Just minutes before publishing a story about how Ceetiz, a French online travel agent for tours and activities, was working to reduce its dependence on Google, the news broke that the US search giant had been slapped with a €2.4bn fine by the European Commission.

In the EyeforTravel office near Spitalfields, not far from where next year’s European Summit will be held, there was a collective gasp. “This is big news,” said Tim Gunstone, EyeforTravel’s managing director. “We need to find out what the industry thinks and if anybody from the travel industry is lobbying the EU specifically.”

EyeforTravel approached the European Commission which confirmed that, yes, there are on–going complaints concerning flights and hotels, and pointed to Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s press statement last week that said:

"We have been looking into these [other Google products]. And today's decision is a precedent, which can be used as a framework to analyse the legality of such conduct. At the same time, we would have to take account of the characteristics of each market and the facts in a specific case."

…we would have to take account of the characteristics of each market

European Commissioner Margrethe Vesta

Lobbying to rein in Google's moves in travel have been taking place in various ways for some time. Back in 2010, for example, Kayak and Expedia launched its coalition website Fairsearch.org to oppose the Google–ITA software deal. Meanwhile, organisations like the European Technology and Travel Services Association (ETTSA), which represents leading online travel agencies (OTAs) and global distribution systems (GDSs), have been working to highlight how Google’s conduct is significantly impacting competition in travel, the single largest vertical search market. This competition, says Christoph Klenner, Secretary General of ETTSA, has been “at the expense of consumers and of Google’s competitors”.

Though travel industry executives are less inclined to speak out, perhaps for fear of being disadvantaged in search, there are exceptions. One activist for airline interests is CarTrawler CTO Bobby Healy, whose opinions can be read in more detail in a story yesterday titled Google Flight Search: a dead man walking?

His efforts have been welcomed by Peter Bellow, group chief executive of Malaysia Airlines who, at a recent CAPA Airline Summit in Dublin, reportedly said: “We should give Bobby Healy a knighthood. Most people are afraid to say Google is peddling a kind of snake oil.”

While Healy is supportive of traditional lobbying he is “raising awareness directly with the airlines via direct conversations at the CXO level and also via talks at trade shows. ” This approach to “’out’ Google strategy in public and make it very clear what they are doing” is, he says, “way more fun”.  

It’s also, arguably, more effective. As Rod Cuthbert, who spoke to EyeforTravel in his personal capacity as a travel industry veteran, puts it: "This is a long anticipated result and not a surprise. But based on how long the ruling took to arrive, you have to wonder how long it might take the Commission to deliberate on travel.”

While it remains to be seen if travel is next on the European Commission’s list of priorities, the signs are positive. After all, Google has been fined for “promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors”. And you only have to enter ‘Flights to Barcelona’ or ‘Hotels in Berlin’ to know that Google is doing exactly the same thing with Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder.

Although Healy categorically disagrees, and this is certainly debatable, some argue that with Flight Search, Google is delivering a superior user experience. As a commentator on yesterday’s story puts it: “I happen to greatly prefer Google's flight search. I find other airfare sites too slow and clunky to use.”

Not so – yet – with hotel search, says one hotelier, who preferred to share his views anonymously. So far this has worked in the online travel agents (OTAs) favour, as the success of their business, he argues, has been based on the fact that Google, until now, has not delivered the right [hotel] results for consumers.

However, while the Google carousel may not be delivering the best hotel results, consumers seem to prefer this user experience. In the view of this hotelier: “Nobody is wanting to go back to those text-based ad clicks [as shown in the image below] to get the desired experience. It’s much easier to click results in the carousel.”

  

The fact that users like the Google carousel is good news for hotels which have signed up for Google Hotel Price Ads. After all, these were introduced to supposedly drive more direct bookings to a hotel’s own website, and reduce OTA commissions of anything between 15% and 30%. With Google’s ad commission set at around 12%, and a user experience that seems to be winning, that’s clearly good news.

But is it fair? For the OTAs, which have invested heavily in, and continue to invest in the user experience, the answer is no. Because not only is Google now fleecing them for advertising revenues, it’s also stealing customers. Users are drawn first to the carousel, even if these aren’t the best results, and are less inclined to return to Google Ads.

        

Good news, but for who?

Undoubtedly, Google has the data and the technological know–how to become the Amazon of travel, and actively promote Google Hotel Finder. But with the European Commission’s recent ruling that now looks unlikely, as it seems likely that Google is in the losing seat.

Good news for the OTAs but maybe not such great news for consumers, says the anonymous hotelier. He believes that "if as a consequence of the ruling, Google slims down the carousel usage, then the consumer loses out”. 

So what is the solution?

Nobody is disputing that Google is and will continue to be a major innovator in travel but maybe the carousel could be used more fairly. Back in April in an EyeforTravel story titled Dear Google, lend us the travel industry your ears, please we suggested this giant of search “may well be thinking through ways to work with intermediaries that allows them to participate in new models, as they have with hotels”. 

One option, the story continued, would be for the ‘Google Results’ that currently appear at the top of the page to be a blended result of direct supply from hotels, airlines and so on, as well as from OTAs and metasearch engines. With travel intermediaries strong brand clout, along with the push to become more consumer focused, EyeforTravel argued that this model could continue to be a win–win for all.

At the time, one senior executive said he was sceptical but maybe he was wrong. With people like Healy calling for a dedicated travel industry council with teeth, and regulators on high alert, the pressure on Google is rising. Maybe now Google will acknowledge that it’s time to let all riders in travel enjoy the carousel.

Join us at one of our upcoming events to hear more from senior executives like Healy and learn how to succeed in the turbulent and competitive travel industry 

Hotel metasearch trivago receives 1.4 billion visits each year. “That’s an incredible amount of traffic,” says Daniel Holl, Head of Global Hotel Sales at trivago, who believes more travellers than ever are turning to metasearch when searching for hotels.

Last week Expedia, which owns a 63% stake in trivago, released its second-quarter results and it seems the trajectory for this hotel meta, which went public in 2016, is an upward one. Revenues have risen across all regions, and growth this quarter is up 64%. The company, which Expedia acquired a stake in in 2013, has expanded its product portfolio to compare over 1.4 million hotels in over 190 countries.   

In a press statement, the company’s CFO Axel Hefer said he is expecting “annual revenue growth to be around 50% in 2017, with our adjusted EBITDA* margin likely to be up slightly from 2016."

Holl will be speaking at EyeforTravel North America later this year about how to drive direct bookings in a hyper-competitive environment. Ahead of the event, he outlined five things that he has come to know. 

1.  In this environment, you need to act on data, not intuition

According to Holl, trivago “lives a ‘test and learn’ philosophy driven by entrepreneurial passion. We act on data, not intuition, which has allowed us to have a big and immediate impact.”

“In this industry,” he continues, “you need to be agile in reacting to the ever-changing behaviour of consumers. And what consumers want, is diverse choice and full market transparency, and they want to see all their options in one place.”

trivago’s approach to being agile and data driven when reacting to changes in consumer behaviour is one that embraces trial and error.

“If we aren’t making mistakes then we aren’t trying anything new and, what’s worse, we’re not learning. We apply this philosophy to everything we do across all departments, whether we’re testing a new feature or TV ads.  And with our chain partners, we do the same. We’re always keen to try things on a small scale, and this makes us agile in our decision-making and with our partnerships,” he says.

2.  The lines between meta and OTA may be blurring, but not for trivago

“If the traveller believes they’ve booked on trivago, instead of on an OTA or directly with the hotel, then we’ve done something wrong,” says Holl.

Speaking about advertising, trivago spends more than any other online travel company on TV marketing — more than three times more than TripAdvisor on US TV advertisements. But by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at campaigns like the ‘trivago guy’ and ‘trivago girl’ ads, Holl says the company has gone out of its way to explain hotel metasearch and its advantages — transparency of the hotel market, more hotels to choose from, more availability, better prices, and so on.

Although trivago provides the technology that enables hoteliers to compete for bookings, Holl is clear that “our core responsibility in the traveller’s booking journey is the search stage.” For this reason trivago does not foresee a ‘book on trivago’ option being integrated into the search experience, as “this would only foster confusion for our users”.

While the marketing line is to put the traveller first, trivago must also look after its advertising partners. “For the same reason, our booking funnel provides a strong branding to our advertisers. This sets clear traveller expectations: ‘trivago-hosted but partner-branded,’” says Holl.

Holl is referring to trivago Express Booking — which, when launched, was likened to TripAdvisor Instant Booking or Book on Google, but is in fact positioned close to the hotel’s direct channel. “This is a platform that improves booking conversions for advertisers, so they become more competitive in our CPC auction marketplace,” stresses Holl. “Small and medium-sized OTAs and hotel chains are at a natural disadvantage compared to big OTAs because they have neither the resources nor the data required to build an optimised booking funnel across all devices. To level the playing field on these parameters, we make use of our product engineering competence and big data to build a booking funnel optimised for trivago traffic that helps advertisers turn more ‘lookers into bookers.’”

3.  Having a clear product focus and value proposition means Google and other competitors are less of a direct threat

Across the industry, there is growing concern that the search giant’s move up the trip-planning funnel is a threat, because if a consumer decides to book on Google or TripAdvisor (where you can now book for that matter), then presumably this is diverting traffic away from others like trivago. For Holl, trivago’s unique selling point is aclear product focus: hotel search. “No flights, no car rentals, no confusion for the users. It’s all about hotel price comparison. We’re the only global tech company focusing solely on the vertical of hotel search.”

This is a big advantage for trivago on two levels, explains Holl, because it makes them:

i. Fast internally, because there are no conflicts of interest                                                                                                                                         

ii. Fully dedicated when it comes to developing products that are empowering hoteliers to compete online and travellers to find their ideal hotel

4.  Hotels that invest more time in securing direct bookings have a competitive edge

trivago aims to be the first entry point for travellers searching for their ideal hotel by making all online bookable rates visible. Holl argues that the direct website rates from hotels are particularly valuable, because the traveller can decide whether to book direct or indirect. “There are a big segment of travellers who prefer to book direct if the rate is attractive and the booking journey seamless. So we welcome those hotels and chains that are investing more time and effort into getting direct bookings. The need is already there, so we have fewer discussions about why direct bookings are important and more about how to actually get them,” he says.

We welcome those hotels and chains that are investing more time and effort into getting direct bookings

5.  First and foremost, technology should enhance the guest experience; it should also simplify the hotelier’s life

Independent hotels in particular often face challenges in adopting technology and succeeding on direct marketing channels.

So, the essential question, says Holl, is this: “How can technology simplify the hotelier’s life while enhancing the guest experience they offer and increasing their revenue?”

“After all, the goal of hotel technology is not to monopolise the hotelier’s time and focus, but to empower them to be competitive in the market while keeping their focus on their guests. Marketing a hotel is already extremely complicated, and it’s only becoming more so, with activities such as setting CPCs for different markets, monitoring and allocating budgets, initiating and suspending campaigns, and so on,” he says.

Other questions trivago is attempting to answer with technology are:

i.  How do you make it possible for the hotelier to successfully market their hotel without having studied marketing for years and with very little time and money at their disposal?

ii.  How can you help them simplify and streamline their day-to-day activities?

“That’s what we want to achieve with the technology we provide: marketing made easy,” says Holl. “We’re working on developing the most accessible and effective tools. And by ‘accessible,’ I don’t just mean that it’s affordable, though that is of course important: I also mean that it is tailored and intuitive and requires minimal time and effort to operate.”

Like many online travel firms, trivago offers data services to hotels. Booking.com, for example, has BookingSuite, and trivago has developed a solution called trivago Hotel Manager: a product that makes it easy for a hotel to perform better online. According to Holl, the platform allows hotels to take control of their online hotel profile. “Over 300,000 hoteliers around the world are using it to build unique hotel profiles that stand out in trivago search results. And we see that those hotels receive five times more clicks on their profiles than others. So there’s a direct business impact,” he says.  

Highlighting again the importance of data in the industry, trivago recently announced its new Rates Insights tool, which, as stated on the the trivago Hotel Manager Blog, “grants hoteliers access to an unbiased and comprehensive set of data on market demand and competitor prices […] with a new version of this feature, trivago has made over 5 billion room rates visible to hoteliers around the world.”

Travel brands pour gazillions into tools and technology, but are they getting their message across in the right way? Remember a few years ago when digital experts from Facebook et al were predicting email was on its last legs? We haven’t heard that lately. Email is thriving primarily because companies are endorsing the channel. 

Still, there is a good chance it will come as a shock to find that consumers are most likely to respond to emails! For choice, emails come consistently ahead of direct mail, mobile apps, social media, push notifications or mobile wallets. 

A survey carried out by email marketing group Campaign Monitor found that well over half its respondents checked their emails more than ten times a day. (Campaign Monitor commissioned Market Cube, a research panel company, to conduct an online survey of over a thousand US consumers.)

“It is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands,” the survey says. No surprise, however, is the finding that millennials are far more likely to take action on an email than any other age group.

Amazon agrees. A survey it carried for smartphones found that when it came to mobile wallets “most (73%) users would prefer to receive items by email sent directly to them…”

Though, as US marketing technology group Acxiom found, “if a message doesn’t look good on their small screens, 70% say they’ll just delete it, while 23% will look at it again on a computer and 16% will unsubscribe.” Only 9% will make the effort to try to read the message on their smartphone.

70% of travellers will delete a message if it doesn’t work for a small screen

For travel and hospitality brands, the preference for emails is particularly marked - at 66% the number is more than twice that for Direct Mail (26%) and Mobile Apps (25%), according to Campaign Monitor. Social Media comes in slightly lower again, at 23%, and mobile wallets bring up the rear at 14%. The preference no doubt reflects the amount of data being conveyed.

Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalisation and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalised subject line (62%).

62% of consumers will open an email with a personalised subject (72% for a discount)

Satisfaction with delivery of travel and hospitality brands on the promise of personalised mail was pretty high, at 59%. Yet this lagged retail brands, which scored 76%. When it came to preferences on personalisation, there was not a lot of difference between age groups.

It was another matter with content. Millennials are far more likely to take action on the content of an email. For example, 58% of millennials ‘always’ or ‘most of the time’ donated to a non-profit organisation, while just 18% of those aged over 55 did the same.

On travel, the likelihood of action was highest by far with under 35s (50%), compared to 35-54-year olds (27 percent) or those 55-plus (15 percent).

Response to the offer of a discount was again much higher for retail brands (72%) than travel and hospitality (58%).

Yet, says Acxiom, don’t forget ‘relevance’ - it goes hand in hand with discounts for influencing purchase decisions. This is a message well understood - hence the omni-present quest by brands to collect data!

Join us at one of our upcoming events in North America or Europe to hear more about how to apply marketing techniques for a competitive online travel industry

Jim Brody is passionate about destination marketing. “I love working with destinations - I get their passion, their authenticity and even their need to be involved with politics,” he says.

That passion has led to a career in digital travel spanning over 20 years. In the mid 1990s he created one of the first travel content sites - VisitNewEngland.com - in the US for Mystic Media in Connecticut. “This was back in the day when the internet was in HTML 1.0, and marketing people for the region's attractions and big lodgings all thought the entire medium was too grey," he recalls.

Then at Kaboose.com (now part of Disney) he headed up family travel, before joining TripAdvisor where he spent almost eight years setting up an running its destination marketing efforts, first domestically and then internationally. Brief stints followed at Oyster.com and Travelzoo before he launched Sense of Place to work with destination marketing organisations (DMOs) on content strategy.

His latest venture, which is still in beta, is Destination Recommended and comes in response to “speaking to dozens of DMO friends” who told him there was nothing like this. “While there are certainly other sites, like TripTuner, that focus on the top of the funnel, they do it differently, and without any focus on user generated content (UGC) ratings and reviews, and certainly not with a partnership for any destination that wants to participate,” Brody says.

We put some questions to Brody to find out more.

EFT: So what’s the big idea?
JB: I have always wanted to give destinations something to work with that would help all of them - no matter what their size or budget or where they are. The idea is that users will come in and rate and/or review a particular destination overall, as well as specific experiences such as snorkelling, hiking, shopping and so on, in those destinations. Destinations, which are core to this mission, can partner for free - providing content that helps better define that destination, and nudges the interested user further along in the planning cycle. As content volume grows, DMOs will also be able to get some marketing intelligence and data from that content such as:

• Word clouds of review content

• Rankings of different experiences compared to the competitive destination set

• Points of origin for those viewing the content and so on). 

EFT: Who are these destination reviewers?
JB: People who love those destinations for one, people who love travel for another, and people who just like rating stuff. Just like TripAdvisor or Yelp, users who provide the content will be a subset of those looking at it. There is a great intersection of those folks who follow their favourite destinations on social media, so the one thing we are asking DMOs to do is to tell their social networks whenever we feature them. And the content creates an endless number of Top 10 Lists to do just that!

EFT: How does this differ from sites like TripTuner or ArrivalGuides which look pretty slick visually?
JB: TripTuner has a pretty cool widget, and the design is more contemporary, but it completely lacks UGC, so it's utterly different. I think there is certainly room for both, as they look for different users. One user prefers an algorithmic path at the top of the funnel, another user-generated content. Same for ArrivalGuides. In the broadest sense they are competition. Just like Lonely Planet or your favorite travel magazine, they are dependent purely on editorial content, which they offer in the form of pdf downloads. There is no user-generated content, or ratings of any kind, and that's a very big difference.

EFT: You haven't officially launched yet, but can you outline what have you achieved to date, and your next steps?
JB: We went into open beta to begin the process of building audience, user generated content and DMO content partners in mid August. Closed beta (invite only to make sure everything works and the site doesn't break) was the three-week period prior to that. I am in discussions with some larger DMOs to partner for an official launch at one of their events over the next six months. The plan over the next year is to get the ad placements up to kick in revenue, while reaching out to DMOs to grow more partnerships (and therefore more DMO content and more eyeballs for UGC). In addition, we are already growing our own social channels to pull in more consumers, and registered users (over 250 and growing) on DestinationRecommended.com will begin receiving our weekly ‘Destination Inspiration’ email once a week.

EFT: What’s the business model? How are you funded?
JB: Right now I am self-funded. This is a lean and mean effort, but I will be looking for a first round shortly, and will use that to get to as many DMO's as possible to grow traffic. Going forward, I'll let the rest of the industry fund this effort through text link ads on the destination pages that direct people to relevant topics: Where to Stay, How to Get There, What to Do, Where to Eat and Getting Around. The plan is to follow the tried and true method and build traffic, with initial revenue coming through ad network text link placements.

EFT: Do you foresee any difficulty in raising money? 
JB: Raising funding is relatively new, but the media plan is rather tried and true (build solid content, build the audience, then build the revenue) so there should be interest. Needless to say, it will be easier to get funding once the ads are up and whole concept shows solidity. 

EFT: More broadly, what trends are you seeing in destination marketing right now?
JB: Trends for DMOs have a cycle to them (certainly the digital ones). So this year seems to be all about leveraging influencers and live streaming video on social networks. Overall though, in destination marketing there is a trend away from paid media (especially the template-based placements) like banner ads and text links. If you combine their non-profit/government cultures of stretching their funding as far as possible with the naval-gazing, political pressures, and redefinition of goals going on worldwide, this totally makes sense. So if you have redefined yourself as a DMO, you want to spend less on marketing. And if some candidate is running for office pushing the idea that your organisation is irrelevant, you want to be effective as possible for as little expenditure as possible. This was always the drive behind more PR, media placement push and FAM tours (which are all infinitely less expensive than the consumer ads they buy).

Who said the traditional media model is dead?

Certainly, not Holiday Pirates, a sort-of social media driven metasearch for travel deals, which seems to be riding a wave in the travel space that nobody else has yet caught.

“Our model is a bit like traditional media, where journalists write copy that is totally independent of any commercial ads or promotions in the magazine or newspaper,” says David Armstrong, CEO of Holiday Pirates, which launched its first website in Germany in 2011. “It’s more or less the same with our travel hunters and editors – they are really focused on deals and value for money and pay no attention to the commercial deals behind them.”

It seems to be working. Since launching in Germany, Holiday Pirates has accumulated 8.8 million Facebook fans, its app has been downloaded 8 million times, and – wait for it – it has achieved all this without shelling out a penny to Google. Although Armstrong won't share turnover, he says in 2016 they processed transactions to the tune of €258 million.

Today the firm employs 192 people across Europe in the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Austria and Switzerland, to name a few countries; most recently, in 2016, it set sail across the pond to open an office in Boston. “Yes, we’re trying to conquer the US but it’s a slightly bigger task than going into Luxembourg,” says Armstrong.

Standing out

What distinguishes Holiday Pirates from others in the travel ecosystem, be they operators, OTAs or metasearches, is that it does not spend a single pound or Euro on Google ads.

"We only receive Google organic traffic,” says Armstrong, which "is quite different to other travel companies, which have to pour substantial funds into Google but also other types of paid media like TV, to acquire traffic."

Where the company does spend money, however, is on social media advertising, predominantly on Facebook. However, you could hardly call this splashing the cash. “The portion of our paid traffic has been only 7% up until now and that is only through social media,” Armstrong says.

Aside from organic traffic via Google or social media, about 30% recurs through its app, or as a result of CRM initiatives following an email or WhatsApp campaign.

Armstrong admits: “One could argue that okay we are not there yet, and as we get larger and more well-known, we might also have to go and acquire through traditional channels. But we don’t see that happening now nor do we see it in the near future – not at all."

Competition and Captain Content

What about competition; is there any? These questions are followed by a lengthy pause, as if Armstrong can hardly believe that the answer is, in fact, “No”.

There is no competition, he says, because this traditional media mindset makes it difficult for others in the online travel sphere to copy, and be successful. “You really have to a different set up in your organisation, a different mindset to take this non-sales led approach,” he says.

What is fundamental to being successful on social media is that the customer must come first, the business second. “If you don’t keep that in mind, in the first place then the customer will notice very fast that the brand is not authentic, and that you are only trying to sell them something,” he says.

So, what’s the secret? It seems that for Holiday Pirates content really, and truly, is the captain. 

According to Armstrong, their success stems from the uniqueness of the content, and the way it is addressed towards their target group, of which 60-65% fall between the ages of 16 and 40.

“It’s quite a wide target group, but it’s really important that we understand how to approach them, and what wording we use in order to be authentic. This is something we manage to do well,” he says.

'Authenticity', admits Armstrong, is just another one of those industry buzzwords that marketers like to bandy about but if done properly, really does make a difference.

People seem to believe and trust the brand, because of the complete lack of a hard sell

People seem to believe and trust the brand, because of the complete lack of a hard sell.  Instead, the approach is to make recommendations – ‘guys, we found this or that’, ‘take it or leave it’, ‘go check it out but, if not, don’t worry’ are the sort of phrases fans might hear. “We just don’t push things. When we push these messages, people don’t perceive it as a push thing. They see it as a great deal that they want to share,” he says.

The sharing piece is also important so recommendations also need to be 'relevant', another marketing buzzword. But relevance is something the team continues to work on, because people are not only interested in the deals themselves, but like to share them with friends and family – and, it’s this dynamic that drives organic traffic from social media. “People share things and if they see a recommendation from a good friend on Facebook or in a WhatsApp group, then if the person trusts the brand, they will say ‘have a look’,” Armstrong says.

This is backed up by consumer research from Nielsen which finds that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and people are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend. 

With a brand like Expedia or booking.com it’s different, because people know they want to sell you something.

Business model

So what is the business model?

Quite simply Holiday Pirates promotes good deals, found by the ‘editorial’ team, regardless of whether there is a commercial partnership or not. They also publish partner deals – from airlines, OTAs, hotels, metas and so on – but only if they fit the editorial line. 

“Not every deal is ‘awesome’ value for money. So either it’s a good deal or it isn’t. And that’s what we want to promote,” Armstrong stresses.

Not every deal is ‘awesome’ value for money

Holiday Pirates seems to have nailed social media content, which it sees as central to its business model. “We are investing a lot into our own media content but also actively encouraging fans to generate UGC”.

In terms of channels, Facebook is obviously crucial, but sometimes users are overwhelmed with information in the newsfeed and might miss a deal. For this reason, the firm is increasingly focusing its energy on WhatsApp, which it’s pushing strongly, as well as Instagram and SnapChat.

WhatsApp works for a number of reasons including:

• The mechanism of sharing and ‘virality’ is quite similar to Facebook

• Subscribers tend to be heavy users; they don’t want to miss out on anything

• It’s a direct and personal form of communication

Holiday Pirates is also looking at opportunities for Facebook Messenger because with its number of fans pushing 9 million globally, and an ability to reach 500 million users every month its media reach is, as Armstrong puts it “quite something”. 

No understatement there then.

Join us in Amsterdam for Digital Strategies for Europe 2017 (Nov 29-30) where David Armstrong will be speaking on a panel titled David & Goliath: Challenge Monopolies with Digital Partnerships

Luxury consumers spend over six times as much on travel than the average consumer annually, and the trend is for this disparity to widen finds EyeforTravel’s The Global Luxury Travel Consumer report.

The average traveller spends $1,690 a trip, and take around three each year. By contrast, luxury consumers and fork out $5,365 on each journey, and take just over 5.6 trips.

EyeforTravel’s research finds that this gap is more likely to widen than diminish. According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2017 the number of high het worth individuals (HNWIs) globally is expected to grow by double digits each year and well into the 2020's, adding millions of luxury consumers into the market. For the travel industry, more good news is that luxury consumers are expected to prioritise experiential spending and put less emphasis on personal goods.

What is more, a survey showed that on average luxury consumers are also planning to take twice as many vacations holiday.

• 16% of luxury travellers report planning 10 or more trips a year

• 75% are planning between five and nine trips in the 12 months

It is clear that consumers are switching more of their discretionary spend into leisure travel. While developed economies are leading this trend, as wealth becomes more widespread emerging markets are playing catch up. The report notes that Chinese luxury consumers are shifting their spending away from shopping and towards activities and accommodation, with a particular focus on adventure and exploration.

High end up

While high-end tours and activities should be one of the primary sectors to benefit, the changing priorities of the luxury traveller means hotels will need to rethink their strategy. Today luxury travellers are now more focused on finding unique accommodation, and so hotels will need to think about character and local activities that can really add something to these consumers’ trips while still continuing to provide high-level service.

“Our research suggests that despite the challenges, it pays to focus on the luxury traveller and not just because they are big spenders,” says Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel. Indeed, luxury travellers are trendsetters and are an indication of where the market might head in the future. 

“The luxury traveller is at the forefront of a number of trends, including rising disposable income, a focus on the experience, growing smartphone usage in the travel research and booking process.”

With spend on travel rising in this segment there is clearly everything to play for.

Become a member of EyeforTravel On Demand now and access the full report, which includes:

• Country analysis of the major luxury travel markets in Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, covering both developed and emerging economies.

• Unique proprietary data based on more than 2,000 luxury travel consumers.

• Behavioral analysis of luxury travellers, including lead times, device usage, booking patterns, and spending habits. 

• Major trends and developments in the luxury travel market.

• Data taken and analysed from nearly 100 different sources.