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discounted rate to win that position —how many hotels can profit from a rate like that at any volume level? A special rate was not mentioned, but as a standard practice to attain the top or even first-page position on Expedia, it would also have to appear on brand.com in order to meet rate parity conditions. The four subject hotels, posted in a top-ofpage listing (or at least “above the fold”), would call for that same special rate to also appear on brand.com, and that would ensure an uptick on the hotel website, with or without Expedia’s support since specials on a home page typically result in an uptick in brand.com bookings. This experimental situation makes it hard to emulate realistic conditions. Because this study was narrow in its scope, any hotel marketer that would assume these findings apply to his or her hotel would have to believe the hotel’s situation is identical to the test sites and this is unlikely. In examining the results of the second study of 1,720 bookings published in April 2011, a question could reasonably be raised with regard to the likelihood of any OTA causing three to nine brand.com reservations for every one on the OTA site, as posited in the study’s executive summary. The ratio between OTA bookings and brand. com bookings, based on the Distribution Channel Analysis channel mix data of 25,500 hotels is 1:1.5, so it would be mathematically impossible Hotel Shopping/Buying 2010 132 An Ah&lA And stR sPeciAl RePoRt for the OTAs collectively to generate three to nine reservations for every one without producing well over 100% of the brand.com bookings. 8 Furthermore, other than a handful of exempted hotels, IHG was not under contract with Expedia in June 2008, so the benefit of a billboard presence was not possible for a full one-third of the study’s time frame. Although the billboard effect study did not report on the behavior of the online travel buyers beyond the role of Expedia, the data was examined for the Distribution Channel Analysis study and revealed consumer activity that is relevant to the question of assigning credit for the source of a hotel’s website bookings. The category of “hotel websites” was visited most (in terms of minutes spent and pages viewed), and an equal amount of attention (as was dedicated to OTA sites) was spent on airline sites. Although there was no data addressing other consumer touch points, it would also be useful to examine the influence of digital online advertising, email and off-line advertising, which have been documented to influence hotel bookings. Interesting to note was the amount of time spent on hotel sites and the visits per transaction, which increased from 2008 to 2010, while OTA visits and time spent declined; the airline sites were pretty stable over the three-year period. One theory for this trend is that hotel companies improved their content and user experience quite Site Type Pages Minutes Number Total minutes Total pages per visit per visit of visits spent viewed OTA 7.2 4.8 5.19 25 37 Air 7.2 4.8 5.64 27 40 Hotel 7.0 4.7 13.6 64 95 Source: comSource data, CHR, Expedia: Jun-Aug, 2008-2010—top 50 sites visited. 8 distribution channel Analysis channel mix data; at a 1:1.5 otA to brand.com ratio, the booking of three to nine reservations on the brand.com site would mean that the otA caused 200% to 600% of the brand.com bookings and that expedia caused 50% to150% of this.
Online Marketing Strategy and Consumer Behavior a bit during that three-year timeframe and likely made their sites more useful and appealing. Many travel shoppers are looking for multiple products: air, car, and/or hotel and any one of these purchases might lead a shopper to make at least one or more visits to one or more OTAs. The participants in this study were known to be hotel buyers and appeared to be likely buyers of other travel products — this is implied by their visits to air and car sites. Visits to an OTA would be a common occurrence on the travel-shopping path, but so is a visit to Google, Trip Advisor, Visits per Transaction by Site Type and Facebook. The other sites create a billboard effect as well. With so many hotels listed on the OTAs, how can we be sure the hotel on page three is even noticed? Can we assume that they will get three to nine reservations on brand.com due to their presence on page three? Can we get a presence on page one of Trip Advisor and get the same result? Or, what about Facebook? How about the position in the Google listing? Further study would be appropriate given the complexity of the travel shopper’s behavior and would reasonably call into question any claim that Expedia or any other OTA can be credited as the primary impetus for so many brand.com bookings. Y Partnership’s latest traveler profile study, 2011 Portrait of American Travelers, indicates that three out of five leisure travelers visited TripAdvisor before making a hotel booking, and one in five visited YouTube. The decision process is clearly varied and fragmented. Other information that is corroborated by consumer behavior research by Travelport, Google and World Travel & Tourism Council 9 is that the travel shoppers in the comScore dataset visited on average seven to eight travel websites prior to making a booking with a median of ten, so OTA sites were one of many. Even if an OTA site was frequently included in these seven to ten sites, there was so much activity on other sites, there is no recurring pattern of an OTA visit followed by the IHG booking and no evidence that confirms a presence on the OTA caused a booking on brand.com. Visits per 2008 2009 2010 transaction Hotels 8.56 10.17 13.61 OTA 7.92 4.72 5.19 Airlines 5.03 5.46 5.64 Other 2.94 2.63 3.34 Source: comSource data, CHR, April 2011—top 50 sites visited. To this point, but not mentioned in the study findings, is the fact that visits to the OTAs were often followed by visits to airline or car rental sites, which might imply that the traveler was likely to book other components of his or her trip such as air or car rental, not necessarily hotels. Since there was no indication in the data as to what exactly the site visitors were doing on Expedia or the other OTA sites, one can only guess about the travel shoppers’ purpose for visiting the OTA site. The data do not provide an answer to this question, nor do they support an assumption. 9 travelport, The Well Connected Traveler, november 2010; World travel & tourism council/Frommers, 2010; Google, The Travelers Road to Decision, 2010 4 Published by the hsMAi FoundAtion 133
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