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Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

More people are visiting holiday websites than ever before, according to new research. So is it just because of the wet summer, or is the net now the only way to book travel, asks Guy Clapperton

Monday August 2, 2004

It's so tempting to start a piece on the holiday industry's performance online by asking whether readers are enjoying the summer weather, but somehow this year (so far) that would seem cruel. It's been very wet and unseasonal and there's no point in claiming otherwise; this might in part explain claims from the online research company Hitwise that June 2004 saw more people visiting holiday websites than any previous month, January this year having held the previous record.
According to Hitwise, the industry accounted for 4.16% of all visits online during June, and it enjoyed a 23% increase in visits compared with June 2003. The destinations and accommodations sub-sector increased the most, boosting its market share of visits by 33%. The most popular terms typed into a search engine over a 12-week period leading into June included "easyjet", "ryanair" and generic terms such as "cheap flights" and "cheap holidays".
A wish to escape is only one of the factors involved. Hitwise general manager Simon Chamberlain suggests that it's not a sudden phenomenon. "The whole year-on-year change is that the trough is a little smaller and the peak is a little higher, and I think that's a healthy sign," he says.
"The cycles indicate that travel as a market category is reaching a level of maturity - we're no longer in a place where the business cycles are out of step with traditional business."
This overall maturity is underpinned by a number of things, he suggests. The companies that use the internet as a key channel to get to their customers are making fewer mistakes, he believes, and gaining better benefits from their online strategies. "They're all engaged in customer-acquisition strategies that cut across lots of different online approaches, whether it be through emails and newsletters or through search marketing, which is a key growth area in the past 12 months, or through affiliates and partners."
It's not just the outreach that's making the sector grow, however, it's the fact that customers are coming back more than they have done in previous years. There are a number of reasons for this. Ian Wheeler, managing director of e-travel, which sells the technology that underpins many online travel sites across 90 countries - some of the best known in the UK are Opodo, Travelink, Qantas and Air France - points to some of them: "Booking online is about economies of scale and trust - the more people try online the more people are comfortable."
This means more people will book, so more profit is made and more money can be thrown at advertising the online site. And, of course, the online booker's experience is improving by degrees. "If you go on to Opodo and search for a fare between London and Sydney you'll now get 200 fare options, and some options are options you'd never dream of if you were working out your cheapest price - or you can pay a slightly higher price but get something convenient. Then you go on to hotels and you get a vast array of hotels, you get maps, you get pictures, you get a lot of data."
The quality of the information has improved as well as its quantity; you can book in five minutes or in five hours depending on how much data you want to sift through. "If you look at the offline booking experience it's really no longer comparable," says Wheeler. External factors are also important, he adds.
As BT has facilitated almost universal availability of broadband, there is no longer any financial penalty to spending time looking at the information, and it's faster, thanks not only to the speed of the net connection but also to compression technology put in place by outfits such as e-travel. This essentially means the computer thinks it's receiving less data than it is in order to display, say, a selection of pictures of a hotel or resort, so it displays it on the screen more quickly. Add to this people's increasing familiarity with computers thanks to their workplace and you have a compelling reason to book electronically.
If you pick up the phone to a hard-pressed call centre, they're on time limits - they need to get you off the phone in five minutes so they're not going to give you all the different options," says Wheeler. And if it's compelling for the traveller then the companies offering the services will benefit too - and not just through getting the customers in the first place.
Alain Portmann, founding director of the internet advertising agency WebLiquid, points to email: "It's a very powerful communications channel. Companies who get it completely right - Expedia do it quite well - use a lot of resource and technology in deploying a good campaign. Email is the most intimate relationship you can have with a consumer online." And developing such a relationship means tracking them properly and indeed servicing them - if someone has asked for information on flights to Malaga they don't want mails saying "great deals to Athens" or indeed anywhere else.
Anyone who has researched flights over a period of time will be aware that this sort of confusion happens. That entails segmenting the customers properly, which involves doing some hard work - but this has advantages in its own way.
Vanessa Kent, corporate development director for ValueClick Europe, which sells some of the web technology that goes "under the bonnet" to extract marketing data from customer behaviour, says the data on offer from a customer's clicks is much more sophisticated than ever before. "When you look at the marketing data in relation to an email you can do a lot with the technology to try and track a different user - there's all kinds of information on what they're doing, what they're searching for, what their preferences are, and then combined with media you can deliver a really targeted, preferential email to that user with exactly what they want."
Much of this has to do with the travel industry's online presence catching up with the growth enjoyed by its offline counterpart, but what is really interesting is the different model of buying and spending that is starting to emerge.
Nowhere in the offline world can a customer spend either hours or minutes searching for precisely what they want; walk into a travel agent and if they take you through more than three choices of holiday or flight on their screen, it's because they are in a good mood. Nor can the seller gain information of the same quality about a customer's buying habits, price sensitivity, likes, dislikes and tenacity when looking for something in any other environment.
It is perhaps not a surprise that, once the inhibitors such as patchy web availability are eliminated from the equation, travel will grow more quickly than anything else; it will be instructive to watch and see whether other industries can follow its impetus.


According to – według
To Account for – stanowić
affiliate – partner, osoba stowarzyszona
approach – podejście
availability – dostępność
benefit – korzyść
bonnet – maska (samochodu)
To boost – zwiększać
Broadband – łącze szerokopasmowe
BT – British Telecommunications
To claim – twierdzić
to combine – łączyć
compelling – nie do odparcia
convenient – dogodny
counterpart – odpowiednik
cycle – cykl
claim - twierdzenie
data – dane
to deploy – rozmieszczać
emerge – wyłaniać się
to engage – angażować
essentially – zasadniczo
to entail – pociągać za sobą
equation – równanie
extract – wyciągać, wydobywać
factor – czynnik
gain – zdobywać
generic - ogólny
impetus – rozpęd, bodziec
inhibitor – coś, co hamuje, powstrzymuje
involved – zaangażowany
maturity - dojrzałość
outreach – zasięg
quantity – ilość
patchy – niejednolity
peak - szczyt
penalty – kara
preferences – preferencje
to sift through – przesiewać, przebijać się
sophisticated – wyszukany
Tempting - kuszący
tenacity – nieustępliwość
to track – tropić, śledzić
trough - spadek
to underpin – podtrzymywać
vast array – szeroka gama


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