UK Travel Blog

More travel research for you to explore

2012-05-23T12:10:00.000+02:00

Want to understand how search drives travel purchases? To compare mobile and desktop use? To understand more about the ROPO effect: research online, purchase offline. Or perhaps you want to deep-dive into the travel market in a particular country? Think Insights is home to the latest insights from a wide range of industries including the travel sector. The site houses case studies and thoughts from leaders to help you develop your travel digital strategy. And now the site has expanded to cover 21 different countries, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. You can now search our expanded library by country and by sector, making the latest travel research even easier to find. Plus, there are new tools and videos for you to explore, including: two videos on the consumer journey looking at ROPO and attribution. Check out this video to see how the newly expanded Think Insights website can help you. And follow Think on Google+. Posted by Claire Martin, Product Marketing Manager, Google UK

London Olympics 2012

2012-03-07T12:51:00.004+01:00

We are pleased to release our latest travel whitepaper, "London Olympics 2012". This paper analyses the impact of the Olympic Games and other major sporting events on the UK Travel Industry.

The objectives of this paper are to study the impact of the Olympic Games on both UK inbound and outbound tourism. In addition, the paper also considers some of the factors around the legacy of the Games. We have made recommendations based on the analysis and identified the key trends that we are seeing in the market

You can access the whitepaper here.

Many thanks!

Posted by Anish Acharya, Industry Analyst, UK.

Youtube & Display for Travel

2011-11-22T14:32:00.003+01:00

Above is an amazing EMEA video showcasing how global brands are effectively utilising our platforms.

With Google's media and platform solutions, Travel advertisers can develop comprehensive, innovative, and scalable display solutions for their objectives. Whether that be driving bookings as efficiently as possible, driving awareness of a sale, or showcasing the value of their brand, the Google Display Network and YouTube can help.

Here are three key strategies that you don't want to miss:

1. Sell more as efficiently as possible by combining audience buying with Google's powerful contextual targeting technology.

2. Deliver additional reach at a more effective cost per point of reach with YouTube Skippable Ads, and pay only when users watch your ad (not for the impression).

3. Engage your users and develop true brand advocates with YouTube programs, especially leading up to the Olympics.

Learn more about Google's display solutions, trends, and tools at www.google.co.uk/watchthisspace.

Posted by Cristy Aragon, Industry Manager UK.

Travel Whitepaper Q3 2011

2011-11-03T12:11:00.006+01:00

We are pleased to release our latest travel whitepaper, Destination analysis Q3 2011. This destination-focused whitepaper is an attempt to go beyond the usual seasonality and event analysis, and delve a bit deeper into product-specific destination trends.

We hope this provides you with greater insight into evolving destination trends and your customer’s geographic preferences. We have proposed strategies which will hopefully enable you to navigate through this dynamic environment.

Posted by Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst

Mobile Masterclass

2011-10-31T12:27:00.007+01:00

On Wednesday 26th October, the Google UK Travel Team hosted a Mobile Masterclass. The event was a huge success and has really sparked interest in Google's Mobile offering. We wanted to share the link to the presentations which include best practice takeaways, Travel Mobile trends, Mobile site layout recommendations.

One of the highlights of the event was our conversion specialist's presentation on mobile site design where he imparted his words of wisdom in terms of a main rule of thumb - "if it can't be done with the thumb it can't be done!" Another talking point was the innovative demonstration session where attendees were shown exciting new Mobile features such as Google Voice & Chrome to Phone.

You can view the presentation at this link.

Thanks!
Divya Kukar, Account Strategist UK

Google Analytics Becomes Enterprise Ready

2011-09-30T11:33:00.003+02:00

The travel industry have long been known as digitally advanced, as consumers embraced online planning, research, and shopping from an early stage. Many Internet users’ first transaction online was booking a flight or hotel room. As travel planning now occurs across myriad devices and social interactions online, understanding how users find and engage with your site is essential to optimising both customer experience and marketing investment.

It’s a challenge which the Google Analytics team have been addressing through Multi-Channel Funnels - a set of reports enabling site owners and analysts to see how multiple marketing channels and online touchpoints contribute to bookings. The travel industry have embraced these reports - uncovering insights about path length, time to convert and channel contribution - even prompting them to re-evaluate long-held attribution assumptions.

Though many of our partners across travel base marketing and design decisions on insights drawn from Google Analytics, they've asked for ongoing additions to the product, to enable fuller adoption within their companies. We’re happy to share that today we’re launching Google Analytics Premium - everything customers currently enjoy about Google Analytics, with the addition of guarantees, support and extra processing power.

We’ve worked closely with a select group of partners through the development phase, and Travelocity was one of our first customers to benefit from access to the premium team. Learn more about how Travelocity and other partners are using Google Analytics Premium today by visiting www.google.com/analytics/premium.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual cost in the United States, Canada, and the UK directly from Google, or through Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or find our authorized resellers here.

Travel has embraced the mantra that decisions made using data trump those based on opinion. We’re confident that Google Analytics Premium will encourage more data-driven decisions throughout the industry, ultimately resulting in a better experience for travelers and marketers alike.

Nicolas Tully - Industry Analyst, Travel, United States

GDN Solutions

2011-09-22T17:54:00.004+02:00

"GDN Solutions" was a half day event for Travel and Finance advertisers, held at our new Soho offices on Sept 19th. With unmatched reach across UK audiences, the GDN offers performance at scale, whatever your marketing goals and solutions. Missed out and want to read more? You can find the presentation at this link!

Posted by Ellie England, Account Strategist

Think Mobile with ebookers

2011-08-19T16:18:00.006+02:00

Watch Robert Define, Director of Product Strategy give insight into the transactional and brand aspects of ebooker's mobile strategy, July 2011:

Posted by Ellie England, Account Strategist

Summer 2011 Whitepaper

2011-06-15T11:06:00.004+02:00

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest whitepaper, entitled Summer 2011. The paper looks at the potential development of a challenging and value-driven lates market for holiday suppliers. Throughout the paper, we've highlighted insights on the latest query trends and have provided data which will hopefully help travel advertisers plan for the summer ahead. We welcome any feedback as well as questions on the paper and hope that it proves insightful.

Please find the paper here.

Posted by Matt Kala, Industry Analyst

What's your video strategy?

2011-05-20T11:17:00.003+02:00

81% of internet users in the UK watch online videos.

On average, each user watches 173 videos every month.

Not only are people watching loads of videos, they are searching for videos related to travel information. As such, many travel brands have adopted YouTube as an engaging communication platform to speak with their audience. For example, Air New Zealand has been really great at keeping their YouTube brand channel fresh and fun, and in doing so have generated over 6 million views of their videos and more than 1 million visits to their brand channel.

No matter what you've chosen as your video strategy, we'll show you 10 steps to doing the basics brilliantly. Please check out our slideshow below:

Your Brand on YouTube

View more presentations from YouTube UK

Posted by Cristy Aragon, YouTube & Display Sales Manager, UK.

The Champions League Final

2011-04-13T10:27:00.007+02:00

The Champions League Final is on the 28th of May in Wembley. One English team, Manchester Utd., are definitely in the running to be Finalists. In previous years when English teams have been in the Final, we've seen huge query volumes for the city hosting the Final. This represents a unique opportunity this year, with the final taking place in Wembley, London. The usual queries are for Flights/Accommodation, but this year we can expect volume across Flights, Rail, Bus and even Ferries due to Irish fans travelling to the final.

We expect traffic to spike just after Easter, and the period will be very short (approximately one week). To help you prepare and capitalise on this unique opportunity, we have created a report and also a pre-recorded Webinar discussing the report.

Webinar Link:https://googleemea.connectsolutions.com/p55242231/

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst

Destination Analysis Week 12

2011-04-06T17:08:00.004+02:00

Please see the destination analysis below for the usual 5 industries. We've started to see some uplift in many areas, most notably in Car Hire, with double figure growth week on week across many of the top destinations. This is reflected in other areas, but is most pronounced in Car Hire.

Version 3.0 is on the way - this will include updated destination lists, a more comprehensive keyword bucket for the analysis, and Q1 2011 statistics for ad depth and CPCs.

Hostels

Holidays

Flights

Car Hire

Hotels

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst

Think Quarterly

2011-03-23T15:54:00.007+01:00

While we always think "travel first" on the Google UK Travel Blog, sometimes we would like to share with you information and ideas that are applicable to the wider community and all industries. Matt Brittin, Managing Director of UK & Ireland Operations for Google today kicked off Think Quarterly. Think Quarterly contains advice and wisdom from some of the brightest minds and leaders from Google and the UK business sector. In Matt's words, "Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It's a place to take time out and consider what's happening and why it matters." We hope you find it both enjoyable and useful.

Posted by Nate Bucholz, Industry Manager

Easter & Royal Bank Holiday Whitepaper

2011-03-09T12:50:00.008+01:00

2011 is a great year for Easter bank holidays! To help advertisers plan for the coming season, we have analysed trends in 2010 and 2011 (to date) and have written our findings in the latest whitepaper, which you can download here.

Travel query growth year-to-date suggests that demand from the online travel consumer continues to grow (29% year-to-date), and we expect this to carry through the Easter weekend. The upcoming Royal Wedding may increase tourism within the UK. Sweden had the last major European Royal Wedding in July 2010. During this month, queries for hotels in Sweden originating from the USA grew 40% year-on-year. More impressively, hotel queries within Sweden rose 124% Year-on-year.

We have also noticed more interest for short haul destinations when compared to long haul, the former growing 20% vs.7% year-on-year in January 2011.

For a more detailed analysis, please download the whitepaper. We hope you find the insights and recommendations helpful.

Jonny Cranmer, Industry Analyst

Destination Analysis: Week 8, 2011

2011-03-07T15:09:00.005+01:00

Attached is the destination analysis for the same 5 products:

Hotels
Hostels
Holidays
Car Hire
Flights

It's interesting to note the start of the summer curve; some destinations have been experiencing traffic increases over the past few weeks.

We are working on a revised set of destinations in order to capture the highest ranking destinations searched for in the UK. We will publish this revised list in the next iteration of our reports (in two weeks time).

Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst.

Destination Analysis: Week 6, 2011

2011-02-21T15:28:00.008+01:00

We've made a few small tweaks to the Destination Analysis Report this week:

1.We've added a new report for the UK Hostels Market - the set of destinations is different to the other 4 reports as there seems to be a different set of users searching for hostels than hotels/car hire etc.

2. We've included the Week Number and Source Market on the first sheet to ensure you know what market we've analysed and how up-to-date the report is.

3. In the previous version, there was an issue with one or two graphs not showing - this has been fixed.

Please find the analysis here:
Hostels

Holidays

*Please note: The Holidays report uploaded this morning (21st Feb) contained an issue around 2011's data. This has now been corrected and re-posted. Apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused.

Flights

Car Hire

Hotels

Posted by Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst UK and Ireland.

InterContintental Hotels Group sees monthly mobile site traffic increase by 20%

2011-02-15T12:49:00.007+01:00

InterContinental Hotels Group’s sophisticated mobile strategy is having a demonstrable impact on their business in Europe. The business operates seven hotel brands: InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites, and is the largest hotel group in the world by number of rooms.

We caught up with Marco De Rosa, IHG’s Mobile & Interactive Marketing Manager for EMEA, who’s been using Google AdWords mobile ads to reach new customers on their mobile devices. Recently, IHG began creating mobile-optimised websites and creating AdWords campaigns with messaging specifically targeted to users on their phones.

“By using text specifically aimed at mobile users, we saw revenue from our mobile search activity increase by 91% YoY,” says De Rosa. “Thanks to our current activity with Google, traffic to our mobile site is increasing by 20% MoM.”

Watch the full interview with Marco in the below video or visit the Google Mobile Ads Youtube Channel.

To read the full case study, please download this PDF.

Posted by Michael Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team.

Destination Analysis

2011-02-07T10:52:00.007+01:00

The Destination Analysis attached provides details on the most searched for destinations from around the globe. Each report provides insight into the seasonality of these 50 destinations, as well as sharing AdWords Metrics (such as CPC and Ad Depth). This information is aimed at advertisers at every level of the auction to help them plan their campaigns with the most up to date information available.

We hope you find these reports useful. If so, we plan to share them on a regular basis:

Car Hire
Flights
Holidays
Hotels

Posted by Stephen Cunningham, Industry Analyst UK and Ireland

Valentine's day

2011-01-14T14:45:00.003+01:00

To help you plan for seasonal events, we have written a brief research paper for Valentine's Day 2011.

The study provides insights into how users search for travel products around February 14th; taking into account influencing factors, such as the spring half-term dates & the day of the week on which Valentine's day falls.

We hope you find the recommendations in this paper useful, and are happy to answer any questions you have.

Posted by Jonny Cranmer, Industry Analyst Google UK.

The silver lining of bad weather: more holiday bookings

2011-01-14T12:12:00.010+01:00

A survey by Sainsbury’s Travel insurance has revealed that more than 13 million people will book a holiday before the end of February. The average amount spend on a holiday is expected to fall 1% year on year, but the increased number of people booking means that spending is expected to increase by 49%, to £11 billion.

Our data tells a similar story. Travel related queries for the weeks immediately leading up to and after Christmas have seen massive year on year growth. In our whitepaper published before Christmas we highlighted the increasing importance of December in the online travel market, as travellers begin their research earlier. As the graph below demonstrates, queries in December actually outpaced the growth from the year before. This query growth has continued into 2011, with 28% and 19% year on year growth respectively in the first two weeks of the year.

The two weeks which saw the highest year on year growth were the weeks which were most affected by the weather, meaning that a lot of the additional queries would not have been commercial. However, query growth has been high in every other week, so we can assume that the spike is legitimate.

Fig 1: Year on year query growth for all Travel queries Week 49 – Week 2 2009/10 – 2010/11

As is often the case during periods of intense query growth, the average depth (number of ads shown per query) has fallen, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for cost efficient traffic. The graph below shows that in each of the past six weeks, average depth has been lower than the previous year.

Fig 2: Average depth for all Travel queries Week 49 – Week 2 2009/10 – 2010/11

Recommendations:
• Uncap daily budgets for the remainder of January. In the last two years, the traditional ‘January peak’ has extended well into February.
• Constantly review your account setup and keyword coverage to ensure you appear where people are searching.
• Use insights for search to keep on top of changing query patterns.

Posted by Michael Wicks, Senior Industry Analyst

How People Search: Mobile vs. Desktop

2011-01-11T15:27:00.006+01:00

Posted by Jonny Cranmer, Industry Analyst

We wanted to gain greater insight into how people search for travel products online, and how user behaviour varies on desktop vs. mobile. So we analysed a sample of travel queries & split them into three buckets: Brand, Head & Long Tail (see images for definitions). We assessed queries made via desktops, and travel queries made on mobile phones.

Please see image 1. Travel queries made from desktops continue to grow. When we index Brand, Head & Long Tail query volumes to January 2009, we see a pattern emerge. The growth of Long Tail & Head queries is aligned more closely right before seasonal vacation periods. This implies that users conduct Long Tail searches early in the research period, before refining them to Head & Brand Terms closer to traditional holiday periods.

Please see image 2. Travel queries made on mobile devices continue to grow at a very fast pace. The highest volume of searches come from Brand and Head terms. This makes sense, as you might expect people to keep mobile searches short due to keyboard limitations. However, when we look at indexed rates, we notice that the growth of long tail searches is very strong. This is interesting to note - perhaps users are becoming more comfortable with mobile search & therefore being more specific in their search.

Now posted: The Customer Journey for Online Travel

2010-12-03T10:07:00.007+01:00

The Nielson study, The Customer Journey for Online Travel, is now available here.

About the study: This year we revisited the Customer Journey for Online Travel in the UK. Nielsen used its NetView metered panel to monitor travel research, quotation and purchase behaviour of 50,000 UK panelists from January to March, 2010.

Posted by Nate Bucholz, UK Travel Industry Manager, Google

Customer Journey For Online Travel

2010-11-25T23:24:00.001+01:00

This year we revisited* the Customer Journey for Online Travel in the UK. Nielsen used their NetView metered panel to monitor travel research, quotation and purchase behaviour of 50,000 UK panelists in the key sales period, January to March (2010).

We analysed:
· The journey and profile of a purchaser beyond 1st transaction

· The role of paid and natural search, brand and generic keywords on one's propensity to book

· The relationship between search, research, product and review sites in the journey path

We will be releasing the information next Wednesday 1st December and holding a webinar between 4-5pm to present the findings and talk through the data. Nielsen will be on hand to address any methodology questions.

Name: UK Online Travel: The Customer Journey 2010

Start time: 12/01/2010 4:00 PM
End time: 12/01/2010 5:00 PM

Registration Link: https://googleemea.connectsolutions.com/e31836066/event/

We urge you to register before the event as we ask for adwords account information.

Please do join us!
The UK Google Travel Team

*We first looked at the customer journey with Comscore in 2007, both we and our clients have been referencing those finding ever since.

Posted by Sarah McDonald, Senior Industry Manager, Travel Team

All You Want For Christmas

2010-11-25T12:39:00.005+01:00

The Google Travel team's latest whitepaper is now available! All You Want For Christmas looks at the increasing importance of December to the online travel market, the change in the way people search for travel products during this period and the effect of the extended January peak. We hope that the paper will help travel advertisers plan more effectively for what is the busiest period of the year.

Please click here for the latest paper.

Posted by Michael Wicks, Industry Analyst, Travel Team.

easyJet shares mobile success at Google's Think Mobile

2010-09-24T16:12:00.005+02:00

Think Mobile, Google's annual event dedicated to the mobile advertising (R)evelution took place recently at the Royal Opera House in London. If you didn't make it in person, fear not! You can find the presentations on the
Think Mobile YouTube channel.

As we've said in other blog postings, we keep hearing great mobile success stories from Travel advertisers. One such story comes from easyJet, which saw a return of $11 for ever $1 spent on mobile; this is higher than their return on desktop search ads.

In the video below, easyJet UK Marketing Manager, Katie Stitson, speaks about the approach, testing methodology and results achieved.

Posted by Nate Bucholz, Industry Manager, Travel