Interpreting consumer online search statistics

I just sat through one of the more meaningless presentations on how consumers search and book online travel. It seems that Compete.com and Google thought it would be a good idea to slice and dice the numbers and attempt to tell us that all is as it should be. That search for travel is UP, and that more people are booking online! Just keep refining your search, and nerd out on 14 pages of analytics to keep your brand STRONG! That's all great, but it explains the obvious in a web-enabled world.

Search by itself will never be the silver bullet

Refining search will NOT save your brand from current doldrums unless you’re one of a handful of airlines, OTAs, or hotel chains. It won’t even come close. One of the more painful stats they pointed out was that consumers, purportedly in a blissful search mode, spent an average of 6+ sessions and hit an average of 20 sites. They gleefully point out that the people who search more, book at a higher rate! (Think back to the last time you booked. It's 1am, you have to work tomorrow, and you've been searching for three freaking hours to find a room on Cape Cod for a long weekend. As you click through to your TWENTIETH site, you say to yourself, "Screw it, we're staying at this one. I'm fried.") They say this all bodes well for the airlines and OTAs, yada yada.

Not every traveler can be bought

What they didn't uncover was the fact that search has been a disaster for travel branding. The "great rate" generation machine assumes that for $99, they can get in my pants before they ask me my name. They forgot that before I decide to even THINK of buying you, I have to LIKE you. One actually interesting note in the presentation: Travel review and planning sites were up 87% from 2008 to 2009. I think the reason you're seeing jumps like this is due to the fact that the rest of the search results are complete garbage, and review and planning sites are one of the few places consumers can go for [theoretically] real information about resorts, destinations and attractions. It's our last ditch effort to get something useful out of our 6 search sessions and 20 site visits. Hurray for the consumer.

A destination brand is more than the sum of its search

Search, as all sane marketers know, is one part of the challenge, and not, as Google and their minions would like to think, the whole shooting match. Attempting to boil down or refine any brand's existence and essence to search result smacks of an nerd-centric understanding of the notion of brand.

So before you charge your in-house search nerds to work even harder to play the google game (which you have to do regardless), remember this: Google stole your brand from you, and they're going to try to sell it back to you in the form of some sort of branding solution that will be pure hogwash. Take matters into your own hands, and get back to work on the basics of why brands are important, and fight back against the commodified search hell consumers are stuck in.

Something strange happened to destination marketing

With the never ending onslaught of technology innovation in social media, digital marketing, and internet based “solutions,” chaos has replaced clarity when it comes to actually connecting with a potential consumer.

Take my recent search for information on places to stay in Virginia Beach. What a mess that was. Starting with a google search (as most of us seem to do) yielded practically nothing useful for me.

In fact, googling “Virginia Beach Resorts” offers up a bunch of hotel websites that look identical, save for a name swap, and a few photo changes. Is this supposed to be the ownable, differentiated brand position that inspires me to prefer one place over another? I understand multiple property owners desire to realize economies of scale on a web platform, but this creates chaos for a consumer, and completely ignores major tenets of branding, including differentiation.

Don't let technology distract you from the basics

Destinations, resorts, and attractions need to remember that even with a never ending tide of new things to learn and master (from twitter to gliider to google video), they STILL need to master the basic concept of branding before any of these other innovations make sense.

I’ll go one step further:

Only through solid branding can any of these marketing innovations be brought into order, and deliver your destination from the price-driven, commoditized hell that are travel booking sites, and useless search result pages.

Maybe the pendulum needs to swing back in the other direction, from the chaotic mess that’s been created in travel search, to a [somewhat] more controlled approach to branding, where we offer content, imagery, and inspiration to guide the perceptions that people form.

This coming summer, my family and I will travel to D.C. for a wedding, and thought it would make sense to hit Virginia Beach for a few days while we were in the area. Like just about everyone else, we hit the internet to get our plans underway.

You would think that lining up the information we’d need to make a fast decision would be easy, wouldn’t you? You would be wrong:

1. Google searching for travel information has become a mess, and the crap that ranks high in the search is close to useless for making simple decisions like “where should we stay?”
2. There was no lack of information, it was just that I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe that’s why using the net to actually book a stay at a destination takes so long.
3. According to one source, the travel industry thinks it’s OK to force people to endure 9 different search sessions, and visit more than 20 sites before they book something. Can you imagine visiting 9 different travel agents and reading 20 different brochures before booking a trip?

That doesn’t seem acceptable, does it?

I was searching for a place that would make sense for two adults and two little kids. It needed to be:

• fun, close to the action, and clean
• clear about what it offered and why it was a better choice than any of the other places in Virginia Beach.

Only after I was satisfied that I had that information would I move to the next step of looking into price and availability.

Well, guess what.

As soon as they had a lock on where I wanted to go, all of these websites jumped straight to “looking for a deal in Virginia Beach?” I hadn’t even decided if Virginia Beach would be any fun for my family, and they were trying to close the deal.

"How about getting to first base before
you think about stealing home."

Don’t the resorts and destinations realize that they are missing a step in this process? The sites that come up at the top of the Google results page aren’t inspiring me one bit, because the resorts and destinations didn’t do their job.

Show me why your destination is desirable.

Show me why it’s different. Show me why it will be perfect for my family, and inspire me to book with you. The stuff they skipped is called branding.

Google, OTAs, booking sites, lead generators, meta search, and most travel planning and review sites have taken your eye off the only thing other than lowest price that can make your destination stand out from the rest: branding.

Without it, you’re less than a commodity, you’re an annoyance to someone who’s ready to spend their money.

Good things will come from this down season, I'm sure.

First off, I bet families realized that the price tag of the vacation doesn't have much to do with it's value. As a result, I can see destinations thinking long and hard about where they sit on the value chain. If they can't deliver an emotional benefit, or a story that will be told a decade down the road, they might rethink their brand, and their approach to marketing.

Second, I think marketers of travel destinations, recreation, and tourism will be scared straight, and develop better strategy, better plans, and better marketing. As will always be the case, good work works. If creative is treated like a commodity, it will remain uninspired (which is exactly how consumers acted: uninspired.)

Lastly, I think the best thing to come from what is hopefully the last of down seasons, is the prospect if an up season. I'm already thinking snow.

Winter vacation is right around the corner.

Who will help me dream up something big for my next family trip?