|
The Travel Marketing Digest
31th August 2012 - Volume 1, issue 4 |
|
|
|
IN THIS ISSUE.....
Dear Industry Colleagues and Friends,
With just under four weeks until our launch event in Dubai we have some exciting news about our speaker line up. The world's leading brand valuation company, Brand Finance, will be represented by Hany Mwafy. Hany will cover the value of brand assets, their methodology to measure brand value and reveal the ranking of some the world's top travel brands. Ashis Kumar Ray from SkyTECH solutions will cover the increasingly relevant issue of BIG DATA and how travel marketing departments can harness vast volumes of information. We will also be joined by Giles Mascaras from TravelPort who will provide insights into their corporate strategy and take part in our wider debate on the optimal channel mix.
For many parts of the world it has been a holiday period but significant travel marketing news was still being made. Four items over the last two weeks have caught our eye:
- Google's acquisition of Frommer's and some negative reactions
- Amadeus's financial growth
- An industry report on the performance of e-mail marketing across regions and sectors
- Information provided by Nielsen on the use of smart phone applications versus mobile web in travel search for the US Market
Best regards,
Duncan Alexander
Director
The Travel Marketing Store
|
|
Without Frontiers
The Global Travel Marketing Forum
Our speaker line up expands
We now have a truly fascinating and exciting line up for the Global Travel Marketing Forum.
As you can see we have a interesting cross section of travel companies, marketing services suppliers and travel technology companies who will provide insights and breakthrough thinking in travel marketing.
For the full speaker line up and details of our event follow this link: Travel Marketing without Frontiers, Dubai 26-27 September |
 Google acquires Frommer's and faces opposition:
TTMS
Google has acquired travel guidebook publisher Frommer's from John Wiley & Sons. This is yet another example of Google's expansion into the travel industry with their acquisition of ITA and Zagat.
Google also owns Google Flights (ITA) and Hotel Finder, two tools that customers can use to look up their flights and itineraries via Gmail. Frommer's is an established publisher of guidebooks and hosts a website that books travel, offers trip ideas, information and mobile apps.
This is raising some interesting questions regarding Google's search strategy. Traditionally Google has lead customers to the best search results but in the case of travel will they now integrate their search engine in favour of their acquired content assets? This is raising many eyebrows.
Consumer Watchdog and FairSearch.org are calling on government regulators to block Google's purchase of Frommer's. FairSearch.org, a group of companies including Microsoft, Expedia, and TripAdvisor among others, released a blog post about Google's latest acquisition. In it they stated:
"As Google expands beyond general search into content development in key search verticals, FairSearch.org encourages government officials to look closely at its ability to use its dominance in search and search advertising to steer users away from competitors in order to keep users on Google's own pages longer, and the potentially devastating effects that could have on the online economy."
In the same blog FairSearch.com quoted Forbes' Jeff Bercovi, "How long can Google be a fair arbiter of all the world's information when it increasingly has information of its own that it wants to promote?"
 The Travel Marketing Store's view is somewhat different. All corporations should be free to pursue their vision as long as laws are not broken and dominance is not abused. It remains to be seen how Google deploys and integrates its existing, new and future travel assets but if they are giving customers what they want, easy to find and authoritative travel information, and remain within the law, then why should others try to create false frontiers?
Clearly one of the interesting topics to be discussed at our forthcoming event in Dubai. |
|
Amadeus reports yet another strong financial performance
TTMS
In early August The Amadeus Group announced year-on-year financial and operating results for the first half of 2012. Adjusted profit for the first half increased 26.1% to reach EUR 332.5 million, due principally to the substantial reduction in interest expense. This was backed by growth in revenue of 8.6% to EUR 1,508.9 million and a 6.1% rise in EBITDA to EUR 606.9 million.
Luis Maroto, President & CEO of Amadeus, commented on the first half of the year:
"Despite the on-going challenges of the global economic environment, this has been a successful first half of the year and we have continued our growth record. Once again this sustained improved performance was underpinned by growth across both our businesses: Distribution's revenue increased 7.2%, backed by a 1% expansion of global market share; whilst IT Solutions' revenue rose 13.6%, supported by a 27.0% growth in Passengers Boarded.
 Luis went on to highlight their key contracts in North America, a market which has taken Amadeus many years to penetrate. These include the Altea contract with Southwest Airlines, a contract with Expedia for content and another with KAYAK.
He did however provide a cautionary comment:
"The global economic outlook remains uncertain, and air traffic and GDS volumes have shown weakness in recent months, driven by the economic environment. Nonetheless, we believe that our business model will continue to prove resilient and support good results for the second half of this year."
Amadeus is indeed well placed with a strong customer base and a diverse and increasingly global revenue structure. In addition there are still many large travel companies reviewing the future of their existing IT systems which may present new market opportunities. We look forward to discussing Amadeus' future plans at The Global Travel Marketing Forum with Antoine Medawar, Gulf Regional Head for Amadeus. |
|
 E-Mail marketing performance?
A useful benchmark study provided by Silverpop
TTMS
Silverpop, a leading provider of an on-demand marketing platform, has released an interesting report on the performance of e-mail marketing across regions and across industry sectors.
Their research looked at all e-mails sent during 2011 and Q1 2012 across 1,124 brands and 20 countries in North America and EMEA. The travel sector lags behind other sectors such as financial services and consumer electronics in their e-mail performance ratios.
The travel sector has a low comparative click through rate of 1.42% compared to
Media & Publishing, 8.9%, Computer Software, 8.5%, and Consumer Services, 5.7% . "The higher click-through rates may be attributable to these industries typically delivering content lighter on sales related messaging and heavier on news, information and educational materials" states the report.
The unsubscribe rate for The Travel & Leisure sector was highest at 1.64%, significantly higher than any other sector. According to Silverpop "this may be attributable to the nature of that industry - people subscribe when researching or booking a vacation, then unsubscribe once the trip is complete".
Compared to other sectors the travel sector fares better with hard bounce rates of 1.7%. This is probably due to the effort made by travel companies to acquire mail addresses and the use of CRM/Loyalty programmes.
The table summarises the statistics for the Travel & Leisure sector enabling you to benchmark your own e-mail performance.
Since we launched The Travel Marketing Digest on the 21st July we have sent over 8,500 mails. Our open rate is 17.8%, CTR is 7.8%, our unsubscribe at 0.7%. Initially we had a very high bounce rate but we have brought that down significantly to 0.5% as we cleaned up our e-mail addresses. It's not a bad start but we can clearly see that we need to improve to get to the top of the tree in terms of opens but our click through rate is good. We hope you find the report useful and it can be found at the following link:
Silverpop e-mail marketing benchmark report. |
Nielsen publish data on use of applications versus mobile web on US smartphones
TTMS
This useful graphic published by Nielsen, a leading market research agency, clearly demonstrates the dominance of applications versus mobile web search for travel information. There are variances across types of travel information being searched but on the whole smart phone users prefer using applications.
The leading application was Google Maps which had 77.8M users in June 2012 from Android and iPhone handsets. 8.9M used Gasbuddy and 4.5M used Streetview. Southwest Airlines was the leading travel application with 7.5M users.
The lesson here for travel companies is to engage in these applications or create their own. |
|
|
|
|
The Travel Marketing Store
Nicky Baxter
Editor
The Travel Marketing Digest |
|
|
Images courtesy of Shutterstock
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
