Blog homeI have touched on the subject of lack of innovation in online travel (from the large online travel agencies) previously…. however perhaps this is a different way of looking at it.
Lets just say you have £100,000 GBP (200,000 USD) to spend on marketing. This is a major sum for a small tour operator - but a minor budget for a larger company such as a leading OTA.
Here are a couple of options:
- Spend the money on PPC advertising
- Create a great new piece of content or content area on an existing website (i.e. perhaps innovate)
Lets just assume that the average PPC marketing cost for a new customer / booking is £20 GBP (40 USD). The PPC advertising would therefore return 5000 bookings.
£100,000 GBP would buy you 4 web developers working for 12 weeks (at standard London contract / agency developer rates), plus a bit spare for hardware, software / content licenses etc. You could get quite a bit done in this 12 weeks - but it wouldn’t be a major web development project (in comparison to other IT and web project costs that large OTAs undertake)
It would be a brave executive who would be confident that their “idea” (potentially unresearched) would give a 5000 booking return….. so it is currently just too easy to continue with PPC.
PPC prices have to go up in order for people to need to innovate…. maybe Google is doing everyone a favour with this whole “trademark” bidding thing…. because now companies may determine that innovation and investment in new web projects is a better commercial option than increasing PPC.
So - what would you do with £100,000?
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Buy a yacht?