eTravel Project

According to Travelmole, the majority of travel companies plan to increase or maintain online spend, according to a new survey. The poll of 88 companies, including airlines, agents, tour operators, hoteliers and shipping companies, found that eight out of ten intend to at least keep spending online.

More than half said they planned to increase budgets and a quarter said they expected online marketing budgets to rise by between 11% and 50%. Eleven out of 20 travel agencies plan to increase spending, with nine doing so by one to 50%. 40% of airlines planned to reduce spend by up to 10% while the remainder planned to increase their spend by varying degrees from 10% to more than 100%. Ten hotel companies responded, with only two decreasing budgets by one to 10% and one keeping it level. Of the seven who plan to increase their budgets, four will do so by one to 10%, two by 11-50% and one by more than 100%.

When asked what online priorities travel marketeers had, more than two thirds said they would increase spending on SEO (66%), half planned to increase destination content and 47% expected to increase spend on AdWords. But a fifth said they expected to reduce spend on banners and six out of ten expected metasearch spend to remain the same.

Unique content was a priority for 41% of the travel companies surveyed, which also reinforces the strong position of SEO as sites increasingly try to offer exclusive content to their customers and to search engines. User-generated content (34.8%) is the next priority for travel companies to add to their sites followed by video (28.3%), image galleries and marketing micro sites.

Delivering content over mobile and localising for non-English markets were the lowest priorities.