Travel 2.0 vs Search Engines – Where is your Travel traffic going to come from?

With the emergence of Travel 2.0 services and the current reliance on Search Engines for traffic it is becoming interesting on where a Travel Seller should focus their effort and whether Travel 2.0 services are going to be more effective than the generic Search Engine.

There have been recently some interesting articles relating to this topic which emphasise the interest in this area and most are saying that the Travel 2.0 applications are and are going to be more effective than a generic search engine.

Hotel Marketing: UK searches favor travel 19th September 2007
Britons online are most likely to be searching for travel deals, social networks or reference information through sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, says Nielsen//NetRatings.

Hotel Marketing: The role of search engines in a Travel 2.0 world 17th September 2007
Will online travel consumers abandon Google as a travel planning and research tool and shift their attention to Web 2.0 sites such as TripAdvisor.com and social networks like YouTube.com?

Travolution: Consumers of all ages seeking advice and tips from review websites 20th September 2007
The power of independent travel review websites is finally being realised as consumers increasingly turn to them for advice and tips about products and services.

I have tried to work out whether the generic Search Engine is more effective than a Travel 2.0 service. The actual effectiveness is quite hard to measure as most travel companies keep conversion ratios and cost per acquisition under wraps, however there is a way using Hitwise to work out the where the main traffic each of the top travel websites comes from.

The view that I gained from Hitwise was that on average across the Top 50 Travel Sellers in the UK the source of website traffic 40% come from Search Engines and 6.9% from Travel 2.0 services. This across the Top 50 Travel Sellers has been relatively consistent over the past 12 months. For all definitions see bottom of page.

Based on the average across the Top 50 Travel Sellers and consistency of the sources of traffic 40% and the growth of the Travel 2.0 services such as Travelsupermarket it would suggest that these services are not at the moment going to overtake the Search Engine.

When I look into the detail of some of the larger Travel Sellers mostly the percentages are exactly the same, but in a few it is very different and those Travel Sellers must be adopting an alternative approach.

The first being Expedia which on their Hitwise Clickstream is seeing a steady decline in Search Engine traffic and an increase in Travel 2.0, so for the month of August 2007 the percentages were 31% Search Engines and 10% Travel 2.0.

The second is Opodo.co.uk which has over the past 12 months had a decline and increase in the Search Engine to end up back at 25% and a huge increase in Travel 2.0 from 16% to 14%.

The sources between Expedia and Opodo’s Travel 2.0 traffic are different, Expedia relying on Trip Advisor and Opodo on Cheapflights and Travelsupermarket. Interestingly Expedia own Trip Advisor.

It could be said that it was a real clever move that Expedia Inc. bought Trip Advisor I guess as security for future distribution and probably more cost effective distribution. Opodo on the other hand are probably trying to buy market share which will cost them or that they know something that all the other Top 50 Travel Sellers don't know about.

Which Travel Seller will buy which Travel 2.0 next!

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Definitions:

The Top 50 Travel Sellers are defined by Hitwise traffic rankings and include Travel Agents, Online Travel Agents, Tour Operators and Flight Consolidators.

To define a Search Engine, I am going on the base of a generic sector independent search such as Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, AOL, Dogpile, Orange and Ask. There are 40 Search Engines used to gain the % figures above.

To define a Travel 2.0 service, I am categorising travel specific media, travel social, aggregator services and meta search services. Examples include Trip Advisor, Teletext, Cheapflights, Travelsupermarket, Kelkoo Travel, Yahoo Travel, Travel Mail and Holiday Watchdog. There are 26 Travel 2.0 services in total.

Both the Search Engine and Travel 2.0 categorises used cover the most of the traffic which a top 50 Travel Seller is getting.