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The Travel Marketing Digest
14th October 2013 - Volume III, issue 5
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IN THIS ISSUE.....
Dear Industry Colleagues and Friends,
Welcome to The Travel Marketing Digest.
In this edition of The Travel Marketing Digest we cover:
- Gulf News' coverage of The Global Travel Marketing Forum
- Booking.com partner with New York City
- Airline leading brands by value, latest rankings
- TripAdvisor's first TV advertisement
- Best ranked U.S. Hotel brands for digital innovation
- CNN's Richard Quest reviews an airline auction platform to obtain an upgrade
- From the blog: other new news items from our blog, CMOsInTravel.com includes:
- Ryan Air unveil a new digital strategy and seek to become more social!
- Where2TravelNext, a new free online portal for travel agents
- Assessment of Thomas Cooks re-brand
- Tourism Fiji launch a new global campaign
- Kenyan Tourism Board remains upbeat after terrorist attacks
- Carnival Cruises launch new campaign
Best regards,
Duncan Alexander
Director
The Travel Marketing Store
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Coverage of The Global Travel Marketing Forum 2014 by gulfnews.com
By Alexander Cornwell, Staff Reporter, Gulf News
ClearTrip have targeted to reach a million downloads of their mobile application by the end of the year, Tarique Khatri, Senior Vice- President Business Development at the online and mobile travel site said.
Speaking at The Global Travel Marketing Forum in Dubai on 25th October, Khatri told Gulf News the company had significant growth in mobile application downloads.
"We're very bullish on this and have seen half a million downloads already with just the one product," he said.
ClearTrip launched their mobile application in July 2013 on the iPhone application store and followed with launches on other platforms. Khatri said the ClearTrip application had been downloaded 500,000 thousands since its launch.
Despite significant downloads the mobile application makes up just 10 per cent of travel bookings made through ClearTrip with users still predominantly choosing to book online. Khatri said that ClearTrip would like to see mobile application bookings increase to 25 per cent.
Khatri said that online bookings were continuing to increase and that travellers had already began booking their Christmas and end of year holidays through ClearTrip. He said that low cost carrier bookings were increasing in a market that was previously dominated by full service carriers.
"There is a shift happening where we see 25-30 per cent of bookings are now made on low cost carriers," he said.
In recent months ClearTrip has noticed an increase in white collar customers including management and senior management booking through their website and application. Khatri said ClearTrip had also seen a lot of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) companies using their service for unmanaged business travel.
Another trend emerging as the year comes to an end is a significant reduction in air fares. Khatri said one reason for the airlines to be aggressively competing on price was of excess capacity of selected routes and pressure to maintain strong year-to-date growth.
Khatri demonstrated on his smartphone through the ClearTrip application. He searched a Dubai-to-London return flight over the December - January period and found a Dh2,500 airfare. He said airfares on this route could cost as much has Dh3,500 - Dh4,000 on this route over this period depending on demand.
Scott Booth, Associate Research Director at market research agency YouGov, said online engagement was still a lot more entrenched globally than it was in the region. Booth said that there is an increasing demand for mobile interaction with customers.
Increasing demand has led travel and tourism customers to rethink their strategy on how to target consumers. Booth said that consumers increasingly wanted tailored content that was easy, seamless, effortless and but involved little to no cost. He said that consumer trends meant that customers wanted to receive push notifications to create a richer travel experience that was relevant to them.
One of the many topics discussed at The Global Travel Marketing Forum was the acceptance of digital technology. Branding is one companies are able to build the profile of their services however in a multi-lingual region such as the Middle East it is important offer content in a variety of languages.
Dan Cross, Territory Manager - Middle East and Africa at travel website TripAdvisor, said the global economic crisis forced the UAE to rapidly catch up with the rest of the world in online technology usage. He said that it previously was not fully ultisied like it was in other countries.
Since the crisis companies have had to adapt to a completely new sales channel, Cross who previously worked in the online travel agency (OTA) industry, said.
For TripAdvisor in the Middle East and Africa it is more educating companies in the travel and tourism industry on how travel website can contribute to their business, he said, because more often than not a lot of travellers - business or leisure - will look to TripAdvisor before making a booking.
Cross said that TripAdvisor has with two mobile applications it has had 36 million download globally. He said that its website receives a contribution a second from all over the world and of the 200 million clicks its gets each month, 62 million come from its apps.
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L2, a think tank for digital innovation, has published its report on digital performance for U.S. Hotels
The 2013 Digital IQ Index�: Hotels report assesses the digital performance of 48 U.S. Hotel brands in the Economy, Midscale, Upper Midscale, and Upscale categories across the dimensions of Site, Digital Marketing, Social Media and Mobile.
http://vimeo.com/75435512
Top 10 Ranking
Members Download (Full Report)Non-Members Download (Excerpt)
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The Most Valuable Airline Brands
By Rafat Ali: Skift
Airline brands don't usually show up in the list of global most valuable, loved or biggest brand rankings done by various agencies such as Interbrand and others. And yet, airlines are among the most high profile consumer brands that exist, and surely generate a lot of mainstream media attention, most of it these days about consumer frustrations with them.
Brand Finance, a global brand valuation and marketing consultancy, recently came out with its rankings of the top 20 most valuable airline brands, using its methodology where it uses the net present value of the estimated future cash flows attributable to the brand in question. The methodology is described in detail here.
Emirates, not surprisingly, rules the roost, topping out as the most valuable airline brand for a second year running, followed by Lufthansa and then Delta, which climbed up a rank this year. Delta, United, Southwest and American are the four U.S. brands on the list, and three Chinese airlines also make the top 20 list.
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TripAdvisor launches first TV advertising campaign
Travel-review website TripAdvisor this week launched its first television advertising campaign in its 13-year history.
TripAdvisor unveiled two 30-second advertisements, both of which remind viewers of the site's green-bubbled one-to-five user-review scale.
One ad, titled "The Vacationer," wordlessly follows a hotel guest walking to her hotel room and opening the room's curtains to reveal an ocean view, causing her "green bubble" ranking to increase to five from three bubbles.
| TripAdvisor presents: Every experience counts - The Vacationer |
The other ad, titled "Room Service" shows a hotel reviewer's ranking increase to five from four bubbles after a hotel employee brings him a tube of toothpaste. TripAdvisor says additional ads are being planned.
Founded in 2000, TripAdvisor has more than 100 million reviews of about 3 million hotels, restaurants and other attractions.
| TripAdvisor presents: Every experience counts - Room Service |
"There are 260 million unique visitors to TripAdvisor every month, which is amazing, but that also means there are still over 2 billion Internet users we want to reach," said TripAdvisor Chief Marketing Officer Barbara Messing.
TripAdvisor's second-quarter net income surged 26% from a year earlier, to $67 million, on growth across all its operations. While its primary click-advertising operations boosted revenue 21%, subscription and transaction revenue jumped 68% from a year earlier. Overall revenue increased 25% to $246.9 million.
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NYC & Company announces new partnership with site Booking.com
NYC & Company, New York City's official marketing, tourism and partnership organization, announces a new partnership with Booking.com - the world's largest accommodation booking site- to increase tourism and generate additional hotel bookings to the nation's number one big city tourism destination.
Booking.com will become the exclusive hotel booking engine powering the City's official tourism website, nycgo.com, helping NYC & Company bolster incremental hotel bookings during key need periods, exclusively for its hotel member properties. Consumers visiting www.nycgo.com/hotels make New York City hotel reservations using the new e-commerce offering, a first-of-its-kind, hotel booking platform promoting a travel destination."
We are pleased to join with Booking.com to provide consumers from around the globe with easy access to the best hotel inventory at every style and price point in the nation's number one big city tourism destination. Tourism in the City continues to grow with 53 million visitors anticipated by year's end, and a hotel sector that continues to experience record growth," said NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta. - See more at: NYC & Company announces new partnership with site Booking.com.
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CNN's Richard Quest reviews PlusGrade, an airline online upgrade tool for travellers
Richard Quest from CNN reviews a solution that is seeing rapid adoption by Airlines across the world to provide a solution for customers to bid for a last minute upgrade. The system uses detailed profiling to offer airline customers to bid for an upgrade to a higher class of travel. This has its risks that Richard explores.
| Plusgrade on CNN - Quest Means Business |
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Coming Soon: The Travel Marketing Directory
The Travel Marketing Store has teamed up with D2i SYSTEMS to build the next phase of our business and to provide an online Directory of Travel Marketing Suppliers.
This will provide a facility for user generated content and automated subscriptions for Travel Marketing Services Suppliers to list and promote themselves.
At its launch The Travel Marketing Directory comes with three levels of participation:
- Free: basic company listing with contact details
- Standard: $300 per annum: logo placement and additional space for promotional copy
- Premium: $800 per annum: logo, extra copy space, ability to load corporate presentations/video clips, links to your corporation's social marketing sites, ability to book appointments at our events and outside of our events.
The directory is divided into 5 broad categories with over 30 sub categories of marketing services.
Further details will be made available soon as we prepare for the launch of The Travel Marketing Directory.
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Secure communications on the move
SeeCrypt is a downloadable application that costs as little as $3 a month and allows users to make encrypted voice and text messages using military strength encryption. The application is provided by Porton Group, a privately held venture capital firm specialising in commercialisation of military technologies. The timing of their roll-out could not be better. The application currently runs on Apple, Android and Blackberry 10. It enables Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls for free with the added benefit of the best in cryptology, key management and information security. Two users can make unlimited calls and messaging from anywhere in the world at no additional cost.
ENJOY THE APPLICATION FOR FREE FOR SIX MONTHS WITH THE TRAVEL MARKETING STORE REFERRAL CODE:
1. Download Seecrypt from the Apple/Google store (depending on your device).
2. Register with your email address and set a new password.
3. Enter this referral code: FLYSAFE.
4. Go to your email and verify your email address (very important) - click on the link.
5. Log in to your Seecrypt account to check all your details and active devices.
6. Invite your colleagues, family and friends to create your own secure network.
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Seecrypt Mobile
The Privacy Solution
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Porton Group are the main sponsor of The Global Travel Marketing Forum. They will present and discuss this important issue for those involved in the travel industry and in the wider private and government sectors at our event.
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The best of the blog.
"The Forum for Travel Marketing Specialists"
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The Travel Marketing Store
Nicky Baxter
Editor
The Travel Marketing Digest |
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Images courtesy of Shutterstock
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