It’s been a rough couple of months for airlines. On the heels of Aloha, ATA, Frontier, and Skybus all going bankrupt, American Airlines cancelled over 3,000 flights over safety concerns, stranding tens of thousands of passengers and disrupting air transportation across the U.S.

In the week following the flight groundings, Compete fielded a survey to 429 consumers to poll them about their awareness and opinions of the problems at AA. 95% of the randomly selected Internet users, or a sample of 408, were aware of the groundings. What else did they have to say?

Impact on Attitude Towards American

Nearly two-thirds of consumers felt the groundings took a toll on American’s reputation, the most negative outcome of the week of operational problems. Perceptions of AA flight reliability fared almost as badly, with pessimistic sentiment being voiced by half of consumers. Most critical, however, is the significant number of respondents (45%) who indicated a decreased likelihood to fly AA in the immediate wake of the groundings.

American’s Response

Did American’s PR machine kick into gear as quickly and effectively as consumers expected it to? Consumer feedback showed a lukewarm to cool response, with many respondents either unaware or dissatisfied with AA’s handling of the situation. The biggest offending category – informing customers promptly about delays – had a third of consumers feeling AA’s actions were insufficient, and an additional third weren’t aware of any actions that had been taken.

Expectations for the Future

Despite the negative feedback from consumers, most see the events as a general air travel issue rather than a problem specific to American Airlines. While 49% expect AA to experience issues like this in the future, most (81%) think this is just as likely for any other carrier, not just AA.

Comparisons to JetBlue

How do opinions of American today compare to situations that other carriers have gone through in the past? JetBlue, which had a highly-publicized and embarrassing series of operational failures following a February 2007 snowstorm, provides an interesting comparison. Compete fielded a similar survey a year ago directly following the JetBlue troubles, and found consumers were significantly more impressed by that carrier’s response to the situation. In many cases over a third of consumers found JetBlue’s responses to the events to be exceptional, a rating that a scarce few gave to AA.

Takeaways

While most consumers aren’t thrilled with American Airlines following such a massive operational problem, they are able to bucket this as being more of a general risk in air travel rather than a unique AA issue. Travelers anticipate other airlines to be just as likely to go through similar problems in the future as AA, and ultimately don’t fault AA for the groundings.

Where consumers are disappointed with American and expected to see more is in the company’s response to the events. Whereas JetBlue’s swift and well-publicized responses to their operational failures drew rave reviews from travelers, AA drew little such fanfare. In an age of always-on media, social networking, and YouTube, negative public perception can spread quickly and do meaningful damage to a brand. Even as travelers are increasingly resigned to the inconveniences and unpredictability of flying, a swift and sincere response can go a long way in restoring faith in a brand.

With affluent Americans making up a greater percentage of the online population than the population at large, there are unique opportunities for online marketers to reach this high-value target segment. One tool media planners can use to accomplish this is Compete’s Behavior Match product suite – a tool that scores the entire web and generates a list of the top several thousand sites matching the segment, in this case, affluent Americans (those earning $100,000 and up).

Of particular interest here are torso websites (those getting 50,000 to 500,000 monthly unique visitors) with high composition indices of affluent Americans. These sites, although usually under-leveraged by ad networks and underused by media buyers, reach valuable niche audiences and can be efficiently and effectively used by creative brand advertisers to achieve success. Among the top torso websites that accept advertising and whose audience is overrepresented by affluent Americans are:

(The first line to be read as: In February 2008, Affluent Americans were 2.69X more likely to visit battellemedia.com than the average internet user; 26,700 Affluent Americans visited the domain in the month.)

Torso Domain Findings:

• Composition indices of target segments among torso sites tend to dwarf those at larger sites, contributing to the efficiency of marketing campaigns on torso sites.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, news and media and blogging sites dominate this (advertising-supported) list. Moreover, the subject matter of these sites mirrors some of the higher paying professional fields: Advertising, Business, Finance, Marketing, Media, Technology, etc.

In addition to looking at the overall top-indexing torso websites, media planners and brand marketers can use Behavior Match to look within specific industries. For instance, marketers looking to reach affluent travelers may seek out travel-specific websites on which to advertise:

Torso Domain Findings – Travel:

• While larger websites and/or the online properties of more established offline brands such as Travel and Leisure or Fodors might already be sought out by marketers, Behavior Match can be used to identify hidden torso gems that might otherwise be overlooked (e.g. FlyerTalk, Cruise Critic, Cruise Mates).

Similarly, marketers looking to reach affluent financial services enthusiasts may use the tool to do the same:

Torso Domain Findings – Financial Services:

• Although larger financial service sites such as thestreet.com (Comp. Index 111, Feb. 2008) and smartmoney.com (Comp. Index 107, Feb. 2008) may often be the target of marketers looking to reach this affluent segment, marketers can identify properties that are more effective (higher composition indices) and efficient (lower CPM) such as those in the above list.

Media planners and others can use Behavior Match to harness the power of segmentation and track the ever-changing behavior of high-value target segments (e.g. affluent internet users). Furthermore, the tool allows planners and marketers to execute highly efficient campaigns by identifying appropriate “torso” websites which, on average, have lower CPM and higher target segment composition indices when compared to those with significantly more unique visitors per month.

Big things are going on at Cheapflights.com. Unique visitors to the site had settled at about 1.5 million for quite some time, but something changed in November, 2007.

Unique visitor counts surged upwards starting in November and reached 3.5 million in January—well over double November’s traffic. The growth was so sharp that Cheapflights composed a press release, further piquing my interest in the growth’s causes and effects. I quickly pulled Compete’s referral data for Cheapflights and found the growth was driven from a variety of channels.

Varied Travel sub-categories contributed to the rapid increase but the most notable referral volume spike was from Search & Portal, which contributed 400,000 more referrals in January than November. Tweaks to the Cheapflights site, SEO, and increased SEM spend could all drive an increase like this in Search & Portal traffic.

Compete’s new Search Analytics Select™ tool can measure precisely this type of Search traffic gain. In fact, Search Analytics Select™ reaches beyond simple referrals and quantifies conversion like transfers from Cheapflights to external partner sites. These transfers are a critical revenue source for Cheapflights; more transfers to Orbitz, Kayak, or American Airlines means more money in Cheapflights’ pockets. Check out what Search Analytics Select™ can tell us from May 2007 to January 2008:

Look at that last dark blue bar: Cheapflights visitors referred from Google who then transfer to Cheapflights’ partner sites grew by 119% in January! Yahoo! and MSN transfer volume growth was just 51%, but the numbers from Google dwarf the other engines, anyway. The traffic growth not only increased Cheapflights’ visibility in the Travel vertical, but additionally is driving noteworthy revenue gains.

Note that 3.5 million monthly visitors is within striking distance of Travel Lead Generator heavyweights like Shermanstravel.com and Travelzoo.com. The next few months will be exciting for Cheapflights to see if traffic and transfer levels hold, grow further, or if decreases in site investment and SEM bring Cheapflights down to earth.

WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?), a UK-based travel social networking site has recently made successful inroads within the US online population. In hopes of increasing member-engagement WAYN announced WAYN Desktop in September, an application designed to help users more easily upload photos and manage their accounts. Below is a synopsis of the popularity of the varying content areas of WAYN.com, as well as an early-stage look at download interest of WAYN Desktop.

In December, over 550,000 US web browsers visited WAYN.com, up from 330,000 one year ago. Over the past 6 months several pages within the site have emerged as the most popular content areas. The Mail tab is the most visited section of the site with 215,000 US WAYN users landing on it in December. Not surprisingly, the Web 2.0 sections such as Profile, Friends, and Photos have also increased audience volumes over the second part of 2007.

Thus far, the recently announced WAYN desktop application has shown minimal attraction among US visitors to WAYN.com. In December, only 1,130 WAYN members explored the download page of the newly released tool, continuing a downward trend in interest for the new tool.

All in all, WAYN has managed to gain healthy momentum among US travelers. Although the recently released WAYN Desktop application failed to catch on, the site’s core competency, its networking platform, has proven to be a hit with users. Congrats to WAYN.com!

A number of websites designed to help consumers plan, book, and manage group trips have cropped up in the past couple of years. These include group booking tools such as Groople.com and GroupTravelPlanet.com, planning tools such as HomeAndAbroad.com and TripCart.com, and hybrid sites that combine a variety of features. It has been a rocky battle for these upstarts, many of which have not been able to either market themselves effectively to generate site traffic, or find the right product mix to sustain an active user base.

“I’m in!”, a site launched in early 2007, however, is carving out its place in the market and in the past few months has seen its site traffic surge. ImIn.com helps consumers and groups generate new trip ideas and then follows up by providing organization, planning, and networking tools for managing the trip. The mix of content and functionality is striking a chord with consumers and has led to ImIn.com attracting over 170,000 U.S. visitors to its site in December. The figure is a larger total than has ever been observed within the category and is 2X to 3X higher than more established brands like Groople and HotelPlanner.

ImIn.com is attracting a valuable and qualified travel audience to its site. Of the website traffic, 73% are measured as being “in-market” for traveling, as defined by actively visiting other online travel agency and travel supplier sites within the same month as visiting ImIn.com. Over 40% are in-market for a flight, 30% in-market for a hotel, and over a quarter are specifically in-market for a vacation package, a level that far exceeds the norm seen at travel websites. The audience also skews high for income levels, with nearly two-thirds in either the $60-100K or $100K+ income brackets.

A strong indicator for adoption of the ImIn.com product is active usage of a variety of the tools available on the site. Both the trip-idea content as well as the member tools for managing trips are generating activity among consumers. There is a near-equal level of activity for searching for trip ideas, viewing specific trip ideas, and clicking on “I’m in!” featured ideas. Illustrating the balance of activity on the site, there is also a heavy number of visits to register for membership, and visits to the existing member homepage.

With ImIn.com’s rapid growth in late 2007, it seems the hybrid approach of combining a wealth of travel content with rich social networking functionality is a winning model. Additionally, the consumers adopting the site are high-income, and often in-market for big-ticket vacation packages, making the site an attractive target for travel advertisers. It’s a site worth taking a look at.

I recently needed to book a rental car, so I started the search where all my travels begin, SideStep. The usual suspects and rates were quickly displayed, but it was a deal for CarRentals.com appearing in the sponsored links that caught my attention.

Thanks to the Compete.com toolbar, I checked to make sure CarRentals.com was a trusted site with decent traffic. Sure enough, they were, and I quickly locked up Dodge Caliber (or something similar) provided by Dollar.

As seen below, CarRentals.com ranked #9 in November in terms of unique visitors for car rental reservation sites and 10% of those visitors booked a car.

I was confident in my choice for a minute, but doubt set in when I realized my SkyBus flight (great deals, no frills) was scheduled to arrive late in the evening. Not wanting to be stuck in Columbus, Ohio without a rental car if things went wrong, I reserved a back-up with Hertz for a few dollars more. After all, you don’t have to pay to reserve, so better safe than sorry.

That got me thinking, how many other people reserve multiple cars for the same trip?

The table below ranks the above sites by the % of people that reserved another car on a different site during the same internet session. Obviously, I’m not the only one who likes to have options. 11% of carrental.com bookers also book a car someplace else at the same time.

It’s a good thing I did, because when my flight arrived in Columbus a few minutes late, Dollar was closed and nobody left the keys to the Caliber. Hertz, however, was waiting for me a few feet away.

For rental car companies, double bookers become a critical segment to focus on. Follow-up messaging and customer service play a major role in the decision process. Consumers have options and it may be the email upgrade offer received the night before or it may be the number of people in line at the counter that sways their final decision.