Reaching Travelers Online - Finding deals is critical

The survey revealed that only some 47% of US adult Internet users had used the Web recently to research travel. The most common travel-related topics to check out on the Internet included airfare, researched by 34% of respondents, hotel/motel rates and availability (30.8%) and car rentals (14.3%).



However, 39% of recent travelers said online media influenced their choice of travel services.

The vast majority of Ad-ology respondents said social media did not influence their travel or vacation decisions, but there is evidence that travel companies can do well among the 23% who said they were influenced by social media.

According to analysis on the Compete blog, visitors to airline sites in July 2009 were six times more likely to visit Twitter than the previous year. The research firm also found a correlation between airline booking success and the promotion of low fares via the microblogging service.

For example, United Airlines and JetBlue both use Twitter to publicize cheap airfares. Visitors to the Websites of United and JetBlue who also visited Twitter in July 2009 were 10% and 35% more likely, respectively, to book a ticket than those who did not visit Twitter. Southwest, on the other hand, which was less likely to tweet about cheap tickets, did not experience the same benefit.

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