Search Marketing Blog
Searching Travel Deals this Thanksgiving
Posted by Sean McMahon on 11.28.2008This year, it’s safe to assume that consumers have furiously searched online travel Web sites for the lowest possible prices, especially since the Los Angeles Times is predicting that Thanksgiving travel will decrease by 10% in the United States. As consumers cut back on purchases in a given industry, they turn to search engines to discover the best deals. Therefore, it is paramount for travel and tourism businesses to shift marketing dollars to mirror this consumer behavior.
To illustrate the importance of effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies in the travel industry, our SEO Engineer, Tyson Braun, presented the following non-scientific experiment. Like most Americans, he began his Thanksgiving journey home with two thoughts in mind “I’d like a cheap flight home” and “let’s use Google to find it.”
Using our advanced SEO keyword research tools here at EngineWorks, he discovered the top three Google queries for his topic:
1. “cheap flights” (20.4 million searchers),
2. “cheap tickets” (5 million searches),
3. “cheap airline tickets” (500,000 searches).
The current most important search phrase for belt-tightening Americans is “cheap.” In fact, the next 50 or so keywords related to my topic contain this qualifying adjective.
Many people who search for flights in familiar booking engines such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Priceline, Expedia, and Cheapflights often reach these Web sites by searching “cheap flights” in Google. Typically these online booking sites offer similar usability and pricing, and pull from the same data pool. According to bookingbuddy.com, the average consumer searches more than three sites to discover the best deal for their flight before purchasing tickets.
The big winner of my travel experiment is cheapflights.com, a booking engine based in London that partners with Orbitz, among others, to generate search results. Cheapoair.com, kayak.com, and cheaptickets.com (owned by Orbitz) are also high on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for my queries. There are endless amounts of booking engines and many of them have partnerships in place as they hedge each other for primed market share. Sometimes the competition boils over as illustrated by the court battles between Priceline and Expedia.
All of these sites provide a desired service, connecting penny-pinching travelers with cheap flights. This Thanksgiving, not only are there fewer of these travelers, but also the actual travelers are more concerned with cost. The leaders in travel and tourism industry are recognizing that aggressive Search Engine Marketing campaigns can to lead to increase qualified traffic and increased market share.
