Are Travel Brands Failing to Capitalize on Own-Brand Traffic?

Travel marketers spend a huge amount of time trying to get people on to their brand’s booking channels but should they instead spend more time improving these channels? A new white paper suggests that closing the loop is the most profitable thing marketers can do

For every customer that makes a booking on your site, it is highly likely you have already digitally encountered them. That’s the conclusion of EyeforTravel’s new Understanding the Travel Consumer’s Path to Purchase white paper. It looks at real purchase data from more than a quarter of a million consumers across five countries and found that three quarters of consumers will visit and then leave a travel site, before coming back to it to complete their purchase.

The research looked at Online Travel Agency (OTA), airline and hotel verticals, tracking the 15 sites a consumer looks at before they make a purchase. OTA sites were visited between 73% and 78% of the time before conversion, airlines between 69% and 84%, and hotels between 69% and 70%. This suggests that all types of travel brands should aim to convert these visitors first time and optimizing their sites so that consumers don’t feel the need to shop around.

This is particularly the case for hotel brands, as the white paper finds that their conversion rates lag noticeably behind airline and OTA desktop conversion rates in Brazil, India and Germany. Furthermore, across all geographies both airline and hotel brands have substantially lower conversion rates for mobile bookings in comparison with  OTAs.

“Reportedly, travel purchases in Q4 2016 had an above average abandonment rate of 82%,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel, “and I think that this research reinforces the importance of getting the fundamentals right so that rate reduces. Travel brands need to get their own-brand site right across all devices because this is one of the most cost-effective ways of driving better profitability, especially as, typically, half of users will abandon a site if it takes more than two or three seconds to load.”

EyeforTravel and Jumpshot tracked more than a quarter of a million travel purchasers across five countries through clickstream data and consumer surveys to build a picture of the path to purchase. The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.

To download the complete white paper and find all the research click here.

Over half of visitors to travel sites now using mobile

Mobile is now the primary means with which visitors interact with travel sites, according to new research from EyeforTravel and Jumpshot

More than half of visitors to travel websites are now using mobile devices in Brazil, India, the UK and the US reports EyeforTravel’s Understanding the Travel Consumer’s Path to Purchase white paper. This rises to two thirds of consumers in India, where smartphones are more important for accessing the internet.

In Brazil and the US 54% of daily visitors to travel sites used mobile devices, with a slightly higher 57% doing so in the UK. The data was captured using clickstream data from white paper partner Jumpshot’s panel of more than 100 million consumers, which tracked visitors across major travel sites in each country.

However, the paper notes that travel brands cannot increase focus on one channel at the expense of another, as consumers are largely adopting a multichannel approach to researching and then purchasing travel, with different devices more important at different stages of the process. Data presented in the paper shows that consumers frequently cross over from primarily using mobile devices to research their travel options, to desktops and laptops in the purchase phase. Desktop conversion rates are also considerably higher than for mobile in all the countries studied, further demonstrating that, for the time being, desktops and laptops remain the primary booking devices, if not the main drivers for research.

Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel emphasised that “travel brands should be getting ready for a mobile-led future if they have not already done so. The demographics we have studied in this paper are clear, with younger generations clearly more inclined to use mobile devices compared to older generations. Although baby boomers are still the generation with the greatest disposable income, millennials are now the largest generation demographically in the West and alongside the populations in developing economies, which are also younger and more mobile-focused, they will change the way travel is viewed and consumed.”

EyeforTravel and Jumpshot tracked more than a quarter of a million travel purchasers across five countries through clickstream data and consumer surveys to build a picture of the path to purchase. The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.

To download the complete white paper and read all the research click here.

Fifth of travel consumers visit social media immediately before booking a vacation

On average, a fifth of travel consumers visit a social media site immediately before purchasing a vacation according to new research from EyeforTravel and Jumpshot.

Social media domains continue to be visited late into the travel funnel, with users regularly connecting with a social media site within 15 sites of their final purchase destination. This was one of the findings from EyeforTravel’s Understanding the Travel Consumer’s Path to Purchase white paper. This used clickstream data gathered through research partner Jumpshot’s panel of more than 100 million customers, tracking consumers who made a purchase on an airline, hotel or Online Travel Agency (OTA) brand in Brazil, Germany, India, the UK and US.

In all countries and purchase paths measured, social media sites were visited in at least 15% of the cases, rising to just under a quarter of those booking on OTAs in the UK and US.

Additionally, 6% to 12% of consumers visited YouTube in their pre-purchase path, pushing the usage of social media up further.

The white paper notes that travel marketers should “continue to view social media as a useful marketing tool up until the point of purchase, but with a focus on programmatic advertising targeting offers that will attract clicks in the latter sections of the funnel. This is especially so because there is a strong possibility that a brand can pick up considerable tracking data in these latter stages to fully personalize an ad.”

The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.

To download the complete white paper and read all the research click here.

OTAs are winning the battle for the customer

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are leading the competition when it comes to online engagement, particularly with regards to mobile traffic, according to new research from EyeforTravel and Jumpshot.

Over the last 18 months, hotels and airlines have been on a drive to win customer loyalty, but EyeforTravel and Jumpshot’s new Understanding the Travel Consumer’s Path to Purchase white paper shows they still have a long way to go. According to both clickstream data gathered by Jumpshot from more than a quarter of a million travel purchases and EyeforTravel consumer surveys, OTAs are winning more bookings than travel suppliers, and by a noticeable margin. 

In Germany, the UK and the US OTAs represent the largest vertical, taking a greater number of bookings than airline and accommodation brands. In the US, the paper compared clickstream data tracking purchases made on Booking.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb.com, Hotels.com, Delta, Southwest, United, Ryanair, Easyjet, Lufthansa, Emirates, Marriott, Hilton IHG and Wyndham. It found that OTAs were responsible for 42% of the bookings made in the period measured, against 39% for airlines and just 19% for hotel brands. 

In the UK and Germany, consumer surveys of nearly 4,500 travellers presented in the paper revealed that OTAs controlled 46.5% and 47.1% of the bookings made on web browsers across all devices in the two countries. 

Even when consumers finished their purchase on a hotel or airline site, they were more likely to have visited an OTA site along the way than a hotel or airline site. For example, 33% of German consumers who bought a flight through an airline also visited an OTA along the way but just 13% also went via a competitor airline brand.

Not only this but traffic is increasingly heading towards mobile, where OTAs are convincingly ahead. OTAs across the five countries studied – Brazil, Germany, India, the UK and US – all saw higher conversion rates than airline or hotel brands in the study. Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel, emphasised how important this is going to be: “Mobile optimization is going to be critical for the survival of all travel brands. Firstly, mobile is in the ascendancy, becoming the primary means of travel research over the last year or so and this will increase as younger consumers, who are heavier mobile users anyway, become more prominent in travel consumption. Secondly,  search engines are also becoming more mobile-focused in how they rank sites. This is especially important as 9 out of 10 consumers visit a search engine in the final 15 sites before purchase, according to this research.”

EyeforTravel and Jumpshot tracked more than a quarter of a million travel purchasers across five countries through clickstream data and consumer surveys to build a picture of the path to purchase. The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.  

To download the complete white paper and read all the research click here.