Last week was my first year at No Vacancy. It is part of the same conference stable as Martin Kelly's SearchEngineRoom and TRAVELtech and is targeted at the hospitality industry - all channels - rather than being a purely online or technology conference. I (and others) tweeted our way through No Vacancy under the hashtag #novacancy. Not all of you are on twitter so here in this post are some of the top tweets and quotes I took away from No Vacancy. Here are the the most interesting tweets:
On the market general (Australian bias)
- 2009 hospitality market in Australia according to Dransfield."held up better than expected" "rates down 3%" "revpar down 8.2%". 2010 "good start, expect rate increases" but " lost 40% of capital globally" "another shock could come" They went on "Credit availability + bank conservatism means still shortage of capital" "has hit valuation "av hotel down 20% value"
- Travelclick" gds htl vol in 2009 46mm trans, to 2003 levels". Wonder how much corp bookg decline, how much OTA neg rate growth?
- Robbie Cook (Wotif CEO) said "60% of business is direct to site, then organic search, paid is a single digit % of the business". He went on to say that "Wotif saved $2.2mm in costs post travel.com.au business post acquisition."
- Yury Shar Hotelscombined said that "less than 10% of traffic comes from typing in URL direct" "59% of traffic affiliate. Paid 24%, rest organic search" Sam_Linder added in his tweet "@hotelscombined 2 mil visitors pm to 6 mil in last year. Affiliates is primary channel, 15,000 such as skyscanner in uk"
- Latest stats from stayz.com.au "22,400 properties, 270k newsletter subs, 160k bkings/ 650k nts in 2009 (+ 30%yoy)" also advertising revenue
- Starwood AsiaPac "2009 -2% in occupancy, -7% ADR for -9% RevPAR in Pacific" "online only channel to grow- branded faster than OTA"
- Starwood "2-3 years to get back to 2007 rate levels" to which robertkcole said "Sorry, Starwood's dreaming if they think it will only take 2-3 years for rates to return to 2007"
- Accor AsiaPac "Occ finished 2009 at 74%. Good but down from all time high in 2007" "price down 6%" revpar down 9%"
- Accor "Online up from 10% of sales in 2005 to 35% planned for 2010" "65% of online sales will be direct up from 50% in 2005"
- Accor "happy with 65% of online business being direct. Won't artificially cap 3rd party distribution or hold back inventory"
- 25-46% of bookings online at "freespirit" (a holiday park/caravan park company). If true for whole sector then parks online larger percentage than hotels
4 comments:
Hi Tim, thanks for this round up. Great short summary for those who couldn't attend.
rgds, @portdouglasfan
Good information on travel. Nice Blog :)
interesting stats on direct traffic from wotif and hotelscombined.
wondering if wotif includes organic searches for "wotif" and "wotif.com" etc as direct? i think they should.
i consider brand name search via google (seo & sem) to be direct traffic. if that was the case then wotif direct could be over 70%..
i reckon direct traffic levels under 25% would be a worry for a brand lead approach. understandable if less for those with large affiliate networks like hotelscombined and hotelclub for example.
@steve S - I agree with you. I think brand search traffic should be considered direct, especially if you have a non generic name.
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