligent Airlines) - $1.1bn each for four members of the Constantino family

Anyway, back to work…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

At the coalface, you might say, during the Comtec e-commerce forum at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham.

A Travolution-chaired discussion panel, featuring the likes of Yahoo! Search Marketing, AdPrecision, Cosmos, Hotelconnect and the host Comtec, through up some interesting points.

All was going well with the debates, covering search, the general state of the industry, email marketing and the increasingly murky boundaries between what constitutes a tour operator and travel agent (“because we’re often doing the same thing these days,” said one delegate).

But throw the dreaded “Internet 2.0” into the equation again and, yes, you’ve guessed it, rows of blank faces appeared within the audience.

[Read previous Blog entry]

It’s hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for the average travel business that has spent – more often that not – vast sums of money getting itself online in the first place and functioning well, only to be confronted with what is coming round the corner.

As Ed Whiting, Comtec’s product director, suggested to the delegates: Internet 2.0 is a pretty loose term in some respects and some parts of what the IT eggheads call “the future” have actually been around for a few years already.

Perhaps this allayed the fears of some delegates, concerned about being left behind by some crazy new development in the online world.

It’s very easy to peer into a crystal ball and forecast where online travel will be in terms of technological developments in the coming years, but there is still a large part of the industry getting to grips with search engine optimisation and dynamic booking facilities.

Forget video-casting, consumer interaction and travblogs for time being… One delegate said confidently: “It all remains a question of price still.”

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Chatting about the lead feature for the April edition of Travolution, on the spiky subject of airlines and the prospect of them regaining much of their former power, recently led a contact to give a grim forecast for one area of the industry.

The so-called consolidators in the online travel world could be facing a far greater challenge than just battling one another for business, he said.

Not only will they have to contend with consolidation in their own market, as powerful travel conglomerates snap up the smaller players, but the airlines are flexing their considerable muscles and therefore put the squeeze on the consolidators.

This is not a new revelation, by any means, but an example he gave was an interesting one.

Take the Middle East giant Emirates, now one of the leading global airlines whose profile is set to become even bigger in the UK with its branding of the new Arsenal Stadium six months away, which also follows its successful sponsorship of the Chelsea football team.

Our own Mystic Meg said he recently searched the airline’s website for a particular inter-continental flight and found a pretty decent price.

But looking for the same flight on a variety of consolidator websites yielded some surprising results.

The same flight on all the other sites was at least £50 more expensive.

He went back and double-checked the details but eventually he was left with an obvious conclusion: if a user trusts a particular service why would they spend time trawling other websites looking for a decent price when often the actual supplier is – increasingly and significantly – undercutting the consolidators.

Clearly direct-selling is an area that must send a chill down the spines of some websites.

But all this is tied very closely to how the airlines market themselves, both off and online.

Search marketing and branding looks likely to become even more complicated and pervasive in the future, but our particular forecaster suggests: the airlines are coming back.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

A couple of weeks ago I went to San Francisco and stayed in a fantastic bed and breakfast that I found on TripAdvisor. I couldn't resist and checked Hitwise data to see how the site is fairing - in short, very well!

TripAdvisor joined the 100 most visited websites based on UK visits in the week ending 30th July 2005 and hit a high the week ending the 18th of February, ranking 83rd among all websites based on UK visits. In February the site ranked 10th among Travel websites.

The share of UK visits to TripAdvisor increased 37% year on year in February - healthy growth compared to the average of 7% for the Travel - Destinations and Accommodations category. Trip Advisor's brand strength has grown significantly - with searches for 'trip advisor' more than doubling year on year last week.

TripAdvisor receives most of its traffic from search engines - accounting for 52% of visits to the site in February. Of these, Google (combined UK and .com) accounted for 70%. Trip Advisor sends 74% of its own traffic to Travel websites, with 41.3% going to Travel Agencies and 31.89% going to Destination and Accommodation websites. The top downstream sites (those visited after TripAdvisor) are those that are prominently displayed in sponsored listings and those that offer price comparisons on hotels listed on the site. Expedia.co.uk, which owns TripAdvisor, received nearly one quarter (22.49%) of visits from Trip Advisor in February. Hotels.com UK received 4.29% of visits, Venere.com received 2.91%, Lastminute.com received 2.89%, and eBookers received 1.80%.

It is not only the big advertisers that are getting traffic from Trip Advisor. Among the top 500 downstream sites from TripAdvisor in February were Sunrise, a resort in Turkey, and Nant ddu Lodge Hotel, a country inn near Cardiff.

By offering reviews of hotels and destinations by individual travelers, TripAdvisor hosts huge amounts of constantly updated content - a feature that helps the site appear among the top organic listings on the search engines. In the past four weeks. there were 38,923 search terms sending visits to TripAdvisor. Among the top 20 were 'blackpool', 'hilton blackpool', 'london attractions', 'paradisus rio de oro' and 'liverpool'.

TripAdvisor attracts 46% more visits from those aged 55+ than average for the internet highlighting the site's strength with "silver surfers". 62% of visits to the site are from those in Social Grade A/B and C1. The Mosaic Group "Symbols of Success" is the Experian Mosaic Group that is most highly indexed on the site. The Symbols of Success group are 61% more likely to be on Trip Advisor than average for the internet. According to offline statistics compiled by Experian, this group is 152% more likely to book three or more holidays per year and 91% more likely to book holidays online - and so represents a lucrative demographic for travel sites.

I should mention that this blog post not only illustrates the strength of Trip Advisor but also reveals the power of Hitwise data to evaluate a potential affiliate or advertising partner. Firms can use Hitwise data to evaluate an affiliate by examining the relevance of search terms sending visits, upstream and downstream websites, and the demographic and lifestyle profile of visitors.

Heather Hopkins, director of research at online analyst, Hitwise

Read more from Heather here

Those kind folk at the Guardian Travel section often send out a mailing that, in between the discounts and the flowery reviews, can create a little interest on a Friday afternoon.

So here is the latest offering: a meaty debate sparked by an article written a week or so ago by respected environmental journalist George Monbiot.

Here he criticises government plans to increase runway capacity around the country, fuelled by a massive surge in air traffic that he argues will eventually create "Airstrip One” in the UK.

Keith Jowett, chief executive of the Airport Operators Association, and British Air Transport Association secretary general, Roger Wiltshire, hit back with what is a pretty substantial attack on Monbiot.

It’s a good old fashioned slanging match between those from opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of their view of the travel industry – and is well worth reading.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

The Gregorian calendar isn’t creative enough to give us specific themes – which is a bit of a shame.

Apart from providing a quirky 28 days in February, which is ironically the only true lunar month, the modern calendar gives us only a simple “year” based on a collection of four digits that increase by one every 365 days. Pretty dull.

Thankfully we have the Chinese to spice things up, who are now celebrating the year of the dog.

It is therefore inevitably up to business folk and other commentators to boldly declare what is the particular theme for the year.

Some are pretty obvious: 2006 could be the “Year of the Cameron”, for example, if you are a long-suffering Tory voter looking for a bit of inspiration.

But others are inevitably driven by a need to add a bit of puff to a product launch, such as “2006, the Year of the HDTV [High Definition Television]”.

In travel it is arguably more difficult to define.

Some are declaring 2006 as the year when Internet 2.0 makes its presence felt [see earlier Blog entry].

Others suggest this could be the year when Google finally comes unstuck – negative publicity over China, arrival of MSN AdCenter later in the year [see Travolution news story].

Or will the online travel industry see a new round of aggressive consolidation between the major players, with Cheapflights – despite the obvious denials – a firm favourite for a sale.

But perhaps Gavin Sinden, one of Travolution’s Star Bloggers, is right in his estimation when he said this week at an industry seminar hosted by Twentysix London that the most significant change this year will be far more subtle.

“2006 is the year that we really learn to use relationships in online travel,” he suggested as a means to indicate how companies will start to use feedback forums, personalisation so much more and better than they have.

Nobody in the industry is sticking their necks out too much though. As for us at Travolution, we’re being far bolder by suggesting 2006 is the year when travel celebrates its first ten years online.

I suspect our own declaration will be equally controversial.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

As a provider of search engine technology for the travel industry, I quickly get to hear of new trends and rumours in Search Engine World.

Last week I was talking to a traditional offline travel agency who have developed their own bookable site and have been running Google Adwords and Overture pay-per-click campaigns through a search marketing advertising agency.

The travel agency has now decided to take the management of their search marketing campaigns in house because they feel that the agency was becoming more of a hindrance than a help when it came to promoting the right products at the right time through these direct channels.

They told me that selling their travel products through search engines is becoming an art-form in itself due to the dynamic nature of product availability versus price versus product yield.

To this end, close control of distribution to the consumer through these direct sales channels can best be handled by people closest to the action using specialist yield management and bid management tools.

Most of the time a travel provider intimately understands the products they are selling and the dynamic nature of the travel industry. If a third party agency cannot adapt their services to this new type of product distribution, why bother using them?

As the tail of search becomes longer, those travel companies that can directly control their product distribution will gain a marketing advantage in a competitive marketplace.

Alasdair Cross, commercial director, AdPrecision