Interesting stats were released in the vianet.travel Operator's Newsletter this week:
* The average lead time for bookings for the past 12 months was 31 days.
* The average length of bookings for the past 12 months was 1.67 days.
* The average value of bookings for the last 12 months was $231.05.
* The average value of bookings in May has dropped to $225.92.
* Bookings in April and May doubled compared to the same months last year.
Source: Click HERE
By our reckoning, Travel Bug have managed to increase domestic visitors to their site in April and May this year by about 20% compared to the same period last year. If bookings have doubled then then it is pleasing that a a few more lookers may have been converted into bookers.
It is difficult however to to put their claimed doubling of sales into relativity. The base comparison is from when Travel Bug had only been operating for approximately 5-months and we would expect that these booking figures at that time would have still been fairly modest after a soft launch.
It is also interesting to second-guess the psychology of the average Trade Me user to try and understand why they haven't migrated over to Travel Bug en masse. The most obvious difference of Travel Bug compared to Trade Me is that accommodation is not auctioned and the displayed tariff is not negotiable.
We suspect that the bulk of Trade Me users are very much turned on by the auction process by having a punt, competing with other bidders and establishing a "market price."
We believe that Travel Bug is not user friendly and intuitive as it could be. One of the frustrating aspects of the site is the proliferation of properties that only offer "on-request" inventory. Hopefully Travel Bug can elevate and distinguish those properties that offer real-time inventory from the scrum of token listings that only offer "on-request."
Often guests will choose accommodation by comparison and Travel Bug's layout does not give the user an effective helicopter view of all available offers. At the moment no other accommodation reseller has been able to improve on the user friendly layout pioneered by wotif.
