Catherine Holahan penned a brief, but interesting, article for Business Week on how Google plan to expand their efforts in the online travel arena. In an interview with Holahan, Rob Torres, Google’s managing director for travel said:

the goal of Google’s travel division—aside from tapping into the $90+ billion global travel ad and sales market—is to give users a destination where they can research travel plans, read user reviews, and see user uploaded videos and photos. Already, about 50% of travelers use some sort of online social media site to research their plans, says Torres. Why not give them a one-stop shop for travel information? “We are already so highly searched for travel,”

This news adds to the speculation that Google are doing a lot of work around ‘vertical search’, and the travel market could be one of the first industries to see the effects.

There are also concerns from travel operators and marketers that Google could to use their strong position and large resources to quickly dominate the online travel market. However, it is unlikely that Google would want to enter the market for online bookings or sales due to the sheer scale of that undertaking.

So for operators and tour companies this could be good news, but for the myriad of hotel booking portals and cheap-flight brokers maybe not so good. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth keeping track of this development.

A recent report published by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) contains a number of interesting messages.

Most importantly for our industry, the most popular products/services bought online by European shoppers were travel tickets (54%) and holidays (42%).

With a huge 80% of European internet users claiming to have made a purchase online these figures make a pretty strong business case for investing in online marketing.

Another key finding of the report shows how web users are researching their purchases more. (more…)

The Chinese aren’t generally known for their snow sports passion. However, with a 70% growth recently projected through a nation wide survey, published online by Mu Xuequan of China View, there’s a certain knock-on effect to be seen in the global winter tourism industry.

China already equates for a large percentage of overseas visitors within the Japanese Ski Resorts. And it seems that booking online is becoming much more widespread. (more…)

Rising temperatures? Thinking about alternative target markets? Then adapt your web site.

With global warming being such a hot topic lately, I thought it time to jump on the bandwagon and take a look at how our somewhat desultory climate is effecting the favourite Tactic Group topic: web marketing for winter tourism. (more…)