Friday, September 28, 2007

Can search traffic be used to start a TUI acquisition rumour?

I receive a lot of strange search engine traffic. There is the simply weird stuff such as the period when I was the number one result on the German version of Google for the search term "price of an elephant" and there is the traffic that seems to confirm things such as the building stream of traffic around TravelClick acquisition rumours. Then there are the times when search engine traffic is the number one predictor of a deal - I remember the flood of Worldspan and Galileo traffic immediately before the announcement of that deal. This has put me on constant watch for strange search terms driving traffic to the blog in case I can spot something building that will lead to a rumour that will lead to a deal. Today I spotted the weirdest of the lot so far and had to share it with you.

Traffic hit the BOOT today from Google for this search term - "TUI purchase of asiarooms". Here is the traffic report. Tell me that can't be true? How is that for a combination of words that none of us would ever expect? TUI - as you know - is the European tour operator giant. They said just this week that "Acquisitions are a priority". Asiarooms is the Thailand based Asian online hotel provider famous for their very small margin mark ups of operator rates, marginal customer service and French owner. One piece of traffic on one search term is not enough to qualify as a rumour let alone getting close to being a basis for anything but scuttlebutt. Nonetheless had to share this with you.

8 comments:

Nathan said...

This is confirmed, TUI has acquired Asiarooms.com. It is in the latest TUI press release.

Nathan said...

TUI has acquired Asiarooms.com, it is included in the latest TUI press release. Really is an interesting move that will shake things up!

Nathan said...

TUI *has* acquired asiarooms.com. It is included in the latest TUI press release. This acquisition will really shake things up!

Nathan said...

TUI *has* acquired asiarooms.com. It is included in the latest TUI press release. This acquisition will really shake things up!

Travolution Blogger said...

Thankfully good old fashioned journalism uncovered the Holidays Uncovered story this week. :-)

Travolution Blogger said...

TUI Travel has bought Asiarooms.

It's in their trading update on Wednesday 26th.

Anonymous said...

how do you monitor the traffic stats between two domains?

Tim Hughes said...

I use a free traffic tool called site meter (there are plenty of others, not least of which google analytics). It tracks the number of hits to my site and can provide me with information about those clicks such as IP address and the referring URL. The referring URL is the place/site that sent the traffic to my site. It could be another blog or it could be the search term used in a search engine. A lot of the time there is no information because the IP address is hidden or the hit came from a site that does not pass on referrer information (or the hit came direct to my site without referral).