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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals.
These lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Hello everybody and welcome to the travel marketing compass podcast. Super excited to have you here today, this is going to be one of the most incredible episodes that I've recorded. I'm making this intro after the facts I've already had the conversation with Kevin and dig, but whoa, if you're looking for some SEO insights specifically for the travel industry, this is your place to be.
Kevin is probably one of the top sources of research in our industry, in the SEO industry, and he did a lot of coverage on travel that I just had the honor to interview him on and get to share with you today. So I have not much more to say other than you should just listen to this whole darn thing and take notes, take all the notes that you possibly can.
So we'll go ahead and jump right in.
I'm really thrilled to have you here today, Kevin.
I'm setting the bar very high, but I think this is going to be the most valuable conversation we have about travel SEO on this podcast, at least in a little while, and possibly for some of the foreseeable future just because of all of the incredible research that you've done.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, that sounds amazing. Let's make it happen.
All right. So you created a, I mean, I don't know how much time it took you. I think my friend or our mutual friend Russ McCumber was the one that tagged me when you published this and I was like, oh my God, yes, a thorough deep research about the travel industry and I see on the travel industry, we have to eat this up. So I just wanna dive right in and talk about it.
Basically, this was like several thousand words and significant research. Lots of beautiful graphs, lots of incredible findings that really do align a lot with what we see in the travel industry. So I'm gonna just start asking questions. That's kind of the best way I can approach this. You started with the mention that travel had fully recovered from Pandemic declines, we've seen that in terms of search. The most interesting thing, I think, that came out of this in terms of market dominance was that 1% of travel brands get 57% of the traffic. And one of those travel brands that significantly plays specifically in the US is Google Travel.
I'd be curious to hear, when you assess this industry, which fourth or fifth largest search industry that exists.
What were your thoughts on Google travel and their presence in the market?
Yeah, you can imagine that a little bit like Google owns the only pub in town and they also brew their own beer. So obviously they are kind of the gateway to travel these days, right? If you compare the travel industry to say, maybe 20 years ago even, it really has shifted the power from a lot of like maybe local travel bureaus and travel agents to search, right?
People search for their travel in any conceivable way on Google, whether that's inspiration or actually finding hotels, comparing hotels, same with flights, car rentals, all that good stuff. So Google really holds the key there. And I wanna point out that they hold the key for a good reason. They did a great job over the last 20 years in designing search and really helping companies come up that would have never had a chance before. That has led to essentially two big things. One is these large OTAs like a booking.com trip advisor, right?
There are big businesses, public companies that make essentially a living from helping you find prices and reviews. And then the other thing which you have already mentioned is that Google itself has launched a search interface for flights and hotels.
Now that search interface itself sits at the very top of the search results. So it gets a ton of attention. It gets a lot of usage and it also provides a really good experience, right?
There's no advertising, there's no, I mean, there are advertised offers in there, right? But there are no big banner ads or pop-ups or lots of the other stuff that you will find on many travel websites. And so, as I've already stated, Google really, if you take that travel interface, that interface for travel searches as its own result, which it is, then you'll see that Google gets over a third of all the attention of search in the travel space, which is very significant you can tell how significant it is by how it is shown in the European Union, where regulation is a lot more strict, let's put it this way. So the European Union...
or not sure, right?
Yes. Exactly. It's actually very interesting. But the best gap or delta appears when you compare EU results with American results. And there you see that these travel modules from Google are much more passive, in some cases not even existent. So this is a big challenge that the industry works up against. And the way that travel players can actually be visible in there is actually is through advertising, right?
So I'm going to pause there because there's obviously a lot to unpack, but that is the current state, right? A few sites get the majority of traffic. Google sits at the very top of that small minority that gets majority of traffic, and it is a constant challenge that companies battle up against. But it also does seem that consumers like it
It's been a relatively easy industry to consolidate because you look at travel and you think, okay, well, yes, there's all these unique travel companies with these unique offerings, but really honestly, it's a commodity. You're going to go to Argentina, you're going to go to Nairobi, you're going to go to Iceland, to Reykjavik. And you're going to that place, whichever company you do it with, or whichever hotel you stay at, minor variation in the experience, but really you're going to see the place and that's why I think it's been so easy for large travel brands.
You mentioned Expedia and Booking.com and Marriott, all of which have grown through significant acquisition and most recently, I think it was either Hyatt or Hilton that acquired the standard yesterday. And it's a matter of the brands just continue consolidating and accumulating that traffic. You broke out several of the key OTA brands as separate brands. And the funny thing is most of them are owned by two parent companies, Expedia and Booking.com. So I'm curious, I'm gonna weave in and out. There's no structure to this. The structure best just follows your research and all the questions I had as I was reading it. Let's talk about the travel purchase journey.
Okay, so one of the things that we look at when we explore the travel purchase journey is really these five key stages. Google points out four micro moments, we kind of see an additional one that's after all the flight and hotel bookings are made, before all the experiences and destination activities are booked. But there's inspiration, there's consideration, there's planning, there's booking, there's experiencing. Tell me about how you found that the user based on, I mean, you assessed search volume and looked at how users go down that travel purchase journey. What do those searches look like? And what were all of your findings around that research journey?
Yeah, of course. You mentioned the key stages, and you also certainly see that reflected in the research. So what I did is I looked at a bunch of, a couple thousand keywords in the travel space across hotel searches, flight searches, what I would call broadly vacations, so trip searches, and then some more kind of inspirational type of queries what you see is that the inspirational part that is very scattered and messy. Actually, a lot of times people get on inspired on social media, they might swipe around Instagram reels or tik tok, and they might see a quick 60 second video of a hotel or of a trip, and then they make some think about their own travel. And that's where a lot of times the fire gets ignited, but then it often carries over relatively quickly to Google search. People will start with inspirational types of searches like best trips to Mexico, those kinds of things, or trips to Mexico or best honeymoon hotels.
Not always to find or compare the actual hotel, but to just get an overview of what's available to them. And so a lot of that intent is quickly taken over the search, but in the beginning, it's again, very messy. It's short dwell times of websites, it's a lot of clicking and leaving, lots of images and all that kind of stuff.
Then when it gets a bit more concrete, people will Google for the names of hotels and of course cities to evaluate basically.
And then once they have a set of options together, then they will compare.
And then it's keywords like you know, hotel name one versus hotel name two, etc. So that is kind of the high level way that people go about it. And I think the best piece of consumer research that has ever done to describe that very well is the messy middle.
The messy middle is a study mainly driven by Google in collaboration with some other market research companies. And it's probably the biggest consumer behavior study that is pretty modern and pretty applicable to what we see also in travel. And it's that whole idea that there is a trigger, which I mentioned earlier, right? People see something on social media, and then there's a purchase. And in between, there isn't this gradual linear journey that we often try to visualize as marketers. But instead, it's messy, it's all over the place. There's a lot of micro moments, a lot of small interactions. And that's where people gather information, evaluate information, but it's not in a very structured way. It's very scattered. It could be conversations with people, Google searches, more social.
It could be anything really. And then at the end of it stands a purchase when people feel like they have enough information to make a call or sometimes when they just feel pressured by time. So that's also what we see reflected in search keywords on Google.
And as a travel company, and I'm saying that very broadly because it really doesn't matter were you are in the chain, whether you're a OTA or a airline, what's important is that you provide and satisfy all these different intents, right? That you have some content on your site that aspires to inspire people. That you have some content on your side that helps people just browse and discover maybe in a somewhat unstructured way. And then of course, front and center should be your offering, maybe how it compares broadly against the rest of the marketplace.
And then some kind of timely discounting. So I see that most travel companies, whatever they do, they're very focused on their products and their offering, but they miss catching people very early on in that scattered user journey.
So this is one of the key components of our performance bookings methodology, which is essentially understand the stages of traveler intent and target them effectively with different channels at those appropriate stages.
I mean, importantly, you're talking about that inspiration stage. We don't see a lot of that happening in search. We see that mostly happening through relationships, referrals, and social. But as soon as you get into the research and planning phase, you need to start building strong audiences to retarget with paid using whatever methodology, third party or first party that you possibly can. And I think that's something that a lot of companies miss as you were just pointing out, it's that you have all of this incredible data from people looking at your organization at a higher level if you're targeting higher in the funnel and travel research and planning takes somewhere between 73 and 120 days based on the Expedia path to purchase research that came out in 2023.
And it's amazing how many organizations we talked to that focus so heavily on the booking stage but miss out on those earlier stages in the funnel.
A couple things. Well, going more macro in nature strategically from a specific SEO standpoint, which is your experience, you are at the forefront across industries. This is not just travel.
For those who are listening that don't know of Kevin, Kevin is one of the few that actually does real original research and it's something that I highly recommend getting involved with and subscribing to if you're interested in that type of thing.
But let's talk about the 57%, right? So 57% of traffic going to 1% of domains. I think that was a really important key finding. And you look at travel, it's a huge industry 12% of the global product that's created. I'm curious when you look at you know, big company, you can think of TripAdvisor, you can look at Expedia, you can look at Viator, which is also just owned by TripAdvisor.
So you can look at any travel company and you see, okay, these big companies can effectively target terms like things to do in Austin, Texas, and flights to Austin. How do you approach it as a small company with a single location, as a boat tour operator in Destin, Florida? How would you craft that strategy? Would you go about targeting things to do, or would you do something more specific?
That's a fantastic question.
By the way, Brennen, you've been incredibly kind. I just want to say that I appreciate you highlighting all the work that I'm doing. So thank you very much.
If I was a small, say boat tour operator, I've once done a whale watching tour in the Bay area when I still live there, San Francisco so I'm just picturing that in my mind. So there's a bunch of things, right? First of all, if you're a provider and I'm saying provider as in related to attractions, tours, experiences, hotels, flights, if you're a service provider in that sense, then reviews are absolutely critical for you, right? So before even thinking about what content to create and what kind of, what terms to target, I think it's important to just highlight that reputational piece. People are, as everybody knows, right? It's not a secret, but they're incredibly tuned towards reviews. That's how they evaluate and so I think before even getting a lot of attention and going further up the user journey, you probably want to think about how can you display your business in the best way possible. And that often happens through pictures, videos, and then written reviews on different platforms. That's one part. The other part, so once you think about how to get more people in there, you really want to think about all the different use cases that people might have. When I'm saying use cases, I really mean what sort of situations people find themselves in. So some people have already planned a trip to a location and they look for things to do, right? So that's where you might probably want to write a blog article about what are some things to do in the area?
And of course you want to list your own service as well, but not exclusively your own service, then you want to think about, hmm, are there maybe people who, you know, maybe they haven't planned a trip yet and they might consider coming to the location, to your city, right? Or to an attraction nearby, so that already gives you some inventory to create content for different locations around you and then see if people want to make a trip to your place as well. I'm seeing so many companies who severely under invest in really helping people understand what they get when they book their service. So I think there should be a lot of content around questions people have around that boat tour, what the different offers look like, right?
You might know this from hotel booking. What really frustrates me is when I, when I look at a hotel and I think it's really cool and then you have maybe one or two pictures of the rooms and it's like, I want to see the room. And that's why people then go to TripAdvisor or to other platforms to see actual pictures of the thing.
And so if I was a business, I would pay very careful attention to what pictures people upload on other platforms. And if I couldn't maybe provide those pictures myself, maybe highlight it a little better, right? So that gives me a bit more control about how I present myself.
But if I had to structure all of these answers that I gave is you want to start on your own site by really highlighting your offering, answering all of the consumer's questions and then putting a lot of effort and time into reviews. That's number two. And then number three, you really want to cover all these different inspirational types of searches that people make, whether it's attractions in the city that you're in, whether it's nearby attractions, or it's generally trip planning.
So in the context that I gave earlier, if people are looking for Bay Area trips or what to do in San Francisco, then you want to be part of this. So that's high level how I would approach it as a very small brand
And I'm already acknowledging that we're 17 or 18 minutes into this. And this is definitely going to be longer than our typical, our typical podcasts. I think this one's going to at least go for 30, 45 minutes.
But my thought here is that it's interesting. You talk about visuals so much. And one of the things we found just cause we work with 40 plus travel brands is, and I'll get into the best practice piece in a second. Cause I think you found some things that you pointed out in there that are not SEO best practices, which I'm excited to talk about in a second, but as a policy and as a principle here, we don't really just follow the best practices for every term that we're targeting. We run a statistical analysis, look for strong statistical correlation with the use of specific search factors and ranking for those keywords that we're targeting.
One of the things that we consistently find in travel is that heavier pages perform better, which is very different from other industries. Generally, it's faster loading, lighter pages that perform better, but it's as much as five to seven times larger the pages, the weight of the pages, including all multimedia. And it's so interesting because best practice says, make a page that's lighter. Typically, it loads faster, assuming server infrastructure is the same. But that's not the case here. So I think it's really interesting you point out the visual purchase journey.
It's such a visual purchasing experience that you need to have really compelling visuals. We're working with a company called Travly right now. Basically, what they're trying to do is build an OTA that's video driven. I think anybody who's investing in the visuals as part of the travel research experience is definitely going to be performing better on the outcome.
I guess we can jump into that conversation around best practices and, and things that you've found. So it's funny. I think it was TripAdvisor that you pointed out had two H1s on most of their landing pages. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is not a common thing.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely right there. And what I want to say about TripAdvisor is, you know, they, I mean, they have a legendary SEO team. When I ran SEO and part of growth at Shopify, I was lucky to actually manage a lot of former TripAdvisor people and collaborate with them. So I know the team and the company pretty well. And I know that when they have something on their page, that's not an accident. Everything there is geared towards SEO. And so when they have something that looks extraordinary, that tickles me, right? And tickles my spider-senses. So TripAdvisor does a lot of cool things. The H1 thing that they have is essentially a user-oriented heading that is shorter, that is a bit more on the point. And then they have one that it's more geared towards SEO. And it goes against, as you said, so many best practices in SEO but it does seem to work. It does seem to give Google more context about what the page is about. And so the action item or the takeaway for me is to just test that. When I see those kinds of things that I haven't implemented myself, that I see from the outside, I use that as fuel to test and see ¨Hey, what happens when we put an H1 or two H1s on the page and one is maybe a bit more elaborate¨ so just to highlight that for the audience, so TripAdvisor has this things to do in Los Angeles page and on it, it has an H1 that just says things to do in Los Angeles. It has a second H1 that says things to do in Los Angeles, CA-Los Angeles attractions. So Los Angeles attractions, very similar to what things to do in Los Angeles. And so they are going for ranking for more keywords here essentially.
And it's very, very interesting thing, but they do a lot of really cool stuff. What I really like about that TripAdvisor experience is first of all, they pitch their AI travel assistant at the very top of the page and they're incredibly fast to move and their AI assistant, I think is a very good example for a company that tries to embrace change. And it's really good by the way, I tried it out a couple of times when I was traveling over the last months and it put together some really good itineraries. So they're jumping on that AI bandwagon, but I think in a very good and a very classic way or classy way. And I think they understand that you don't want to wait as a player or maybe an incumbent for a technological shift to disrupt your business. They want to stay on top of that. So I just wanted to call that out and then just from pure SEO perspective, they have a really good internal linking structure. So when you're on the things to do in an A page, they will also very quickly link you over to things like city tours or museums in the area or walking areas, all that kind of stuff. So they're very, very good at capturing people when they're looking for something and then pitching them or giving them offers for all sorts of other activities that they could also do. Knowing that when you look for things to do, that's a very broad search compared to half-day walking tours in that area.
And then the last thing that I'll call out, what I also really like is that they differentiate their offering with curated content. So Brennen, in the beginning, you mentioned that a lot of travel is a commodity and I absolutely agree. And the way to stand out is to differentiate with by enriching the commodity products. And so in this case, it would be something like tours and what TripAdvisor does is on the Attractions Los Angeles page, they have a little section at the bottom with some tips from a quote unquote insider.
It's essentially a person living in Los Angeles that has experience with tours and all sorts of attractions and they just give some tips. And I think that's a great example of how to differentiate yourself when you have a commodity product by enriching that with curated content.
Yeah, bringing in that UGC, User Generated Content and curated content. I'm interested to kind of dive into, you mentioned a couple of the key pieces that were in your research and one of the things that stuck out that you just mentioned again was leveraging testing. So out of curiosity, is that like search pilot? How are you doing A/B testing? Or what are some tools that you would encourage people to look at?
Yep, Search Pilot is definitely up there in the preferred list. A lot of companies that work with built their own testing engines. It's relatively straightforward, you know, it's usually a script causal impact is a free library from Google that you can also use. It's not a full testing engine, but it will help you kind of find the right pages to test against and understand the statistical significance and all that kind of stuff.
So the almost kind of more important question is how to approach experimentation. And so a goal bar that I often set for a lot of companies I work with is to at least have a couple of experiments running at all times, right? There shouldn't be a gap where you don't run experiments. And getting there takes a lot of companies a while, but I know for example, TripAdvisor, they're at that stage. There's always some tests running and it's critical because it helps you surface new ways to win, right? So in SEO, I often think about these different stages where in the beginning, you just try to get to a parity with everyone else. You just try to implement best practices and some very obvious things that you can tell are different from your side than other sites. But once you're at that level, the best way to find things that work is to test. And that demands a testing methodology. You need to have a testing backlog where you understand what have you tested in the past to maybe run some repeat tests or maybe to build on some of the tests that you have run in the past that were successful.
So I think the tool is one part of a big machine that is absolutely critical for travel players, especially aggregators to win down the line.
Yeah, that's the interesting thing because there's really this very bifurcated industry. There's the huge players and the small players. And the question obviously comes out to like, what do you do if you're a $2 million a year company? How do you mean Search Pilot or whatever tool you're going to use if you're going to even use a testing tool without even considering the time and effort it takes and the actual creativity, you're looking at several hundred thousand dollars for a testing tool in some cases. And it's like running that is kind of overwhelming, is there any way you would recommend getting into testing, going from zero to one without having a strong and established in-house SEO team?
A hundred percent. You can use very basic tools so Supermetrics, for example, it's not a testing tool. It's a tool that will basically pull data from Search Console or Google Analytics into a spreadsheet or a BigQuery database or a Looker studio. And so the benefit is that it allows you to customize how you want that data to aggregate and to be stored. And so you can just be very diligent about defining which pages you run a test on, comparing that against a test group and making a change pulling the data, defining the length and how much traffic you need, and then reverting the change to run tests. It doesn't always have to be that incredibly high fidelity. Matter of fact, I often recommend companies that I work with to not start with that massive investment, but first get the methodology and the basics right. You can do a lot of that, again, with tools that cost you under a hundred bucks a month and start to collect some experience. That high fidelity testing is obviously something you want to work towards. But if you haven't run a test before, then there's usually a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can test before you have that advanced telemetry.
And so I think some very basic tools, or maybe even having, I don't even know if you need an engineer for that, but maybe a technical marketer who sets up a very basic pipeline of data into BigQuery, and then creating different tables in BigQuery that you can compare over time and kind of train that experimentation muscle is probably the best way for you to start.
Yeah, the data as an analysis piece is increasingly important in an industry like travel that's so incredibly competitive. I look at just having a pipeline of things to test as a deficit across the board in SEO. Again, it's a very best practice driven industry. There's a very clear distinction between the people who are following the best practices and the people who are on the leading edge. And that's more obvious, I think, in SEO, the more you know about it than any other marketing space that I've come across.
Yeah, funny anecdote. There's a bigger German travel company they're more in the home rental and they rolled out a thing, I can't say exactly what it is, but a thing, essentially a rich snippet that did nothing for them and their competitors copied it right away.
So you have to be very careful, and look, I take a lot of inspiration from looking at what other sites are doing, but you always want to test it. You never just want to blindly implement it and think that they know exactly what they're doing. And yeah, so copying is crazy in that industry.
It might take you a week and then you see the same thing on your competitor's website. And so again, I think the key to win here long-term is to develop that corpus, that inventory of levers of things that you know work, that you have tested, and you know what their impact is. I think that's really the key to winning long-term here.
Yeah, a hundred percent. So just digging around a little bit more into your findings. I'm curious about how a lot of this comes into play with how rendering works and it's a little bit more technical.
This is both a testing question and then specifically like you pulled, I forget which, I think it was Kayak, you pulled cheap flights to Denver, changing that to cheap flight deals from Grand Rapids to Denver, having that be a dynamic H1 based on the location of the browser.
I'm curious for indexation purposes, when Google crawls that, obviously that's a single and one time crawl that's happening from a specific location. Are you doing that post render with JavaScript or is something like that something that you would want to have?
I guess, like, do you want that in the URL, the from location? How do you make it so that you have a dynamically generated heading one with a page that's supposed to rank in multiple markets?
Yeah. Great question. By the way, the kayak team actually reached out after I published that travel study to me to talk about some of these observations and they confirmed some of these things. So that was, that was a kind of nice surprise, but in terms of technically making these things happen, it's all client side rendered personalization after the page loads. So this is something that Google will not see in this specific case, but that doesn't mean that Kayak doesn't have location specific pages. So they will actually have pages that connect for every permutation of a route, right? So any flight going from Grand Rapids to any other airport, they will actually have a page for that. But here in this specific instance, that page was personalized for me and what I found so elegant, and Kayak is not the only company that does it in the travel space. But what I found so elegant is that first of all they got the nearest airport to me right, which is not the usual situation. A lot of times when you try to personalize people, like I live in a small town in Michigan, an hour away from Grand Rapids and that is not easy to get right. A lot of other sites would probably personalize me to Detroit or Chicago, which, you know, isn't the worst experience, but I was very positively surprised that they got Grand Rapids right.
That is actually the nearest most relevant airport to me and the other thing is that they carry that over, not just into the title of the page, but in every element. On the page, they have these very well visualized and designed statistics and pieces of information about when to book the flight, what the cheapest month is, how far in advance you should book it, etc. All that is personalized to that specific route, meaning it's all personalized to Grand Rapids. That is not easy to set up. It's easy to customize a headline, maybe a widget or a module that shows you flights, but personalizing the whole content is incredibly well done. And I know the team has put a lot of work into this. This just launched very recently, and I'm very, very excited to see how that does over time, because it's a great experience.
Yeah, the great thing you mentioned is experience. It doesn't necessarily that user experience doesn't directly affect how something performs in search in terms of what Google's seeing and indexing, but specifically on the dwell time and the user experience factors and how long someone's staying on that page before and if they even return back to Google. I can imagine that causes a significant lift and the user experience signals being sent.
There's so much meaning here. I'm like, I guess being conscientious of your time and our listeners time, there's like two or three more things to touch on, I think.
You mentioned some really nice needs to have kind of on the page and I just wanted to list them out and then hear your description as to why you would include these things. Number one, you mentioned, includes large pictures and large visuals. What's the reason behind doing that?
Yeah, it's interesting. We spoke about this kind of visualization of travel before, and I think it's just one of these things that are very visual in nature and always have been. If you describe a hotel just with words, that's never going to be as powerful as seeing a single picture. You see it actually reflected in Google search as well. Most travel queries have very prominent image thumbnails and they're getting bigger over time, actually. So travel is a visual search and experience and that carries over into every aspect. And one thing you said earlier that I also really want to stress again is video. If you can, video is even better than any image. I would even suggest thinking like, can even maybe license some videos from Instagram or TikTok so when you see a travel creator creating maybe a video about your hotel, I would reach out to them and be like, ¨Hey, what deal can we find so we can show this on our page?¨ But I'm stopping there. Cause that's you ask about the images and it's just an image thing. The best images also…
Yeah. This is such a rabbit hole. I'm so excited to keep talking about this offline.
So, okay. The next one's going to be a Q&A section.
Yes, exactly. People naturally have questions and you want to think about yourself. Again, whether you're a hotel, you're a big aggregator, whatever role you play in the travel industry, you want to think about yourself as this old school travel agents office that people walk into and they have all these questions and you want to answer them. So Q&A, having that is important and you want to figure out ways to source new questions from your users. A company that actually does that really well is Amazon, obviously in a different space, but in their review section, they also have a way for you to ask questions to other people and you want to embrace it and ideally copy it.
Yeah, and that's helpful because you got a user base of actual purchasers. So I can think of a company like an OTA incentivizing with rewards, if users answering questions about their experience with a specific property, like you book something on hotels.com and someone asks a question about that hotel, you get an email two months later about that question with an offer of 5% cashback or something for answering that question, just increasing it's a marketing investment in user generated content. That's brilliant.
Last thing is listicles was the other one you mentioned.
Yeah. I mean, people love listicles. The marketer in me is probably exhausted of listicles, but you know, 10 best things to do in X or the five best honeymoon trips in the Caribbean, like all these sorts of listicle articles, they still work, right? And so even if I was a hotel, even I just for my customers, I would probably write a listicle about the best things you can do in a hotel, like golf, eating, spa, wellness, whatever. But people love lists and they love structured ways to rank whatever it is that they're searching for. It's just a way to faster digest and synthesize information. So again, as an aggregator, it's a no brainer, right?
TripAdvisor has the 10 best things to do in LA. We spoke about it earlier, but even if you're a provider or if you are a destination, you want to think about this listicles and provide that about your own service.
Got it. Awesome. Okay, I have one more thing. This one's going to be kind of a game.
I just thought of this and thought it would be interesting. You noted six key players, flights, hotels, vacation rental, cruises, attractions, research, you also mentioned programmatic, specifically in the context of airlines and flight aggregators needing to have flight tracking and landing pages.
The game I wanna play is I wanna go through each of those six industries and come up with some semblance of a programmatic strategy on how they could leverage their data to provide value at scale.
So starting with flights, you said it, what's the best path for an airline or flight associated company to leverage data? This is pushing the research and more just like a thought experiment and a fun, fun thing to think about, but how would you go about creating a programmatic strategy for a flight operator or an aggregator?
Yeah, I actually just gave a brown bag session to the agency that works with Skyscanner. So I'll sometimes do these kinds of sessions where companies hire me to figure out what's the future in our space in terms of search and what could companies do to grow and something you already mentioned is FlightAware. And so FlightAware, there are a bunch of other providers as well, but FlightAware is probably the biggest provider of flights updates. So if you wanna know whether your flight is delayed and you just Google your flight number, you will typically land on FlightAware. They have 10 million users now, that just came out, so pretty successful, and it makes a lot of sense, right?
I mean, if your flight is delayed or canceled, that is one of the most frustrating experiences you can have in travel and has all these downstream effects on your hotel bookings and trips and everything else.
So a very critical moment in your journey and I haven't seen any one airline or two aggregator who really taps into that. And so that's what I recommended. If I was Skyscanner, I would probably expand into flight updates and I think it also makes for a really nice wedge to bring maybe people into your app or to improve the relationship with your customers
It's really hard to overshoot people's expectations. It's very easy to get people upset. It's like insurance. It's another one of these industries. And so I think that's a very nice way to expand your web footprint, get more traffic and catch people at these critical moments where they either get frustrated or you might turn a frustrating experience into actually something really bonding and positive.
You can even leverage some partnerships for some revenue generation through companies that help with claiming refunds on canceled tickets. That would be another interesting revenue play for them.
Okay, hotels. What's the path for hotels?
Yes. For hotels. It depends really, if you're a chain, then I think the obvious play is to create programmatic pages for the hotels across the world but then also I think there is a natural path towards things to do. If I was Marriot, I would have already expanded into guiding people into things to do in all the locations that I have hotels in, maybe even in the district so if I, as a Marriott have probably have a hotel in many different parts of say Lisbon, right? Then I would probably write a listicle or have landing pages with things to do in each of these different parts of Lisbon, because people will search for that, especially in larger cities. So for me, hotel next logical step is things to do.
Okay. Got it. And then vacation rentals, let's do a scaled OTA vacation rental.
Yeah. So if I'm Vrbo, Airbnb, Home2Go, I think Things2Go is also a very next step. And Airbnb actually has experiences, right? So you already have an example.
Well, they're trying. A couple of fits and starts over the years, but yeah, they're going to try it again in about 18 months, apparently.
Yes, yes, yes. Not a smooth journey. I think from their perspective, it makes sense because in their marketplace, they often have people who rent out their homes and people who then also do tours or also can do some of these other things. So I get where they're coming from, it's not easy, but I think things to do and then same with trips so when I get an Airbnb in a bigger city or even somewhere in the countryside, there's usually something that you want to do there. And so if I was Airbnb, I would see, okay, what kind of maybe day trips or half day trips or those kinds of things can I create some programmatic content around?
Okay. And then cruises?
Cruises are an interesting one. The challenge with cruises is that you have many different stops, kind of like a moving target. And so with cruises, I would be most interested in the type of trip that people want paired with their location. So me, for example, we have a young daughter, so we're now our family, which means that all of a sudden I'm changing my travel preferences from a couple to a family, which is a completely different way to travel for everybody. Everybody knows who has a family in the audience and so I would go after.
Okay, congrats on the wedding, by the way.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.
You got married recently. Did I see that right?
Yes, that's right. Yeah, in Italy.
Congrats. Go ahead.
Okay. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate it. No, it was two months ago. Very recent. And so, you know, for cruises you first of all want to target the type of traveler, right?
So are you a retired single or are you a family or, you know, there's probably different personas and then where are you in the world? So West coast, East coast of the U S Caribbean, etcetera, Mediterranean. And then what type of trip are you looking for, right? So are you a retired single in Germany who is looking to get to know other people or are you a young family in the East coast of the U S and you're looking for kids entertainment and that kind of stuff.
So that's what I would build programmatic pages around.
Okay. And then I think the last one is going to be attractions.
Yeah. Attractions.
That's a hard one.
Yeah. It's a tricky one because you already have TripAdvisor and some others. I've actually worked with a company that is very adjacent to the travel space, but has built pages around attractions and that company it's Bounce. It's a reason Horowitz founded a company that helps you find luggage storage. So if you're in Paris and you have a big bag, but five hours to spend and you don't want to haul it through Paris, then they help you find a locker that you can for very little money store your bag in. And so that was a very smart play. They built pages around attractions and kind of jumped on that bandwagon.
And so I think to maybe turn that around, if I was a TripAdvisor, I would think about all the different adjacent situations that people find themselves in. So maybe you can partner with a Bounce or another company to provide luggage storage and build some landing pages around that.
Or can you build landing pages around more specific types of attractions? So me, for example, when I travel, I usually shy away from the biggest tourist attractions and I'm more interested in maybe the smaller local things that are not so well known. So I wonder if there is a way to scale into a way from like the big tourist attractions and maybe more towards like hidden gems types of searches. But if it's a difficult one, yeah, for sure.
This was awesome.
Like that's all I have to say. This was one of the most fun interviews I've ever done. I'm a self-taught SEO nerd, been doing it for 10 years and we don't typically get this technical. Typically it's a bit higher level or at least not the strategic on the SEO side. It's typically a more broad marketing strategy for travel companies. And this was super fun. I cannot share my gratitude enough.
I'm curious, you know, other than me, like pushing people, not asking, but pushing people to go subscribe to the Growth Memo on Substack. What's the platform that it's on?
Substack
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it. That's right. What else do you want people to know? How else can people learn from you and be in your world?
Yeah. Brennen, thank you so much. You did an awesome job, thanks for taking the time to read through all this and thinking of really fun ways for this interview. So it's very mutual. I had an incredible time here. The growth memory really is kind of the centerpiece. I published some takes and findings on LinkedIn as well.
I'm still on Twitter for now, but yeah, if you want to, if it would be more and more obits, LinkedIn is really the way to go.
Okay. Well, thank you so much. We're going to connect offline, but for everybody else, thanks for joining. This was again, an awesome interview, Kevin. And we'll be sharing this everywhere we possibly can. So have a good day everybody, thanks for tuning into the Travel Marketing Compass podcast.
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