INNOVATION REPORT 2015 ROUND-TABLE DEBATE
MARK MEREDITH
NEALE CHINERY
pushed its price proposition, encouraging holidaymakers at the bottom of the purchase funnel to make it the ‘last click’. “You hear everyone saying today that visits are dominated
by mobile as opposed to desktop,” Chinery said. “There’s probably a higher propensity to book on desktop
so you have to get the mix of the two together and you’ve got to recognise the journey of the customer is across both. “I don’t think there will ever be a world without Google. The
change in [online] ‘real estate’ will only continue. If you’re in mobile you have to be in position one or two. On desktop you need to be in the top three, whereas two or three years ago four or five was fine. As a relatively well-known brand the question is how you get the customer to come back without using Google. When they want to come back they type Travel Republic in Google and click through, so even when you’ve got them you’ve got to pay for them. “How can you disrupt that? We are going through a whole
strategic shift around how we rebalance that traffic. The customer will go to multiple sites, so we are trying to get over a value proposition that says we know you are going to go on a journey but don’t forget to come to us.”
MILKING LEADS TO OPTIMISE CONVERSION With conversion rates in travel in the low single figures, one way of improving the return on investment of marketing budgets is to improve conversion rates. Manish Gajria, senior director of product management at
Expedia Affiliate Network, said travel could learn from the controversial payday loans sector. “We are all paying the ‘Google tax’ to acquire the same customer. The challenge we are all dealing with is how we stop that repeat ‘tax’ being paid for the one customer. “I was involved in a project in the
payday loans industry and they milk every
referral to the last drop. One person will pay the acquisition costs; if it doesn’t work for them they will refer them down to the next band, which has a higher discount, and then down to the next one and so on. “They are not going back to Google to pay the ‘tax’ again.
Apps clearly are a very good way of getting the stickiness but it has to be coupled with something else. “The other fundamental thing is people have lost trust that
they can get a good price in a specific place online. They have been trained by Google and the other players to look and look and look because there will always be a lower price to be found somewhere. We all know in the industry that prices don’t vary that much so how do we get people to stop thinking I have to go to 15 places to find the best price? Perhaps you can reverse it out and say if you book with us and you find a cheaper price we will match it. If we all use price as that ‘something extra’ then we are in a race to the bottom.”
MOBILE AND THE ‘AHAMOMENT’ Mobile might be the big trend for all online retailers but the panel heard the acquisition cost of getting customers to download your app and keep using it is another big issue. Damon Tassone, Intent Media’s chief revenue officer, said:
“Total information awareness has been the paradigm that’s driven desktop. But is that the paradigm that wins in mobile? Or is it going to be curated experiences, not about total information transparency.”
“I DON'T THINKTHERE WILL EVER BEA WORLD WITHOUTGOOGLE”
38 — FEBRUARY 2015 —
TRAVOLUTION.CO.UK
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