Influential Interactive Marketing

Making Last Minute Travel Easier

The rising popularity of online travel planning has made every element of the organizing experience easier from research and coordination to deal-seeking and booking.  Over time the big online travel agencies (OTAs) like Orbitz and Expedia have even gotten better at allowing users to organize more complex itineraries including multiple destinations, hotels and rental cars in a single itinerary.  Until recently, however, the process of booking vacations for multiple travellers leaving from multiple destinations was still a highly manual process.  With the launch of the their new "Meet me in ..." packages, Site59 is tackling this last hurdle of complexity.  This new offering, currently in their site in Beta version offers last minute travellers the ability to synch their travel schedules to leave from two different departure cities, meet in the same place and travel together.  As they outline on their site, there are many different groups of people who could use Meet me in ... best friends travelling together, romantic couples in long distance relationships planning a rendevouz, or family reunions bringing together far flung relatives.  I love this idea. 

In an industry as crowded and commoditized as online travel, you have to respect Site59's strategy of carving their niche in last minute travel to such as degree that the majority of airline and OTA (online travel agency) sites are using their engine to power their own last minute features on their sites.  And if the true profit from online travel bookings really is in the package deals - Site 59 is extremely well positioned in this industry of shrinking margins.  As they continue to make last minute travel easier and more convenient for travellers, this phenomenon of last minute travel will start to expand its audience beyond young, time-rich, thrill seekers ... and move into a broader base of travellers.  Perhaps this will even bring more spontaneity into the act of travelling ... something that has been slowly disappearing with the evolution of the bus tour phenomenon that lets people see a country or region in air-conditioned prepackaged safety.  This is online innovation at its best - rethinking old models, simplifying complex tasks, and allowing travellers to focus on planning and dreaming of their travel experience instead of wasting time coordinating details.  Sounds like what we used to use travel agents for.

The Future of the Online Travel Industry

The online travel industry is one of the most competitive of any that I think exist online or offline today.  In a market previously dominated by two or three players, the rise of travel aggregator sites such as Kayak and Sidestep has made travel an even greater price-driven commodity.  These aggregation sites are increasingly becoming a first point of call for experienced online travel deal seekers looking for the best deals on airfare, hotels, and car rentals.  Despite efforts from the big three (Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity) to bring out enhanced content (often through partnerships with content providers like Frommers), the majority of site visitors are still task oriented and highly price conscious.   

Adding pressure to these OTAs (Online Travel Agents) is the growing prevalence of low price guarantees which have been announced by most large hotel chains, including Hilton, Marriott, and Starwood -- which are taking hotel bookings away and leaving only airfares and car rentals (both lower margin).  As a result, the opportunity for any of the many competitors in this space is increasingly concentrated in two areas:

1. Corporate travel (exclusive deals, recurring sales, full price tickets, etc.)
2. Package deals (last minute deals, book everything at once, specials)

The big three know this.  Each has last minute deals (sourced through Site59 - one of the few successful online travel models out there) and dedicated corporate travel areas.  Yet amidst all these challenges, there is hope in the fact that the passion for travel and travel deals is strong and driving the popularity of consumer driven discussion sites such as FlyerTalk.  The site has thousands of posts from travellers helping others, trading discount certificates, and talking about customer service experiences.  TripAdvisor is one of the most frequently trafficked sites from search engines due to its high rankings for just about any location or hotel-based keyword search.  Each of these sites is hugely influential because they feature real voices sharing real insights.

My view is that the opportunity in the online travel industry is for a single travel site to emerge as the authority in pulling these two types of sites together, to follow a user through from browsing to buying.  An OTA focused on including real voices of consumers to review hotel properties, share deals and frequent flier tips, and even trade discount certificates ... what would that look like?  It's an intriguing possibility, and one that I think will describe the online travel sites which are still around after a few years.

Starwood Launches a Katrina Online Relief Auction

I recently came across a great travel/advocacy campaign sponsored by Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide (up from October 20-27).  Taking the idea of donating your frequent flier miles to the next stage, the site features an online auction with more than 800 travel related items including a "Carolina Getaway with tickets to a pro football game" and a "Deluxe 4 Night Stay at the St. Regis Shanghai."  The site's main purpose is to raise funds for the more than 900 displaced Starwood employees from the New Orleans region, with 100% of donated funds going to help them.  This strikes me as a particularly successful promotion for several reasons:

1. It humanizes the organization's employees: Too many travel companies focus on their services and amenities, while travellers read in the press about new pay cuts, layoffs and other examples of employee devaluation.  This comes across as a great example of a company sticking up for their employees and doing what they can to help them.
2. It promotes national and international Starwood destinations: Ok, advocacy is great ... but this also ties to marketing result, getting more Starwood properties in front of consumers and judging by the many bids on these packages, consumers see most of the offers as a good value.
3. It is low cost and low maintenance: All they needed to do was enlist support from properties worldwide willing to participate.  The entire auction is online and presumably self sustaining, and promotion is through their current hotel properties (as well as possibly some online advertising which I haven't seen)

In all, a strong example of combining a corporate social responsibility, crisis management, employee relations, and marketing promotion into a cohesive single effort.  I'd love to see more travel companies give marketing like this a try.

Hyper-Targeting and Why TV will Lose Smart Advertisers

Orbitz Chief Marketing Officer Randy Wagner says [in this week's BusinessWeek article - "Cable's Big Bet on Hyper-Targeting] reaching consumers with ads they won't skip is a priority.  She likens the goal to Amazon.com's strategy of recommending products based on past purchases.  "It's so relevant, it feels like a service instead of selling."

I had the chance to meet with Randy several weeks ago to speak about the marketing challenges facing the Orbitz brand, as well as the travel industry as a whole.  The interesting insight from those meetings which I can definitely attest to first hand, having spent the past week on the road ... is that the travel industry has weaned customers away from the idea of expecting service more than any other industry.  If a plane lands on time, and the staff isn't rude to us, we're thrilled.  In this environment, there is an erosion of expectation coupled with the erosion of trust written about often by media and advertising skeptics.  How do we rise above this?  How does the Internet offer a way forward unlike TV, or radio, or print, or any other medium?

I think the difference lies in a passive experience versus an active one.  Targeting on television, as written about by David  Kiley in BusinessWeek (available online to subscribers only) is inherently flawed, in my view.  It  attempts to measure what people are watching and then group attitudes based on shows.  The problems with this method are numerous:

• Multiple people use the same television
• People often "watch what's on" - not indicating a preference for that show or even a belonging to the target audience group, but rather a laziness in changing the channel ... not a great metric to target with
• Televisions are often running when no one is watching

Contrast this with the Internet and a similar targeting exercise in this medium.  The potential is vastly different:

• Users are profiled based first on what they tell you - from having registered
• Sophisticated profiles can be created based on what they do, not just who they might be
• New options can be presented real time to interact with this audience
• You are guaranteed that someone is at the other end of the line, because they are interacting

For any of our clients trying to avoid the "ad skipping generation"  - the fact that the Internet is the medium to focus on seems to be the clear conclusion.  At least, until Cable can come up with a "hyper-targeting" technology that can come remotely close to what we already have on the Internet.

Online Moms and Travel Booking Online

On my way to a meeting in New York yesterday for a client in the travel industry, I started to consider the convergence of research reports that I have seen recently on both moms and travel booking online.  A Disney-commissioned audience segmentation I read some time ago noted the following key segments of moms:

• "Tech Nesters" (32%) - Web-saavy stay at home moms who feel the Internet has brought their family closer together, and visit websites with their kids (though they are also protective of what their kids do online).
• "Mrs. Net Skeptic" (31%) - Stay at home mom who is skeptical of the Internet and very protective of her kids going online and does not allow a lot of freedom.  Likely to focus on family activities and feels rules and disciple are important.
• "The Yes Mom" (15%) - Married or divorced moms that are also working, particularly in executive or managerial roles.  Likely to grant kids a lot of freedom when it comes to the Internet and does not know what she would do without the Internet. 
• "Passive Under Pressure Mom" (22%) - Likely to be divorced or single and stretched far too thin regarding responsibilities at home and at work.  Protective of kids use of the Internet, but more likely to be preoccupied with other things to be too concerned about the Internet all together.

Further conclusions drawn from this analysis can be read in the transcript of an Ad-Tech interview with Ken Goldstein, EVP and Managing Director of Disney Online.

For our clients in the travel and other industries looking to target moms, we have already started to take the next step beyond this segmentation of moms by attitudes to the Internet and focus more on Moms as influencers.  Word of mouth marketing has huge applications for this audience ... a fact that companies like BuzzAgent can attest to based on the composition of their members (BuzzAgent is more than 70% female and more than 50% are married with kids). 

The recent phenomenon of targeting these "Alpha Moms" even has support through a new TV network that focuses on providing content for moms that are described on the site as "mavens of mommyhood."  Coupled with the strong growth of online use among moms, as well as the recent reports about email's potency as a way to reach moms ... identifying the right influencers in online communities could be the strongest single tactic for connecting with moms that are in the midst of making their families travel plans for the next big vacation.

Orbitz is down - CRM opportunity?

Orbitz.com is down - an extremely rare event for large ecommerce sites these days.  I'm sure there will be articles in the coming days about the real cost of this outage for Orbitz.  And at this point it's still down with only their admission that "We are aware of the problem and are working to correct it."  Chances are they will have it up very shortly.  But when the site is finally back up, they will have significant credibility issues to deal with.  Classic online crisis management. 

But this outage could also be an opportunity for the site to reconnect with dormant or past customers. What if they sent a letter to all customers with an apology and incentive to return to the site?  Apology emails have a way of travelling among customers ... which could be a good thing if an incentive were part of the message.  A built in setup for a viral message - where the good is sent with the bad.