In terms of the content that users are looking for, there needs to be a good balance of both content to inspire the user (e.g. imagery to attract them to a destination or type of holiday), content to inform the user (e.g. information about climate, airport transfers, maps etc), as well as user generated content which will give good honest reviews.

According to research done by digital marketing experts eConsultancy, when it comes to actually making a booking, the following were the key factors in users deciding to use one website over another to book their holiday:

1. An easily usable search function, which will give the user options which are close to their search if there are no exact results returned (e.g. allowing the user to search a date range rather than just one day of travel)
2. Clear information – important factors being clarity about location (how near is it to the beach), type of holiday and whether children are welcome
3. Photos and videos – the larger and the more choice – the better. Visual information scores more highly in decision-making and is more likely to sell a holiday than quality copy
4. Competitive prices – in a competitive market and with a holiday being a relatively high consumer spend item, price will always be important so having access to the best prices will put you ahead
5. Reviews from other holiday makers so that the user doesn’t have to go off elsewhere to find the information

Econsultancy’s research, which was done last year showed that almost 85% of holiday purchases by consumers involved the internet (53% booked online, and a further 30% did their research online before booking offline). So getting the online offering right is absolutely crucial for travel agents to survive in this market.

Multicom can help in addressing all of the above issues, so do get in touch with us if you’d like to find out more about what we can do to help you.

We’d be interested to hear from the industry on their experience with improving their website around the above factors, or what other features they have also found are important to end users?

APD and Spiralling Costs

In November 2011, George Osborne announced a tax hike of almost 10% on flights from April 2012. This change affected those who had already paid for their flights, adding extra money to their fares. On short haul flights, an extra cost of £52 for a family of four to fly to Spain seems just about manageable. However, if you swap Malaga to Australia, you’re looking at a rise of £368.

This drastic rise in price doesn’t simply stop at pricing struggling families out of the market. The effect from consumers forced to cancel their holidays is felt keenly by travel agents who are normally the recipients of those consumers’ purchases. Larger travel agents may be able to absorb some of the loss of revenue but this spells big trouble for small independent travel agents, who are already struggling in a recession. Further effects will be felt by airline staff, with bosses from Easyjet, RyanAir, Virgin Atlantic & British Airways condemning the tax and warning that APD will create large numbers of redundancies amongst their staff. The World Travel and Tourism Council recently confirmed the anxiety and worry felt in the industry by predicting that the rise will cost the country 91,000 jobs and £4.2 billion in revenue (ATAB Article).

In the next year, the Government will collect an extra £2.8 billion from passengers….where will it be going?

ATOL and the Erosion of Customer Choice

We can tell you that one place the extra money won’t be going is to fund the Civil Aviation Authority ATOL scheme; the latest legislation on this scheme means that all travel agents in the scheme will be forced to charge each passenger £2.50 to ensure that their travel is fully protected. This might seem fair and all for the consumers’ safety, until you learn that airlines selling flight-only deals are completely exempt from this ruling and can sell completely unprotected travel, leaving passengers out of pocket and potentially stranded if the airline goes out of business.

Travel agencies now must obtain CAA permission to start issuing ATOL certificates to their customers (which, incidentally, must be issued immediately after booking) or risk breaching CAA guidelines. This provides another series of barriers and confusing red tapes for small agencies and brand new start-ups to deal with, stifling entrepreneurs and innovation in the industry.

At Multicom, we believe that exempting air travel from the new reforms gives the already powerful airlines an added advantage – a head-start of £2.50 on every single booking. This can easily mount up to millions in extra revenue, giving them a more dominant market position and pushing out smaller agents. As well as destroying jobs and crushing businesses, this also creates a much smaller market for the consumer, leaving them with less choice, which has already been made unaffordable by APD.

What are your opinions on the recent changes brought in by the Government? Do you believe we should continue petitions and protests to get our message across, or work within the current guidelines to protect the industry and look after the consumer?

Research/Planning

Most trips start with some type of research. It may be heading down to the local travel agent to chat to a consultant, but more often people will drift online to ask friends, look for deals and start to map out their trip. Travel inspiration and research can be a more casual process which can be carried out on a mobile device as well as a home computer. From a June 2011 study from TripAdvisor revealed that 27% of participants had researched destinations on their mobile, with 29% using it for research and booking accommodation.

One of the most venerable names in travel is Lonely Planet with a huge range of highly regarded guidebooks. For those that don’t want to carry around a heavy guidebook, the Lonely Planet mobile app not only allows the user to download any of their guidebooks to their phone but even provides free ‘lite’ versions of their most popular guide books. Apps like these allow users to casually check out destinations, helping them judge if it’s the place for them.

Once a user has chosen and booked their holidays, then comes the time to start planning activities and travel. There is plenty to organise when preparing for a trip away and apps that allow users to put all their arrangements in one place are immensely useful. An itinerary app such as TripIt helps a user condense the many processes and information produced in holiday booking on to one app on their phone. Instead of the laborious process of copy and pasting information, TripIt allows the user to build up their itinerary by forwarding confirmation emails which automatically are added to their list.

But TripIt has competition in the itinerary market with the Worldmate Mobile Itinerary app. This app appears to be geared towards the need of the business traveller, comprising of an automatically synchronising itinerary app that pulls together flights, hotel and car hire information and builds it into an itinerary. On top of this, the app also lists meetings and allows the user to share plans with colleagues.

WorldMate Mobile Itinerary

The day of travel

By the time the user reaches the airport, everything should be in place but for those times when a user needs to navigate a large airport quickly and efficiently, apps like GateGuru come in useful. An airport specific location app, GateGuru allows users to check out and rate amenities (restaurants, shops) discover what facilities are near their terminal and even discover the average waiting time their gate. Location used to enhance one of the most stressful periods of a user’s travel journey.

GateGuru

For those times when flights are cancelled or delays, some applications help the user find alternative travel. FlightTrack Pro allows the user to track a number of flights, keep on top of gate changes and delays and even find an alternative flight if flights are cancelled.

FlightTrack Pro

Even further along the journey, the user may want to contact their accommodation for directions. Mobile allows them to check the details through email or web, call the accommodation and work out a route through the many available mapping/GPS apps. For those times when a user is genuinely lost, the TomTom application can be downloaded to turn a smartphone into a sat nav appliance.

During Travel

For longer trips, some users wish to book accommodation whilst travelling. Even for short trips, there’s always the chance of something going wrong and a need appearing to book alternative accommodation, and fast. Several hotels and travel websites offer applications that allow users to book on the move, reducing the stress of finding alternative accommodation by offering price comparison and location based services.

For younger travellers, the European hostel chain, Generator Hostels, offers a mobile app which allows users to book on their phone, perfect for backpackers and similar travellers who have changeable itineraries. For more formal travellers, HotelTonight offers big discounts on unsold hotel rooms, right at the last minute. A useful revenue streams for hotels wishing to pack out their last new spaces and a potential lifesaver for inconvenienced travellers wishing to quickly find accommodation.

For travellers struggling with the language barrier whilst aboard, Jibbigo offers a vocal-based translation app, translating the user’s chosen language from their mother tongue to the language of their current location.

There’s a wide spread of information that a traveller may need access to when on their holiday. Most smartphones will have some type of built in location based weather app, allowing the user to plan for bad weather or surprise changes in temperatures. But most crucially, pinpointing places of interest appears to be a common activity amongst mobile travellers, with 62% of travellers using mobile to discover restaurant locations and 36.1% checking ‘shopping information’.

And finally, for those who want to check in with friends at home, Lonely Planet have developed a whole new spin on the traditional postcard, with their Lonely Planet Postcards App.This app allows users to create a physical postcard from a photo taken on their phone and will ship anywhere in the world for $1.99.

Post Travel

The customer journey doesn’t stop after the holiday ends. After the trip is the perfect time to gather feedback, whether it’s a positive review or a complaint that can be turned around into a great example of customer service. From TripAdvisor’s mobile application to mobile sites with reviews built into the system, there are several ways for brands to continue to engage the customer, providing a good enough experience for the customer to either consider repeating booking or to recommend to friends. And with an audience of 6 million per month for the TripAdvisor mobile site, there are many opportunities for your brand to make an impression.

It’s clear that there is a multitude of ways that the travel industry can reach and help users through mobile, whether it’s altruistic (a useful travel app for free) or a way of developing revenue (filling out empty rooms by developing a mobile booking app)

What can we take away from this?

• Travellers are displaying an increasing hunger for mobile
• Users are increasingly likely to research and book travel on mobile
• Applications that help users perform a certain action are popular
• Travel review sites are experiencing continued rises in mobile traffic
• Travel brands that are not considering their mobile audiences are missing out on big opportunities.

Project Tacho (named after the Greek for ‘speed’) is a new, user-centric content delivery process comprising a number of exciting new technologies, which work within our FindAndBook and web platform ecosystems to provide yet more flexibility and functionality to our clients. Tacho allows Multicom’s clients to transmit a smaller amount of data to their users while still giving them all the details they need to make informed decisions about their holidays; and by using the latest in browser enhancements and Multicom’s advanced caching solutions, the user receives real, usable results from their request in under a second.

By moving away from XML into more lightweight languages, Tacho uses an entirely different data structure to our existing FAB interface allowing us to communicate more precise information with a smaller overhead. This smaller, more refined format is perfect for our customers attempting to reduce the size of the data footprint they transmit to their users – most commonly mobile and social web users. By reducing this footprint, our customers are opened up to using our services in a number of new ways depending on their needs.

To give a couple of examples of how Tacho could work:

• A client who feels their site takes too long to present results to their end-users may find smaller, more frequent messages between the browser and server can give the impression of a more reactive system to the end-user.
• A client striving to improve their look-to-book ratio on certain competitive routes may decide to only show the cheapest flights returned to the user initially, while loading more expensive results in the background and displaying them in a paginated fashion.
• A client interested in developing mobile applications may wish to severely limit the amount of data they transfer to the phone to keep the cost to the end-user as low as possible. Tacho’s reduced data footprint encourages exactly this.

In addition to a new data format, the new system makes use of numerous other advanced techniques including:

• Browser pre-fetching and caching to ensure the fastest possible feedback is given to a user when they hit ‘search’
• Server-side caching, as developed by our ground breaking Omnicache technology is incorporated into Tacho as a standard, meaning sub-second results and the fastest possible searches
• Client-side sorting and filtering mean that we can return sets of data to the customer and allow their browser to worry about which parts to display
• A lightweight search API combines these features into standards-compliant protocols, and promotes the easy addition of higher-level data functions (encryption, compression, encoding, etc.)

We’ll keep you up to date as further developments are made. In the meantime, if you’d like more information on this or any of our products, visit us at http://www.multicom.co.uk/ or speak with one of our consultants on 0117 908 1250.

However, that’s only a part of the story. How long does the data that we just gathered in fulfilling a customer’s request stay valid for? This is an especially troubling question for responses generated from web scraped data, where flight prices can vary wildly – even to the point of showing different prices to two separate users viewing the same flight simultaneously.

This “price hiking” phenomenon happens much more frequently than you might expect as flight providers maximise the amount that they can sell each seat for. As seats on a specific flight get sold, the (fewer) remaining seat prices increase – sometimes gradually, occasionally in leaps and bounds.

Part of this issue is out of our hands – there’s no way to know whether we’re visiting that site thirty seconds after a large party just booked the same deal.

A significant portion of it though is down to us, and how responsibly Multicom’s travel technologies interact with the site on our customer’s behalf. What we can (and do, rather well) do is ensure that the price a user sees when they first check a flight remains as low as possible, even through multiple re-costings and over an extended period of time. By managing a customer’s sessions expertly on both our own systems and our supplier’s websites FindAndBook works hard to keep the price you pay at booking to be as close to the price you first saw when you checked availability, even when other systems would show (and charge you for!) an increase.

We can’t do anything the supplier’s website won’t allow us to do, but with many years of experience in web scraping behind us, Multicom is leading the way in developing smarter, faster tools to get the best our of our suppliers’ websites.

So, how fast should your website be? Or more importantly, how long will your online visitors wait for information to load on your website?

Well, here are some quotes from search thought-leaders to give you some insight;

• “Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait. Every millisecond matters.”
  Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro.
• Furthermore, 2009 Google conducted a series of experiments which reinforced that “speed matters” on the Internet. Google ran experiments where they slowed down the search results page from 100 to 400 milliseconds, and what they saw was a decrease in the amount of search queries. When they slowed down, people searched less. They kept this experiment going, and over time, they searched even less. The first three weeks, people searched 0.4% less. The second three weeks, it was 0.75% less. “There was this fatigue. It’s barely perceptible in your own mind. You don’t know that this slowdown is what’s making you search less.” Johanna Wright, Google’s search project management team leader.
• The slowest speed that the consumer expects is the fastest speed they have had one time,” said Paul Sagan, Akamai president and CEO.
• “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web”.
  Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.

It is statements like these that have spurred Google and other tech companies (including us) on the quest for speed.

It is interesting to note however that user expectations differ according to the action –  for example, we are more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a search result BUT speed is still the number one factor as four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading. (Interestingly, we are happy waiting for a webpage on our mobile phone to take a leisurely 9 seconds to load).

However, throughout the years as technology has improved – our expectations on how quickly a website should load have significantly increased.

Back in 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers expected pages to load in 2 seconds or less – and at 3 seconds, a large proportion left the site.

If we go even further back in 2006, a similar Forrester study found the average expectation for page load times was 4 seconds or less.

When it comes to search however, speed is undeniably the most important factor – no matter what industry you’re in – and if you can be the fastest, you will undeniably have an edge over your competitors.

Our very own developers here at Multicom, have spent hours upon hours over the past 2 years researching and developing our technology so that we can provide our clients with one of the fastest and most powerful search tools available in the travel industry.

And all the hard work paid off as we have just recently launched our new super fast search tool.  Here are some results from our own in-house speed tests;

• Search results come back from our API in less than one second (note: Google and Bing, are considered by web analysts to be the speed demons of the Web, typically delivering results in less than a second – proving just how fast our search tool really is!)
• Search results are delivered on to a web page within 4 seconds

The reason we’re able to return search results so quickly is because the search is being run against our own cached database – so we don’t need to go off and check against loads of different supplier databases for every search that is run.

If your website is slow to load information, you may risk losing your website visitors as people will search less often and it will most certainly affect the rate at which they return to your website. As Google posted on their blog back in 2010 “…when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

For travel companies specifically, in a market where it can at times be difficult to stand out from the crowd, speed is what will separate you from the pack. By providing good quality information super fast, you will increase the stickiness of your site and increase loyalty.

If you would like to know more about Multicom’s fast search tool, click here or call 0117 908 1250 to speak to one of our consultants.

Our very own Multicom representative in the US met with Google recently, so we thought we’d share our inside knowledge and opinion on this controversial issue.

The Facts:
To kick things off, let’s take a quick look at how and why Google decided to get into the travel space.

In April 2011, Google paid a reported $700m to acquire ITA Software, a Massachusetts-based company that specialises in developing software for the travel and airline industry. A mere 5 months later in September 2011, Google launched ‘Flight Search’.

In their own words, Flight Search enables users to “choose your flight from a simple list of results, explore destinations on a map, and find travel dates with the lowest fare”.

The reason behind the deal according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was because many consumers are currently frustrated with the way to search for airline ticket prices online, with prices often fluctuating thus presenting a frustrating user experience.

A video posted on Google’s website claims the three main reasons for the acquisition were to provide;

1. Better flight info for consumers
2. More consumers for travel websites
3. Bigger breakthroughs in flight search

And with 68 million searches on Google.com  each month for the term ‘flight’ and 55.6 million for ‘flights’,  one can see the business potential that travel search presents.

But it didn’t stop there…

In July 2011, Google also rolled out a second component to its travel offerings launching ‘Hotel Finder’.

Hotel Finder allows users to choose a city and draw a shape around the area where they want to stay. Users can then compare hotels, rates and book either directly with the hotel or through a partner site.

The reaction:

On initial inspection, many industry analysts claimed their dissatisfaction with Google’s Flight Search claiming that the search results were inconsistent, incomplete and that the booking button didn’t always transfer the user’s travel dates and destinations onto an airline’s website.

So we decided to test the waters ourselves.  From the handful of searches we conducted, the options displayed and prices seemed to match up with the airlines website, however on average, around 15 – 20% of the search results delivered an “unknown result” and anywhere up to 30% of the results did not have the option to book, stating “No booking links available. Contact airline directly”.

Overall however, one cannot deny the fact that the site’s fairly simple web interface makes it very easy to use.  Results appear on one page in a grid like format below a map showing the route you have selected.
One unique feature is the open-ended destination. For example, a user can type in a vague flight search into Google such as ‘where can I go from San Francisco in a four-hour period for less than $600’, and Google Flights will display suitable options on the map.

So what does all this mean for the travel industry?

When Google first announced their move into the travel space, the general vibe within the industry was one of fear, some claiming that it posed a “far bigger threat to the online travel market than group voucher sites.”

At the TravelMole Industry Question Time in London in December, responsibletravel.com chief executive Justin Francis warned that the new functions “could spark a new price war”.

He added: “It is going to create a massive downward pressure on price if you commoditise product. Power is changing to the customer, if you’re not the cheapest or the best the customer will find out incredibly quickly as they’ve got the information to do that”.

On the other hand, Robert Birge, chief marketing officer of Kayak (who many claim to be competitors of Flight Search along with Orbitz and Microsoft’s Bing), expressed confidence in his company’s ability to compete, being quoted on Travolution stating “…We believe our flight search technology is superior.”
He continued:

“We recognise Google is a formidable competitor but they haven’t been successful in every vertical they entered. We use multiple data sources and proprietary technology, all of which helps us in our efforts to provide people with comprehensive, fast and accurate answers to their flight search needs.”

As one of the leading providers of travel technology globally, here’s our opinion on why Google’s move into the travel industry is not a game changer.

Flight Search and Hotel Finder are only for the US market (for the moment at least)

Let’s not forget that both Google’s Flights and Hotels search engines are ONLY for the US market.
Late last year, Google announced that the international roll out of Flight Search is “coming soon”, although it is expected to be a staggered launch in individual markets rather than a simultaneous unveiling across the rest of the world.

Google would not disclose an exact timeframe for the launches but just last week they announced that users in the US can now search for international destinations. At this stage, they have included about 500 airports outside the US but said in this blog post;

“If your ideal destination isn’t yet available, we’re working hard on expanding our global coverage and adding more routes in the future”.

No packaging – just information

While Google are claiming that the future of “flight search” and “hotel search” will become “theirs”, where does that leave the rest of us?

Essentially, Google’s travel search services simply provides the time, availability and prices for fares, and then allow you to book directly through the airliner’s own site.  Essentially, all it is doing is pulling together information.

This is very different to actually “selling someone a holiday”.

Yes Google may be used by those of us who want to get from A to B at the lowest cost possible but it won’t be used by those that want to book a “holiday”.

Travel agents who use leading technology such as Multicom’s search and booking system, FaB (Find and Book) and fast search tool, Omnicache, are able to access huge amounts of information superfast to get the best flights, most suitable accommodation and additional extras for each and every customer, while offering personal experience and advice at the same time.

In fact, Multicom’s ground breaking advanced fast search caching product (Omnicache) has specifically been designed to significantly improve search times and accuracy of information, improving sales while also increasing loyalty to a travel agent’s website.

John Howell, CEO of Multicom said;

“Our goal here at Multicom is to ensure that we deliver the widest choice for our customers, at the fastest speed”.

When booking a holiday, let’s face it; there are some people that just prefer to search for all the information and book everything themselves, but at the same time, there will always be people who “don’t have the time” or “can’t be bothered” to spend hours upon hours researching all the ins and outs of their holiday.  They want to just turn up and relax (fancy that!)

Even those that put themselves in the “do everything myself” category must admit that sometimes, the internet just doesn’t cut it and you do in fact need the expert technology that only a travel agent has access to.

While at the moment, Google’s move into the travel industry may not be a threat, it would be naive to simply just dismiss it.  After all, Google is planning on rolling out Flight Search internationally, so it could very well become a threat in future.

So travel companies who want to get ahead of the game; now is the time to ensure that your online offering is the best it possible can be. If you are going to be competing with Google in the future, you will need to make sure you too are able to offer a huge amount of information, super fast.

To find out more about how Multicom’s products can help your business, visit www.multicom.co.uk or speak with one of our consultants on 0117 908 1250

What do you think about Google’s Flight Search and Hotel Finder?

The travel industry has also started to jump on the mobile train with some of the big airlines now offering apps to book flights and check in using your mobile. Search providers such as Kayak are also providing apps allowing consumers to search for flights and book hotels form their phone or tablet.

Much of the discussion at the ITB focused on whether to go down dedicated app or the mobile website route. There are advantages to both; a dedicated app will allow a much richer, more curated user experience with access to more of the features present on today’s smartphones, however a mobile website is far cheaper to develop and to large extent platform agnostic – meaning you only have to develop the site once for it to work across all the major smartphone platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone).

To a large extent the decision on which route to go down will depend on how loyal your customers are and how developed your brand is. If you are going to spend the money developing apps for the major platforms – the cost of this is roughly 9 times that of a mobile site – you need to be sure that you will see a return on that investment. The general consensus is that your customers will need to be using and purchasing from the app at least 5 times a year in order to make this happen. There are other problems with apps, how do you get your app to stand out amongst the 585,000 odd apps in the iOS app store alone? And even once you’ve persuaded your consumer base to download your app, the worrying fact remains that 95% of apps aren’t used after the first month.

There are problems with mobile sites too – while the development time and cost may be less, the features they can offer are restricted when compared to native apps. They can’t for example pull location data from the phone’s GPS system to automatically search for tourist attractions within 10 miles of the user’s location, or locate your nearest travel agent. The user experience can be clunky and is heavily dependent on the network speed of the user’s 3G provider.  However these are improving, new technology is allowing websites more access to smartphone features and 3G and even 4G coverage is improving – so in the medium term the mobile site is looking like the most attractive offering.

One thing is for sure, the trend towards mobile computing is not going to stop, already 50% of Google searches have a local element to them. Apple has just launched its latest version of its game-changing iPad, and Microsoft is due to launch its tablet-focused Windows 8 in October this year. The way people consume travel products will change with these trends, mobile technology allows you as a provider of travel products to interact and even sell to your customers at any point during their trip. Upsell is no longer restricted to the confirmation page of your website, it can now be taken with the consumer on their holiday. Mobile isn’t the only place IT is changing, all of the big 3 (Google, Microsoft and Apple) now sell products designed specifically for use in conjunction with your TV, giving yet more opportunities for consumers to use apps or browse the internet….but that’s for another post.

Driven by a desire to fulfil client requests in providing an ever-expanding variety of choice in the suppliers we provide, we have developed travel  technologies that are fully integrable with our booking system FindAndBook which allow us to gather the necessary information directly from a flight provider’s website.

Colloquially known as “screen-scrapers”, “web scrapers” or “data miners”, these tools are commonly used to trawl the internet for information.  They automate basic tasks such as the completion of forms in order to gather data about certain topics or locate specific pieces of information among the hubbub of daily internet traffic.

Whilst well-structured data – such as XML – is easy to query once you know the schema, information discovered online is much more volatile. When websites change their design – whether in the form of a complete site overhaul, or something as simple as moving the location that card charges appear on the payment page – any web scraping that relies on knowing the ‘location’ of that piece of data will need to be altered as well. The trouble is the process of manually updating these technologies takes time and very often will require deployment of new code from a developer out to a test service, and then finally out to a scheduled deployment to be placed live, ready for customer use. An awful lot of work (and a lot of downtime – sometimes in the regions of days or even weeks!) to adjust to something simple like the movement of payment information!

To counter this problem, and ensure that when one of our supplier’s websites is altered in such a way that makes it incompatible with our current web scraping techniques, we write the code in a way that means the system is able to update fast in response to these small changes – sometimes even in the space of a few minutes without any of our servers going offline. We don’t allow a small change outside of our control to impact our service to the end user for a second longer than necessary. We have to take this approach to this technology, in order to keep ahead of the curve compared to our competition.

This delivers accurate results, and allows us to respond to the unpredictable, all while maintaining speed and reliability.

However it’s still a full time job to monitor all of the sites that we work with in this way, especially given the ever-changing, fast-paced nature of the web.  Until the industry decides to provide access to their data in a much more workable way, then my challenge to keep Multicom’s travel technologies at the cutting edge of the industry continues.

The key point which I took away from this presentation is that cruise companies often miss the boat (if you’ll pardon the pun) on effectively responding to the needs of their potential customers online by lack of appropriate content. As a result they miss out on online bookings.

In looking to attract new customers on board (are we counting the puns?) who have never previously bought cruise holidays, the key objections against cruises need to be understood and if possible dispelled. The main reasons potential customers are put off booking cruise holidays are:

• They’re for older people
• You have to dress formally for meals
• When there’s no shore excursions, you’re ‘at sea’ – i.e. stuck on the boat (implication: not having fun)
• They’re expensive

So there’s some easy things cruise companies can do to overcome these objections. The use of images of people who are not old and who are having fun, and eating whilst not dressed formally is a good starting place. Secondly they can actually write some content to address these questions.

If you search on Google for ‘are cruises…’ the results are interesting:

By ensuring you have content on your website to answer some of these top questions will bring you up in search results more often and drive more traffic to your site, giving a great opportunity to dispel some of the myths and therefore convert the user into a customer.

One of the most searched for questions on the internet about the need to dress up is whether you have to do so on a cruise:

If this is a concern that a lot of potential customers have, then ensuring you have content to address this concern is again something that is an easy way to drive traffic to your website.

Lots of key information such as more specific detail on the cabins, itinerary and the ship are often missing, and websites are found to be inferior to paper brochures. If cruise companies want to save on their costs of printing expensive brochures then they’re going to need to supply higher quality of content online.

A further point that Stefan made is that a lot of users don’t know what they want when they’re investigating a cruise holiday. Most websites simply offer the user basic search parameters such as departure date, geographic location, preferred ship, departure port and duration.

These search functions are great for users who are pretty clear on what they want, however don’t offer much help for a first time cruiser. The results returned don’t offer much help either, covering only the search parameters mentioned and prices. Neither does it explain any of the benefits of going on one ship rather than another.

For example if I want to go on a cruise that’s suitable for a young family (i.e. plenty for children to do, and not full of old people) then how can I determine from the search results above which one would be right for me?

The point Stefan made was that if cruise companies want to direct users into the content that makes them more likely to book, they’re going to need to offer them better advice. They need to ask them things like who are they travelling with (e.g. friends, family, partner) and what do they like to do on holiday (e.g. sunbathe, watersports, excursions) and then present them with options that would be more suited to them – and focus on selling them the experience rather than the price.