Travel Weekly reports that:
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Americans with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more are not only twice as likely as others to make entertainment and leisure purchases, and more than three times more likely to spend more.
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Effectively, 50% to 60% of all expenditures in the travel world come from these people.
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65% of affluent Americans, who account for just 21% of the population, have a passport, compared with about 37% of all Americans.
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Seventy-six percent of those surveyed planned to take a vacation this year.
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In the last year, 83% of survey respondents took a trip of any sort, spending an average of $2,849 per journey, and 55% stayed at hotels with ratings of four or more stars.
Disconect between Travel Sites and Facebook Users
October 26, 2011
It appears that Travel Sites don’t do that well in Facebook according to EyeForTravel’s article Are Facebook and Travel a Good Match? Travel appears to be under indexing in Facebook interaction relative to other categories.
Travel sites received .3% of referrals from Facebook (in other words, Facebook sent 3.4B visits to website and only 8.3M to travel sites).
Likewise, Travel sites are sending a decreasing amount of their visitors to Facebook:
While the research shows a positive correlation between visits to Facebook brand pages and conversion, they also show a minimal overlap between brand’s Facebook pages and the same brand’s website: <10%
Mobile Click-Throughs Higher, Conversion Lower
October 21, 2011
Travolution reports that click-through rates for travel searches on mobile devices are 61% higher than from conventional internet connections. the research came from Efficient Frontier.
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On average for the travel industry, click-through rates from a mobile device are 5.82%, compared to 3.56% from a normal computer based search.
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For the travel industry, mobile search remains small, with just 4.2% of total searches.
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The Cost Per Click (CPC) of mobile traffic is also 65% less than a standard computer search.
However the picture is markedly different for conversion rates on mobile, which were found to be 49% lower than from fixed-line computers.
Increase Trust in your Brand by Keeping Negative Comments
October 20, 2011
Dr. Brent Coker shares research from Facebook that demonstrates the POWER of negative reviews. In a nutshell, they compared a company with ONLY positive reviews vs. a company that also had negative reviews and responses to them.
The results demonstrated an increase trust in the brand:
Booking Window Patterns From Mobile Users – Tonite and Tomorrow
October 19, 2011
Dennis Schaal at Tnooz shares a gem of booking data on the mobile booking window, based upon a GuestCentric study of mobile booking patterns at 300 hotels over a three month period:
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60% of mobile consumers are looking for hotel reservations tonight or tomorrow night;
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90% of mobile bookings take in some of the next six nights (i.e. tonight, tomorrow night or the following four nights);
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90% of mobile consumers book one to three nights; and
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95% of mobile consumers book one room.
Snippets from OpenTravel Presentation
May 1, 2011
Robert Cole reports dozens of interesting datapoints in Snippets and Factoids from Henry Harteveldt’s OpenTravel Presentation. Here are a few of my favorite:
Travelers:
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40% of travelers are seeking the lowest price
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“We (Forrester) have never seen a profitable Groupon deal for a travel supplier”
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44% of travelers will consider upgrading to better products
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25% of travelers are willing to pay a premium to save time or improve convenience
Websites:
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“Travel is the largest global online eCommerce category except for porn”
Mobile:
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Mobile devices have more computing power than Apollo 11
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35% of leisure travelers and 55% of business travelers use smartphones
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10% of travelers have downloaded a mobile travel app
Social:
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60% of travelers use a general search engine when planning travel
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Travel sellers must craft “story-arcs” a combination of micro journeys within a single trip
Direct Connect
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Survey of electronic distribution executives predicts share of GDS bookings will decline from 21.7 % in 2010 to 15.5% in 2016
Visit the blog post to see many more.
Insightful data from Tripadvisor
April 29, 2011
The Revinate Blog shares some facinating data from Tripadvisor that should be helpful to all hotels and all kinds of lodging properties.
The vast majority of reviews on TripAdvisor are positive. The average is 3.9. As of October, 2010 the breakdown of stars is: 1 star – 9% 2 stars – 8% 3 stars – 11% 4 stars – 27% 5 stars – 45%
10% of TripAdvisor’s traffic comes from mobile, mostly in the form of people surfing during the weekend or at night, when they’re not in front of their computers.
Properties with more than 20 photos get 150% more engagement.
When deciding between 2 hotels, 65% of people say that seeing a management response would sway them to book with the responding hotel. (Forrester)
Visit the post to learn more, including an interview about the Tripadvisor popularity algorithm and few tips that might help you handle your reviews more skillfully.
I usually don’t editorialize in these posts… but this content excited me. While it is hard to actually control your reviews, if you put up a bunch of photos AND respond to reviews, you can get a whole lot more out of the system. The percentage of hotels doing both those is in the single digits… low single digits!