This week’s blog has provided not only an excellent introduction and overview of RSS and blogging, but is delving deeply into the technology, implications and potential marketing applications.
The travel industry has traditionally embraced new online technologies early on due to the fact that what they sell lends itself extremely well to online presentation and distribution. Online travel continues to be one of the top categories in terms of e-commerce with an estimated market of $54 billion in 2004. What we will look at today is some early application of RSS in travel and some statistics related to these implementations.
At E-site Marketing we specialize in creating Internet Marketing solutions exclusively for the hospitality industry. We have recently begun developing strategies and tools to help our clients leverage the technology to distribute promotions & special offers, news & events and press releases. This will help them build stronger customer relationships and encourage repeat visits to their Web sites.
Our research has shown that on travel distribution Web sites (hotels, airlines, destinations, rental cars etc) the most visited pages or content is always related to special offers. However, from an end user or travel consumer perspective, manually checking every Web site looking for new deals becomes extremely time consuming. Email special offer and newsletter subscriptions is an extremely good solution to reach these customers for a travel marketer, however, the growing challenges with email marketing are well documented at this point. Enter RSS.
Subscribing to an RSS feed where you are notified of new special offers or events for a destination, hotel or airline of your selection seems like a perfect solution. RSS lends itself perfectly to distributing this content in a simple well formatted manner…and on the end users terms! An example of this being applied can be seen at SmarterTravel.com .
One of E-site Marketing’s first applications of the technology was for a spa resort Web site we developed. We RSS “enabled” the online store where in addition to room reservations, they sell signature products, spa treatments and gift certificates.
Of particular note, and an attest to BL’s comment on Tuesday about the impact of RSS on Search Engine rankings, after only 1 week the store was ranking number 1 out of 256,000 results for a spa related keyword search. This type of result would typically take months to achieve, but because of the high priority being given to RSS content the search engines immediately listed and ranked the Web site. After 3 months the Web site was ranking number one for the highly competitive keyword “spa resorts” out of 11,000,000!
The online store RSS feed was subscribed to by over 1,000 visitors in the first 60 days. 20% of all visitors coming directly to the store itself came from RSS readers during that period (ie: they subscribed and came back) . In terms of feed format the breakdown of those visitors: 19% came from atom readers; 48% came from RSS2 readers and 33% came from xml readers.
In online travel there is a well established distribution network for hotel, airline and car rental suppliers to manage rate, fare and availability. Built initially by leveraging the original travel agent systems developed by the major airlines (Global Distribution Networks such as Sabre and Galielo), this network was leveraged to “power” internet travel Web sitesproviding consumers the ability to reserve travel themselves.
It would seem that RSS could potentially provide an extension to this network in that suppliers can now “push” promotions directly to customers and then bring them back to their Web sites and e-commerce engines to complete the purchase. An upcoming travel Industry conference TravelCom Expo, has a added a session: The Three Letters That Are About to Rock Travel Distribution: RSS – I am sure this will not be the last conference track dedicated to the topic this year.
