In today’ multi-channel marketing world, the Web is quickly becoming not only the first “point of contact” with an overwhelming majority of travel and hospitality customers but also a key tool in achieving incremental growth and competitive advantage. What’s more, an effective Online Marketing strategy in travel and hospitality plays a crucial role in establishing interactive relationships with customers and utilizes all channels available on the Internet.

To gain advantage in this highly competitive industry and win customer loyalty, travel and hospitality website owners need insight into:

• performance of their online business across customer segments, markets, properties, packages, routes and destinations
• effectiveness of their online marketing initiatives by traffic source, online channel, advertising partner or individual campaign
• success of their e-CRM efforts in terms of customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty

But as always - there MUST be a set of measurable KPI’s that are strongly aligned to ones business objectives, like any other organisation that operates with the web being a channel of theirs. Hereby concluding that KPI’s are meant to be acted on and not just reported on. Therefore I suggest optimizing towards the following two business objectives.

Online Travel and Hospitality business objectives:

• Revenue
• Profit margin growth

These are determined by a number of indicators, the most important being:

- Volume of bookings (total number of bookings)
- Bookings (sales) conversion rate (number of bookings/number of visitors to site)
- Average booking value (booking revenue/number of bookings)

For tactical decision-making, you need to break these strategic indicators down into manageable segments and analyze their performance by - for example - geography or property, in order to understand how well each is contributing to the overall result; or, assess them by traffic sources and marketing channels to see where you should direct your marketing budget.

But, let me outline a set of leading KPIs which will enable us to gauge the effectiveness of online initiatives and help us steer a Online Travel and Hospitality websites in the right direction:

Online Travel and Hospitality KPI’s:

• Bookings conversion rate
• Average booking value
• Look-to-book ratio
• Top Geography and Demography
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Online Travel and Hospitality optimization opportunities:

1. Visitor profiling and segmentation in Travel and Hospitality.

   Knowing your visitors is an extremely important consideration for the success of your Web site or online marketing strategy. Addressing your key audiences and providing them with relevant information is one of the key aspects of any travel and hospitality site. If your site does not speak directly to each of these audiences, you will lose most of them to the competition.

   Segmentation can help in the analysis and understanding of how important groups of people use the site by looking at the page-by-page activity of the group without being distracted by activity from other types of users. Some of the key criteria for segmentation would be:

   - Demographics
   - Traffic Sources and channels
   - Activity and Navigation patterns
   - Custom built segmentation criteria

   Opportunity: Target the right groups of visitors with the appropriate marketing message, adapt content to users’ preferences and improve usability to fit your visitor’s browsing behaviour.

You can find a complete and in-depth PDF version of our inputs for Best Practices for Online Travel and Hospitality here:

DOWNLOAD GUIDE (4 page commercial version | 754K PDF)