Summer tourism: School returns to travel agencies
Hold on to your hammock: School is out and Americans will take more than 325 million vacations in June, July and August. About 65 million of them were researched or booked online.
If that’s not enough to suggest an online opportunity for travel agencies, consider this:
The online travel market is estimated at $60 billion and growing rapidly;
Online bookings average $750, vs. $400 offline;
In 2006, for the first time, more trips were booked online than by any other means;
The next most common method, phone booking, has plummeted 16 percent since 2005 and
Travelers who use the Internet to plan and purchase trips almost always visit multiple sites.
The big players are cashing in. Online travel agents like Orbitz® and Expedia® continue to thrive, but face competition from two new sources. Travel research sites, or “meta-sites,” like Mobissimo®, use customer criteria to search hundreds of sites for the best fit. Research-oriented sites include traditional guidebook publishers like Fodor’s® and online-only startups like Realtravel.com®.
Is there room for smaller players? Yes. People shop around when planning a trip, no matter how big or beautiful a particular website is: if they can find your site, it seems like they’ll come.
Therefore, a crucial step is to boost search engine visibility. An expert search engine optimization partner enables the travel agency website to attract a share of the huge traffic by:
Create and update keyword/keyphrase content;
Develop an effective and ethical linkage strategy;
Site element development rewards search engines;
Clean up site elements that are penalized by search engines, and
Discover additional improvements by analyzing the date of the site.
Of course, once visitors start arriving, the travel agency needs a compelling message to keep them there. Most importantly, your website must communicate your company’s position in the industry and its unique value, and provide the information your target customers want. The site should be easy to navigate, load fast, and invite communication with the customer.
There appears to be little to no slowdown in leisure travel, despite a bumpy economy and high fuel prices; one can only imagine the growth when conditions improve. But opportunity does not guarantee success in a changing market. The travel industry is rapidly reaching the point where the Internet will dominate to the near exclusion of all other sales channels. Companies can take advantage of becoming web marketing stars, or retire to the hammock.