New Business Pitch = Travel
Earlier this week, I began preparing for a promising pitch in Miami, Florida, and as most business travelers often do, I needed to gather information regarding the cost of the trip. As a regular American Airlines customer, I visited their website and found the message “American fares no longer on Orbitz, Expedia and its subsidiary, Hotwire.”
I found this alert message intriguing and decided to delve deeper into their decision to remove themselves from the travel-deal mega websites. I quickly understood the business logic behind the decision – eliminate the middle man, secure higher profit margins and retain a larger share of customer web traffic - but my thoughts then turned to not what might be gained, but what might be lost from the standpoint of lost opportunity due to lack of search engine visibility.
Expedia? Orbitz? Hotwire? We don’t need you!
Expedia, Orbitz, Hotwire and the like enjoy high visibility on search engines. What I wondered was if American enjoyed the same fortune. After a handful of searches I found that American, among other airlines, did not have nearly the visibility I thought they’d have. Searching for common travel terms I found page one search engine results dominated by travel deal sites. The airlines themselves were nowhere to be found. Next, I moved on to some more specific, qualified searches; the trend continued. Here’s a sampling of searches for reference:
So, What’s my Point?
From a search marketing perspective, I saw a few areas of focus that represented literally tens of millions of searches a year on Google alone. Where might American put its efforts? Here’s where I’d concentrate:
- Generalized Industry Searches - Search terms related to industry and casual dialect that draw traffic for many channels of business from commercial flight searches to cargo and alternative services offerings.
- Geo-targeted Searches – Searches tied to location are long-tail and definitive searches specifically targeting travel desire including airports or city locations in search term.
- Financially Motivated Searches - These are the search terms used by bargain shoppers; example keywords include “specials” and “deals”.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
One thing was definitely obvious to me: currently, in the airline industry, the deal-oriented sites seem to have great placement for a wide variety of travel related searches. And, while the airlines are all known brands that don’t rely on search engines exclusively to drive their business, there are clearly opportunities open for them, especially in situations like this one where they are separating from partners with high visibility. For the Internet searcher that is looking for a price, not a brand, American is leaving a lot of opportunity untapped, left for the travel sites they removed themselves from and the airlines that are still working with them.
