Analyst Speak: Travel providers must cut through online jungle of information

11 February 2010

For a lot of people, planning where they might go for their main 2010 holiday is well underway. Many have already shortlisted destinations, with the internet playing a crucial role in the process. Our annual Holiday Survey reveals that people will access an average of six websites when seeking information about possible destinations. Certain types of user, such as 20-34-year-olds, those in the AB social class and those travelling long-haul, are likely to visit an even greater number of sites.

The wealth of information now available makes the internet one of the first places to go for holiday research. With so many different types of sites available, it’s even more critical that a destination, hotel, airline or other travel service has a presence on the correct sites to ensure it reaches those in the planning process. To understand more about the online journey, the 2010 Holiday Survey asked people what sites they had or were likely to visit when seeking information about their main holiday this year (see graph below).

In addition to these sites, a whole raft of others such as newspapers, blogs, social networks, Wikipedia, health, financial and cruise lines were mentioned. There were fewer mentions (5%) for social networks, suggesting they’re less used to source harder factual information.

Looking ahead, we also asked people what travel sites they were likely to use more of in the future when planning a holiday. Professional review sites such as TripAdvisor and TravelBlog topped the list. Nearly four in ten people (39%) said they intended to use these more. When one considers that review sites are already widely used, any further increase makes them an important ingredient in the planning process.

Ensuring the information offered by these sites remains fair and impartial will be essential to their continuing success. To further explore this issue, we asked people if they had made comments online about their travel experience. Nearly four in ten (38%) had. The good news for travel sites is that only 10% of contributors said they mainly expressed negative experiences, 51% mainly positive experiences and 39% a mix of both. So it appears a cross-section of users are posting views that aren’t just skewed to those wishing to air a grievance.

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