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Europe's biggest meeting for commercial, digital and data decision makers in the travel industry
The Digital Big Bang in Travel: Does Your Strategy Stack Up?
When it comes to travel marketing, nothing compares with Facebook, according to a new industry-wide survey from EyeforTravel. The State of Data and Analytics in Travel Report 2017 found that 61.6% of travel marketers think Facebook is the best performing social media network. Instagram, also a Facebook company, trails behind with just 15.8% of respondents, followed by Twitter (10.3%) and YouTube (6.2%). No other social media network had a significant response rate.
Voyages-sncf.com, the ecommerce arm of France’s state-owned rail company, has understood the power of Facebook. Speaking at the recent EyeforTravel Europe Summit, Chief Operating Officer Arnaud Masson said: “You need to be there if you want to deliver a good customer experience.” With over 1.2billion using messenger today, he has a point.
In fact, Masson believes that Facebook needs to be the extension of any website or app. Initially, Voyages-sncf.com used it for customer service, which proved more popular than email. It went on to become one of the first companies to create a chat bot for Messenger, and it’s been so successful that the development team has continued to innovate with new features and extensions.
78% of travel marketers are using social media data in their marketing campaigns EyeforTravel
“Facebook has numerous advantages above its rivals, but the most significant is the depth of information it has on its users,” says Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel. As people have become increasingly familiar and comfortable with social media, so have they become more relaxed about sharing everything from their interests and preferences to travel plans. People regularly ask for travel recommendations from their ‘friends’, providing a unique opportunity for travel marketers.
“This gives Facebook huge power, which has been multiplied by the strategic acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp,” says Hadwick, who argues that, “these acquisitions also help to future-proof Facebook from potential downturns in usage of the original platform.”
For the moment though, that shows now sign of abating, and Facebook is working hard to provide marketers with the right tools. For example, its ‘dynamic adverts for travel’ allows marketer to push adverts to people who have previously visited a website or app.
EyeforTravel’s data backs this up with the survey also finding that 78% of travel marketers are using social media data in their marketing campaigns. This level of integration illustrates the importance social now plays in marketing efforts, a position that is only expected to increase in the medium-term.
Click here to download the full report. Or why not join us at one of our second half events?
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From the opening session with Priceline CEO Glenn Fogel to the end, the EyeforTravel Europe Summit 2017 was tackling the big issues. What effect will Google, Facebook and WeChat have on our industry? What are the new areas of opportunity? Tours and activities? Rail travel? How will natural language processing alter how customers interact with brands? We have the key opinions on these issues and more in our new summary report of the Summit, which you can download for free now.
Click here to download the report.
The report features advice and learning from brands including Priceline Group, Momondo Group, AccorHotels, Eurail, Rome2Rio, Voyages-scnf.com, KLM, Gatwick Airport, and many more!
Get all the key discussions in one easy to digest report so you can keep on top of the ever-evolving world of travel and tourism.
Click here to download the report or use the button below to join up to EyeforTravel On Demand.
How do you assess the value of marketing spend? The ‘multi-touch attribution model’, a sophisticated attribution technique, was presented by Olga Nielsen, director of marketing and distribution analytics for Choice Hotels, at the EyeforTravel Smart Analytics conference in Atlanta earlier this year.
Rather than ‘last click attribution’ this model can assess both internet-based and more traditional marketing approaches and statistically separate the incremental revenue value of each. Every touchpoint can be incorporated in the analysis, which is increasingly necessary as customer purchase decisions flow across multiple sites and touchpoints (see Accurate attribution remains travel’s biggest headache, EyeforTravel June 5). The model can identify the value of the initial web ad versus the special offer versus the frequent flyer link.
Potentially, marketing initiatives have different impacts at different airlines. Southwest Airlines is known to use fare promotions more strategically and jetBlue relies more heavily on emails. Some airlines, on the other hand, are said to spend more on pay-per-click advertising. This raises important questions:
How sophisticated is each of these carriers, however, in assessing the value of their different approaches?
Does each fully exploit analytical techniques like the multi-touch attribution model (MTM) to optimise the level and allocation of their spend - as they seem to reach such different conclusions?
Of course, marketing initiatives themselves are often not the biggest driver of bookings. Factors that explain most of any growth or change in bookings include elements like: i) economic cyclicality or seasonality, ii) competitive factors like relative capacity growth and iii) market segmentation factors like growth in target demographic groups.
As Nielsen noted, the MTM model could attribute as little as 5% to marketing initiatives. She notes that most companies, without the benefit of a sophisticated attribution model, attribute much more than they should to targeted promotions. In many cases, the other factors – macro-economic, competitive environment, long-term brand awareness – represent the largest factors in booking volume – all without any current spend!
View from an airline
At one airline I worked with, during a cash crisis brought on by bankruptcy, we effectively terminated most marketing spend, and relied almost completely on local customer loyalty and online travel agency distribution. It worked! Revenue stayed strong throughout the bankruptcy period despite few marketing initiatives.
In retrospect, much of our historic marketing spend had actually supported our brand – even spend that was designed for a short-term boost in bookings more fundamentally conveyed that we were a uniquely ‘fun’, low fare carrier in comparison with our major competitors. Such spend often drives a consistent level of demand over a longer period of time; it contributes as much to a base level of demand as it does to short-term demand.
Arguably, in fact, marketing spend was not very productive on a short-term basis – we could keep revenue strong simply relying on our long history of investment.
Despite the multitude of factors that impact bookings, the MTM model is nevertheless able to focus on the ‘controllable’ factors – the separate impact of each of the short-term marketing initiatives across the various touchpoints. In fact, the end result of the model is to recommend an ‘optimal’ mix – in other words, what allocation of spend across channels, across touchpoints, across segments is likely to produce the best overall booking result.
The model will recommend increased spend on certain initiatives and decreased spend on others to drive the highest forecast revenue, and associated return on investment. Frequently, however, it will identify significant reductions in spend for certain touchpoints, or even overall, given relatively little short-term incremental value attributed to those initiatives.
Nielsen has some recommendation including:
Use the sophisticated attribution model to assess the relative incremental value of different initiatives
Don’t blindly accept the analytical results as the optimal long-term answer.
Recognise the way the model is prone to under-estimate the longer-term impact of reducing spend in any individual medium
Test recommendations against experience with customer behaviour and purchase processes. The ‘optimised’ mix derived by the model needs to be adjusted for short-term versus longer-term goals, potentially increasing spend for those initiatives that may have a longer term impact on demand, but which would be unlikely to be captured directly by the model.
Tom Bacon has been in the business for 25 years, as an airline veteran and industry consultant in revenue optimisation. He leads audit teams for airline commercial activities including revenue management, scheduling and fleet planning. Questions? Email Tom or visit his website
It may not be as cheap as bus travel or car sharing or as quick as flying, but there is something about travelling by train that is hard to beat.
As Brenda van Leeuwen, CEO of Eurail, puts it, rail travel is as much about the journey as it is the destination. In a recent interview with EyeforTravel she described crisscrossing Europe by train as a ‘Zen-like experience’.
Indeed, you only have to Google the phrase ‘Great rail journeys’ to understand the marketing power that the rail industry holds. Great rail journeys are well documented and there are countless films and television programmes, not to mention advertisements, to prove it. Substitute the word plane and, by contrast, the results tell all, throwing up blue links like: ‘What’s the best way to sleep on a plane?’ and ’10 Ways to survive a long-haul flight’.
Little wonder then, that clever rail marketers are capitalising on this to promote their product. Earlier this year, Eurostar teamed up with production company Somesuch to create an advertisement that encouraged viewers to embrace a ‘Travel State of Mind’. The ad, which is shot in the style of ‘New Wave’ cinema, follows a young traveller and the people he meets through various experiences. Focusing on the 'experience' of rail travel, the protagonist’s advice ranges from ‘pack small, live big’, to ‘ask a local, not your phone’ and to ‘look up’. The advert ran on national TV, VOD, YouTube and Facebook, and on the Eurostar website.
Even more recently, Trainline, the largest train ticket retailer in Europe thanks to its acquisition last year of French firm Captain Train, embarked on its biggest ever PR and social media campaign. Further proof that Trainline means marketing business, was the recent appointment of Lisa Bowcott, the company’s first European brand marketing director. Bowker, who has said that the goal is for Trainline to become the Uber of rail travel, has had both agency and client side business at firms like Proctor & Gamble, BT, Havas and Saatchi & Saatchi.
Spun out of Virgin Rail in 2002 to create a standalone company, Trainline is a tech company that is “focused on using data, AI and machine learning to continually innovate and make train travel easier”, Trainline has taken a mobile first approach. However, despite a 120% rise in app transactions, it also recognised that consumers tend to associate mobile with air travel. It is this that the firm seeks to address in its recent tongue-in-cheek campaign.
Seamless and stress free
Working with Red Consultancy, Trainline engaged Poldark actress Eleanor Tomlinson to promote a new travel brand – Lintenair. In the first video, Lintenair is billed as the future of travel, its’ offering including city centre terminals, queue-free boarding, no baggage weight restrictions and mobile ticketing. In other words, a “seamless and stress-free” journey, in other words train travel!
At a closer look, revealed in the second video, we see that Lintenair is, in fact, an anagram of Trainline. In this video, released 48 hours after the initial buzz was created on social media, Tomlinson makes much of the mobile experience, which Trainline has worked hard to perfect.
A Trainline spokesperson told EyeforTravel that by using the language and behaviours associated with air travel, the Lintenair campaign “allowed us to drive reconsideration of train travel and highlight all the reasons why technology, and the Trainline app, makes train travel easy, simple and smart”.
The “cheeky campaign” also “exceeded all set KPIs in terms of coverage volume, message penetration and sentiment and saw significant social media engagement throughout each phase of campaign”.
The cheeky campaign exceeded all set KPIs in terms of coverage volume, message penetration and sentiment and saw significant social media engagement throughout each phase of campaign
In three days, Red Consultancy says that there were over 360 pieces of coverage. Facebook, the main platform for the release of the videos, reached 3.3 million people.
According to Trainline data, 38% of people in the UK describe ease of booking, and the convenience of arriving in the centre of a city (32%), as key to the travel experience. With an app that allows users to access live departure boards, real-time travel updates, mobile tickets and more, and today sells tickets across 24 European countries, this is what Trainline is aiming to deliver. Technology is at the heart of this business and last year Trainline also launched BusyBot, an AI assistant which crowd sources information to tell travellers how busy their train is.
The head of mobile marketing for Trainline will be joining an EyeforTravel webinar on app engagement. Find out more and sign up here.
A senior executive from Trainline is expected to be speaking in Amsterdam later this year. Watch this space
Last week Google was slapped with a €2.42 billion fine, its biggest ever from the European Commission. The crime in question: abusing ‘its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison-shopping service’.
So, the big question now is this: Is Google liable for a similar fine for its dominance in the travel sector?
The short answer, I believe, is yes, and here is why.
1. Google is using its search dominance to preference its own product ahead of its competitors
Try searching for ‘Flights to Barcelona’ or some other destination, and you'll find that Google Flight Search is placed ahead of Kayak, Skyscanner, and any other flight search product. It is given more prominence and is, therefore, experiencing disproportionate and unnatural growth at the expense of others. Both Kayak and Skyscanner derive their revenue by providing an air search function that presents the user with an ordered display of flights and prices. They charge airlines to then forward those customers to the direct websites. Now Google is providing essentially the same service [as these metasearches] and is capturing revenue otherwise due to Kayak and Skyscanner in the form of higher cost-per-click costs to airlines. Worse still, the customer hasn’t asked for this!
2. Google is not selling airfares, it’s selling a shopping experience
You could argue that Google is not giving preference to its own product if you consider that the ‘product’ in question is the airfare. But Google is not an airline, so the product is, in fact, the ‘shopping experience’. And that’s what they are illegally surfacing over Kayak, Skyscanner et al. To my mind, this is exactly what the EU decision is referring to. No question!
As the European Commission official press release states: “Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results."
This is exactly what Google is doing with Flight Search despite the fact that Kayak and Skyscanner are currently providing a better service. And yet, because of the way Google is showing results the display, the consumer inevitably uses it first.
Time for an industry travel council with teeth
So what is needed now? I believe the time is right for a fragmented industry to pull together and form a lobbying force to be reckoned with.
After all, Google already has its own ‘Travel Council’ – a ‘chosen few’ that it chooses to allow into Willy Wonka’s factory every year to consult behind closed doors, and to organise the industry.
The industry needs a commercial approach with teeth that continues to call Google out on its strategy
My suggestion is that airlines and other travel intermediaries create a similar structure/event with an elected board, with a view to providing a collective, structured response that can be used more effectively than organisations like Fairsearch, which are too political.
The industry needs a commercial approach with teeth that continues to call Google out on its strategy. Within the framework of this council, industry strategists could provide examples of how to thwart dodgy practices ahead of any potential EU involvement.
Already, I can think of some issues that require consideration:
Why do some airlines get a free ride, and some don’t?
How do you keep Google from selling my trademark to the highest bidder?
What is the best way to retain control of the relationship with Google by harnessing practical insight from across the industry?
A word of advice for airlines
Importantly, I would suggest that airlines refrain from allowing Google free access to their flight prices and inventory. Instead they should require Google to buy this data through an intermediary that does not damage their long-term profitability and control of distribution.
Airlines [should] refreain from allowing Google free access to their flight prices and inventory
Airlines have done this before, and I believe they could do it again. The global distributions systems (GDSs), like Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo et al, were created many years ago to protect the airlines’ interests. Something similar could be done now to protect their interests from Google. This could be a cooperative effort with multiple technology providers that are in a position to power the response.
If Google want to profit from airlines’ precious data – let them share that profit with the industry providing it. But, and this is a big but, on mutually beneficial terms.
This is an opinion by Bobby Healy, Chief Technology Officer, CarTrawler, a tech firm that works with over hundred airlines. His views are his own
ATTENTION READERS: Do you believe Google’s business is damaging yours. Do you agree that we need an industry travel council to ensure innovation flourishes in our industry? Are you already lobbying and if so how? Please share your comments on this important story below or contact the editor. The best comment wins a free executive pass to an upcoming event in a destination of your choice.
