aaron dalrymple dot com

According to Zagat, 75% of travelers say they now use the Internet as their primary means of booking, particularly air travel. While this means great opportunity for search marketers in the travel space, it also means that the space is more competitive than ever. The survey further states that the most commonly used website to book travel is Expedia.com while TripAdvisor.com takes the honors when it comes to finding travel information. Of course with all of the affiliate sites out there for these two companies, I wonder how many people even know that they’re using Expedia or TripAdvisor…

Another report, released by PhoCusWright, states that next year - for the first time - transactions on the Internet will account for over half (54 percent) of all U.S. travel bookings. Other findings from the report include:

While the U.S. represented just one third of total online and offline travel bookings of the combined North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific markets in 2005, the U.S. share of online bookings was over 60 percent of all online bookings.
Growth of dynamic packaging — the ability of consumers to easily combine airline, hotel, rental car and other product purchases online — is projected to slow significantly from 51 percent in 2005 to 18 percent in 2008. This trend is partly attributable to the current tight supply of bulk airfares and merchant hotel rates available for packages, thanks to higher load factors and occupancy as suppliers enjoyed strong sales during the recent robust economy.
Hotels will be the fastest growing segment online, surpassing air travel, which until 2006 had long been the fastest growing product segment.
The advanced level of the U.S. online travel market creates an atmosphere in which many innovations such as dynamic packaging, metasearch and user-generated content incubate in the U.S. before expanding to other global markets. Many of these innovations include the new online capabilities that PhoCusWright has termed Travel 2.0 — the travel industry’s application of Web 2.0 practices empowering the online consumer.
The tipping point of the travel market, with the online channel becoming the norm for travel purchases, is going to further shape consumer behavior that utilizes Travel 2.0 tools and applications.

I have to somewhat disagree with these statements on “Travel 2.0″ though. I think they may be a bit premature. I’m not sure that anyone has figured out how to bring value to the consumer, using 2.0 elements, that translates into revenue. Until that happens, what good is it to a bread and butter company that’s trying to sell travel - not trying to impress investors (we all know how well that’s worked out in the past)?

So, how do you go about standing out in a sea of affiliate sites, rising CPCs and product commodification? And, will 2.0 be the answer?

Zagat Survey Coverage

PhoCusWrigt Press Release

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