News: Consumers Use Search Engines To Look for Hotels

Is this news? Really?

This was reported by hotelmarketing.com which pointed to the original content on Travolution.co.uk. More details also came from UTalkMarketing.com as BDRC - the company that conducted the research - did not seem to issue any press releases or publish studies.

According to Travolution: "Almost three out of five consumers used a search engine to find a hotel... overshadowing the 36% who browse direct on a accommodation provider’s website"

Well this fits almost exactly into what I blogged about regarding M & C's traffic. See this graphic here from that post:


Travolution: "The BDRC said bookings are increasingly being carried out on hotel sites but third parties such as Expedia (40%), Lastminute.com (36%) and Ebookers (22%) continue to feature prominently during the research stage."

Firstly, we really need to formalize this "Research Stage". I spoke at EyeForTravel in Singapore a couple of weeks back and used this slide:

I will post more on this Web 2.0 presentation another time, but the Research Phase is very important but harder to quantify as people are going everywhere. It takes seconds to pop in another query into Google so why not?

Also from UTalkMarketing:
1) "Expedia is the top website visited for browsing (40%), however business travellers still prefer to book through the hotel website."

There are many reasons for this... another post I think....

2) "In 2008 64% of leisure travellers booked online - as opposed to just 4% in 2000. Likewise business travellers are up 70% in 2008 from 11% in 2000"

And 60% of these leisure and business travellers use a search engine to do their research and shopping. Just wanted to re-emphasize that.