Compete recently completed an analysis showing early signs of the travel industry’s recovery based on overall site traffic to industry websites. Compete has used its ability to identify unique consumers to calculate annual unique volumes from 2007 to 2009. In summary, hotel and cruise showed signs of recovery starting in early 2009, while the recovery for air and car rental first appeared mid-year.

Continue reading “Travel Industry Rebound Based on Site Traffic: The Other Side of the Coin” »

We’re at the height of the 2010 cruise wave season and there is still time for marketers to squeeze out incremental bookings by tweaking their online strategy.

Last week, Compete and Google co-presented a webinar based on a recent study of online cruise shoppers and bookers. Using Compete’s dataset of the online behaviors of 2M US consumers, the study examined the online travel-related behaviors of people who visited a cruise line site between January and June 2009. We also surveyed 198 people who visited a cruise line website but did not book a cruise online during the period to better understand their preferences, attitudes, and offline behaviors.

There are two key findings from our analysis of cruise bookers’ search behaviors:

1. Search referrals start impacting decisions as early as 2 months prior to a booking.
2. Non-brand search terms are important to consumers. We found the highest propensity to book (6% booking rate) among cruise shoppers who search on a combination of branded and non-branded terms.

Continue reading “Search is Integral to Driving a Wave of Cruise Bookings” »

Compete will be at CES 2010 sharing additional and complementary data to what you’ll read below. If you would like to set up a meeting with Compete to discuss, please email Danielle Nohe at dnohe@compete.com or Greg Carter at gcarter@compete.com.

When I first purchased my original iPhone in 2007, I was a lot more excited about having a full web browser, iPod and access to my email all as part of my phone than the little Google Maps application. However, as someone with an admittedly terrible sense of direction, having maps always available has been invaluable.

Continue reading “Why Men Won’t Have to Ask For Directions Ever Again” »

Compete recently led a workshop at the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando, FL that provided a high-level pulse on the travel industry’s level of recovery based on data through September 2009*. One of the conclusions was that different travel categories (hotel, cruise, air, car rental) have recovered at different rates. The analyses were based on the number of visitors to sites in aggregate that represent those industries (suppliers and category-specific sections of OTAs). Note that each visitor is counted only once in a month in a travel category. Someone who visits than one hotel site in the same month is counted only once in the hotel totals for that month. The data presented at PhoCusWright are updated here to include results through October.

Continue reading “Travel Industry Rebound Based on Site Traffic” »

Casinos, like many travel industries, have struggled during the recession.  To help gauge the impact, Compete analyzed traffic to its “Casinos” industry category.  Category traffic represents unique traffic across all sites in the category (over 100 in this case), meaning a person that visits more than one category site in a month is counted only once in that month’s category total.

Continue reading “Casinos Need to Continue the Digital Evolution” »

For months, traffic to Castrol.com has trailed rivals, notably Shell.com.  That all changed in September, with the Castrol site reaching its highest traffic level in at least a year and pulling ahead of Shell.  The gains were unique to Castrol, so are not seasonal.  Not seasonal to oil at least…

Continue reading “More Castrol Traffic No Fantasy” »