The "ugly sisters" of travel media, Jasons and AA have formed the basis of motel marketing for many years.
Their core product is to sell print advertising, however their future relies on solidifying their web offer and encouraging advertisers to tick as many web-add-on boxes as possible.
So, we are interested to observe the battle between Jasons and AA trying to outperform one another in cyberspace stats.
In their latest newsletter to advertisers, Jasons announced that their January's web stats were their best ever. Jasons even produced the following graph that revealed that Tourism.net.nz were outperforming them just to prove a point that their website, Jasons.com is being viewed by more unique browsers than their main rival, AA Travel.
Source: Jasons Travel
In their latest newsletter, AA Travel also had a record month. They preferred to focus on domestic browsers that were attracted to their site, aatravel.co.nz more than all others in Nielsen's Travel category:
Domestic Unique Browsers - Jan 2009 - Jan 2010
Source: AA Travel
So, what have we learnt from all of this?
Well, aatravel.com appears to attract more Kiwi unique browsers and jasons.com attracts more unique browsers overall.
The AA make the most of their dominance of Kiwi unique browsers by saying:
"Our site was visited almost 2,400 times more than the Jasons website site every day from Kiwi visitors – and, of course, our visitors were looking at your business, not your competitors in Australia or Fiji!"Hey that's impressive!
Jasons hit back by asking: "Why is 'Total Unique Browsers' an important measure?"
"With a 10% growth in Australian visitors numbers to New Zealand (January 2010) we believe it is vital that we show you all the visitors that come to our site, and therefore have access to your listing."Hmm...that make sense too...
Lookers are all very well, but surely it's the bookers that count the most to motel advertisers?
In January this year, AA claim to have had over 5,000 live accommodation bookings and in the same period, Jasons claim to have generated bookings valued at over $1.8 million.
By our reckoning this puts Jasons well ahead here, however it is unclear what proportion of bookings are being generated from Jasons.com and individual websites using the Jasons/Holidayguide "commission free" booking engine.
So it begs the question for moteliers: "After deciding what size advert to place in the accommodation guides, how many web add-on boxes will you be ticking this year?"
10 *** Post a Comment ! ***:
Depends on if the hot Jasons girl comes, and what the older AA lady has to offer. Each time i think of pullin out they both bend the rules of the printed prices just to make you feel better and want to advertise with them. What to do what to do! Surely by now they should know the book is dead and online is the only way to go seeing as the only data and graphs they keep sending are about the net net net!
Ha! All those stats make my head hurt. Maybe KG is right and we should simply give our marketing dollar to the the travel company with the hottest sales girl.
Have you noted that Jason's price difference for a 1/2 page and 1/4 page is almost non-existent, if you were thinking of cutting print to spend on web. I'm actually over both companies. to paraphase a wise person "there are 3 kinds of lies, lies, damned lies and statistic's"
A wise operator will put Google Ecommerce on their site and measure the number of bookings from each site. Ecommerce info here (http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-use-ecommerce-tracking-in-google.html) and then ask your online reservation partner how to implement. You’ll see to the dollar which performs better (on your own site). Then add to that the direct bookings you get from their site. I could tell you now which one it will most likely be, their site looks better.
Yip, the books are too heavy for the customer to carry. Both companies are paying more people to increase web exposure and slowly separating web based components out of the packages, which only makes it more expensive in the long run for the advertiser - whatever the size of your print ad.
At least the Unique Visitor Statistics provided by AA Travel attempts to compare like with like, unlike Jasons who provide misleading comparisons by including Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Island web visitors viewing Australian and Pacific Island advertising listings, which only serves to artificially jack up Jasons web statistics and has no relevance whatsoever to New Zealand accommodation providers.
Similarly, Jasons claims regarding the value of online bookings is also misleading as it not only amalgamates three websites (and probably also includes Host Accommodation on line bookings) but also includes bookings made at overseas destinations which has no relevance to New Zealand accommodation providers.
Jasons also includes the value of bookings generated through individual accommodation provider websites (which use the Holiday Guide booking engine on their own website), bookings which have not originated through any of the Jasons web channels. Unfortunately, Jasons you cannot claim these bookings as bookings that your websites have generated.
It is bookings (not jacked up web statistics) which count, which unfortunately Jasons fail abysmally in delivering, and seems dis-interested in wanting to do anything about improving.
Clearly, in presenting such misleading and unqualified information to accommodation advertisers in order to dupe them into purchasing advertising space, it would appear that Jasons are only interested in maximising the benefit to its shareholders, not its advertisers.
Come on Jasons it is time to front up and provide separate and transparent information for each website’s performance, and stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes and treating us like sheep, as the photo in your recent E-Newsletter portrays.
So lets take out of the stats all the web sessions created by advertisers logging into each website and update their availability. If say 2000 providers updated once a day then over a month that would equate to 60,000 visits! Note that this would only affect the AAs stats as Jaosns customers logon to holiday guide to update their availability.
So we can conclude that this high level stats in nothing more than flannel. What of course matters is the number of individual customers that the website can push to your listing on the website and the resulting numbers of actual bookings that you get.
Whether you advertise with a company or not is surely a commercial decision - you only advertise if the return justify the outlay. The only fluffy thing is whether your level of advertising and the price and quality of your product is suitable. There is no point putting in a full page ad if you are using poor quality photos or your prices are not at the local market level for instance. You also need to be aware of the influence that you advertising has that you may not be aware of - a customer may find your property in the guidebook or website and then goto your website directly to book (as many customers do).
As to whether the printed guides will ever disappear from the marketplace - I doubt it. Whilst online booking is really important for domestic (and aussie) customers, overseas FITs tend not to book their holiday accommodation all in advance. The unique isolated nature of NZ and large distances between places makes it undesirable for travellers to plan too far ahead - if they find a nice spot then they may want to stay a few days. As such they tend not to want to book everything in advance and this is where the printed guide comes into its own. The only thing that may change this is if the industry makes free and fast, quality internet access available as part of their services - something which is becoming commonplace in Europe..
Ahhhh an interesting theory if it were true, but unfortunately, it is not!
I have been reliably informed that by logging onto AA Travel’s secure website to update an accommodation providers availability does not inflate AA Travels visitor web stats, as this information is not captured in their web stats.
Obviously, this is just another urban myth being spread by Jason’s to unsuspecting motelliers to try and discredit another player in the market place and make Jasons web stats appear to be better than they really are.
Unfortunately, we all didn’t come down in the last shower of rain, to be suckered into this theory.
I agree with anonymous above come on Jason’s stop pulling the wool over our eyes and show us how it really is website by website.
Jasons is no different to MANZ who make unsubstantiated statements in their weekly newsletter that online bookings are up by so much percent on last year, but don’t back it up with any concrete facts.
I suppose if they achieved 3 bookings this year compared to 2 last year, a 50% increase in online bookings is something to crow about. Yeah right!
Given that MANZ uses Jasons holiday guide booking system, and Jasons presumably provides them with the statistical information to crow about, really MANZ is just another Jasons spokesperson spreading misleading information.
For all said and done for MANZ to not preach the party line, would probably put Jasons conference sponsorship at risk.
Absolutely Fascinating!
But there seems to be one obvious thing missing here…….
Wouldn’t it be great if an independent organisation actually took the time to scrutinise and audit this information to remove the bias, and ensure that the information presented was not misleading, and was comparable?
Wow! some independent market analysis, now wouldn’t that be fantastic!
……but don’t hold your breath for MANZ to step up to the mark and take the initiative on this one, as it might result in them having to actually do some work for a change.
It would seem that the only time MANZ would be interested in doing anything like this, would be if it was completely unrelated to the industry and have something to do with rugby, cricket or golf as going by its regular weekly newsletter these topics feature more prominently, regularly and receive greater coverage than any of the real issues we in the industry have to face and deal with daily.
It’s about time MANZ stopped wasting its time producing this unrelated dribble, and started putting its energies into supporting the industry for a change.
Post a Comment