Travel sites have a huge amount of data on search trends and consumer preferences run through their booking paths and search forms. I can’t think of anyone else who has opened this up in the online travel world. Plenty of other travel companies have merchandising lists of their top destinations etc but they are based on their sales priorities as well as popularity so quite different to this almost realtime user data (if of course it is true data and not tainted). I know of online travel firms who feed this kind of data back into their web apps but not any who give it away in this manner.

So some powerful consumer intent data, I can think of a number of ways you could use this. This is great data for anyone (competitors, affiliates) who want to know what to target destination or hotel wise. Focus on these destinations, if they’re being searched for on Kayak users want product associated with them. Put them on your websites, marketing assets and in your ECRM shots. People must surely be looking at how they can monitor or scrape this data to inform their merchandising decisions, PPC/SEO campaigns (Bid more on the destinations and hotels that are hot on Kayak. Can you assume they will be searched for more on Google when they’re in the Kayak Trends? Long tail flight terms anyone?). You could use it to inform the biasing of your search results, or even to help you highlight areas where your inventory may be lacking.

Kayak will I’m sure have thought of all of that and probably won’t be bothered as their business model is to get as many users through the site and referred on to the agents, airlines and operators from their search results, which they do extremely well.

It’s a great move and I applaud Kayak for being so open. I hope that something positive comes from this; that other online travel sites see this data and realise the power of it, and so start to collect and utilise the data their own websites generate. Too many don’t do that (you may be surprised to hear).

Chris says he uses Twitter before he visits a city to find out who’s there, where they go and what’s good to do. I’ve used Twitter myself for just those reasons when I visited Japan in May and more recently on a trip to Texas. The information returned is pretty good just by using Twitter search but ask a question and you get even better recommendations and content.

I’m thinking that if Twitter could be mined for all the recommendations people make for things in a certain location and a positive/negative sentiment filter be applied to it you’d actually have a pretty good service for travellers. Concierge service in 140 characters anyone? Trust would obviously be an issue but it wouldn’t surprise me (or others here and this article from Chris Brogan again is worth reading on reputation) to see Twitter launching some sort of reputation filter in the future which when combined with sentiment will open up mining of Twitter content to many more uses. Tapping Twitter in a way that delivers the nuggets of information held within in a usable format with sentiment and reputation considered is something I’ve yet to see from any ‘trend’ tool. Does such a thing exist yet?

There’s a new(ish) beta on Google for a Merchant search (only appears when you’re in the right place searching the right thing). This is basically a price comparison engine, currently only serving the loan market. My question is, could this power a travel price comparison engine and so switch users to this type of interface and functionality if they search for the right travel related keywords? Could Google then become an affiliate to travel companies? I’d imagine TravelSupermarket would hope not!!

Quote: Imagine, for instance, being able to ask a computer, “Where should I go on holiday?” and receiving an answer that is as suitable as anything you could have come up with yourself. That level of computer-generated reasoning is on the horizon, says Nova Spivack, one of the entrepreneurs involved. It may still take 15 years or more to be fully realised, but between now and then lies a series of breakthroughs that will revolutionise the way we draw information from the web, he adds.

Perhaps this is where the efforts of the online travel industry should be placed, the benefits of being first to market with an intelligent holiday finder (a kind of online concierge/travel agent experience) will be huge…

On the subject of semantic web, here’s some more great reading from Ian Davis over at Nodalities.

It seems aimed at the Farecast/Kayak arena of comparison and aggregator sites but with a twist which could set it apart. For once in the travel sector they aren’t purely about finding you the cheapest price for a flight, rather they are trying to find you quality.

Flights are rated on price, speed, comfort and ease. The interface flights are returned in is familiar, it has all the AJAX filter tools of Farecast et al but there’s filters for quality too.

In this day of massive GDS’s which have hundreds of airlines and so many different ways to get from point to point by air this is actually a really nice idea. Many passengers will choose a flight based on factors other than price, especially when the cheapest option could be longer, less comfortable and less convenient.

They have filters for Speed which includes number of stops, travel duration, on-time stats and security wait time. Comfort includes legroom, aircraft type, aircraft age and historical load factor. Ease means connect time, routing quality, lost bags rank and gate location. All extremely valid factors for influencing a choice of flights.

If the data behind these options is accurate and complete then I can see this catching on. If InsideTrip aren’t succesful themselves I’d expect to see these kind of search filters and options appearing on other online travel agents and aggregators pretty soon as they are just so useful to the customer.

Is it time for a new approach to the interface for these sites though?

Looks pretty familiar doesn’t it…

January is the peak booking month for holidays in the UK and as such the number of web users researching and buying is much bigger than any other month of the year.

January’s figures show that the biggest increasing category in travel was hotels/resorts with a 54% increase in traffic from Dec-Jan. Airlines were next with 46% and online travel agents third with 43%. Quite where tour operators come in there is a bit of a mystery to me, it would be really interesting to see them broken out to compare with OTA’s.

Within travel two websites saw huge growth, First Choice grew 140% and TUI Group 122%. British Airways, Moneysupermarket Group and Priceline all feature as well with good growth.

Nothing unexpected in any of this but it does highlight the gaps in ComScores data as the market as a whole is not very well represented.

Of course it would also be intriguing to know if their booking numbers increased by similar percentages…

I looked at some of these a while back, seems they could do with a new review which I’ll get round to soon.

Interestingly, Pricegrabber.co.uk looks like it will be up for sale soon and Mike Butcher at Techcrunch has a good piece looking into a possible shake-out that may happen to UK sites.

Detail is here at Hotelmarketing.com but in a nutshell this seems to suggest that the old model of ‘booking engine only’ websites is losing favour as users want a richer, more immersive and customer focused experience rather than simply a one size fits all approach to buying travel online.

The online travel industry has dropped 1.3% as a whole, Expedia lost 3.8% and now scores 75 (the highest).

The next generation of travel websites can’t be far away, hopefully the advances in technology will allow customer satisfaction to be dramatically improved through the use of advanced usability techniques, customer profiling and tools which enable rather than just sell, sell, sell.

It gets straight to the point of the matter by identifying that travel providers need to adapt to give their users a personalised buying experience that gives all the reassurance of speaking face to face with a travel agent while at the same time securing the best revenues for inventory. The ability to size up a website visitor and instantly offer them a tailored experience which meets their needs and offers them products they will be attracted to is seen as a kind of holy grail in the e-commerce world. Travel could be the industry to get that right as most companies have a wealth of data and understanding of their consumers which can be used to segment and target their offering more effectively. CRM based e-commerce is the way forwards (in my opinion), have a relationship with your visitors and let them know that so they feel special (and more inclined to buy with you).

A tough task, but the article goes on to rightly hint that the technology is now in place to allow this.

Another salient point from the article is that the large players operate pretty much on price alone with very little to differentiate them otherwise. Consumers are getting pickier now and this kind of approach won’t work for much longer unless you have the user experience to match.

In my opinion the only thing holding the industry back from breaking this new customer focused way of selling is a lack of foresight and a nervousness which prevents them going the extra mile to offer the all out personalised, segmented buying experience. It won’t be long though until someone breaks the mould and comes up with something truly engaging which also ticks all the commercial boxes.

Throw in semantic technologies and you will have a ground breaking web experience to offer…

Great article! Go give it a read!

Seems that’s not the case though. Robin Goad of Hitwise has a post which talks about some paid and organic search trends in travel and shopping sites through 2007. One really interesting chart shows that the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds categories paid search activity actually decreased in 2007 compared to 2006. Travel on the other hand grew by 15-20% during the final three months of the year.

Also, there a great chart showing the trend for paid search traffic to the two categories from late 2006 to the end of 2007.Interesting dip around July 2007 there. Anyone hazard a guess at what that may be? I know it’s not the busiest month of the year but that’s a hefty drop in paid search spend.