Travel Marketing – Why Internet Marketing?

IT'S THE WAY OF THE FUTURE
  • The importance of the Internet in travel and tourism marketing cannot be ignored. It is the fastest growing tool being used for travel, especially in the US and Canada.
  • If a company is not web marketing savvy – that is, doing everything it can to encourage more hits and E-commerce – there is a real risk of losing major market share and business.
  • Virtually every website can be enhanced to achieve better results (ranking, hits, and sales).
  • If you are not making full use of the internet for your travel marketing campaigns you are missing over 50% of your potential market.
  • 10 million travelers responded to email campaigns, causing the Travel Industry Association of America to believe that e-mail campaigns are stimulating unplanned travel.
  • Travelers tend to be quite computer savvy, with 79% of the US travelers are online and 55% of them buying leisure travel online. (Forrester.com Research).
NORTH AMERICANS USE THE INTERNET
  • Over 232 million North Americans are active Internet users (Nielsen) and 79 million Americans used the Internet to find travel and destination information 2005 (Randall Travel Marketing).
E-MAIL MARKETING IS CRITICAL
  • 83.2% of marketers list email as their most important advertising tactic for 2007 according to a survey by Datran Media.
E-COMMERCE IS GROWING RAPIDLY
  • By 2008, transactions on the Internet will account for over half (54 percent) of all US travel bookings. (Travel Daily News)
  • In 2007, nearly 40 million US households will book travel online, spending $86 billion on airline tickets, lodging, cars, intercity rail, cruises and packages. Travel is the top category in terms of spending for all products purchased online, and it is growing. (Forrester Research)
  • Expenditures for personal travel booked over the Internet in 2006 in the US totaled $44.6 billion. (Prophis)
  • 56% of survey respondents use the Internet as the sole source of information used for travel planning. (Randall Travel Marketing)
  • While the US represented one third of total online and offline travel bookings of North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific markets in 2005, the US share of online bookings was over 60 percent of all online bookings. (Travel Daily News)
  • Hotel Internet Marketing will be the fastest growing segment online, surpassing air travel, which until 2006 had long been the fastest growing segment. (Travel Daily News).