How do people book their travel? Is the online share growing? What is certain is that there are many more online bookings of trips and travel over the Internet than there used to be, but there are also many more tourism products that now have online booking facilities and this keeps on growing. Both are growing in parallel. How can you, as a tourism operator compete in this market? Be visible online so people that want to find you and are looking for you actually find you. Roy Morgan Research in Australia, as part of their Holiday Tracking Survey investigated what method people use to book their holidays:

The diagram above shows that about one third use the phone and another third the Internet. What are the implications for your business? It simply means that for every phone booking that you get you could be getting another booking via the Internet. Now, check your stats, is this what you are getting? No? Less? Is your product bookable online? Most probably. However, what you might be missing is online visibility, which comes through optimisation! Your online booking platform would be similar to having a phone number, but if you are not visible online, it is a bit as if you had a phone but were not listed in the phone book. First thing you should to is test your online visibility: http://www.untanglemyweb.com/test_business_keywords_google.html Remember, your potential client will be Googling keywords describing your product, most probably not your product name as he does not yet know it! These keywords should be strategically placed within your website content. This technique is called Search Engine Optimisation.

The following chart trends how people use internet to choose their holiday destination. As expected, there has been a very large growth over the past 6 years. One in 5 Australian uses the web to choose his or her next holiday destination. Once again, if your product does not appear on his or her search result page, you are missing out on 20% of extra sales!