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August Special

Online travel is no impulse buy

A recent study by a Massachusetts-based travel research company says that online shoppers often take as long as a month to make a final decision before purchasing complex travel products, such as vacation packages. As a result, says TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com), the closure rate on Internet travel sales is five times higher one month after consumers’ initial visits compared to sales made during their very first visits to travel web sites. The company said that online marketers make a mistake when they measure sales solely on what happens after consumers’ first click-throughs as opposed to tracking their visits for several weeks. TripAdvisor’s conclusions certainly gibe with what we’ve been saying for some time: One click-through isn’t a good-enough measure of ad effectiveness. There’s no magic, only good content – and good content will draw serious shoppers back.

Three travel industry cheers for irate citizens!

Like most people who aren’t snobs, we’ve declined to join the ranks of career NIMBYs and other extremists who seemingly are determined to block new housing or infrastructure anywhere at any time. But sometimes the case for no development is so clear, you wonder what planet the people who are proposing a project live on. In late July, a coalition of citizens, conservationists and preservationists announced they will fight tooth-and-nail a developer’s proposal to build a 2,350-house, 2.4 million-square-foot commercial and office project on 790 acres near the historic Civil War battlefield at Chancellorsville, VA. It goes without saying that this kind of development can only turn what is now a bucolic, rural landscape into yet another instant city, with its traffic jams, ever-widening highways and blithe disregard for the significance of the area. As a company that treasures the historic and its meaning to our readers, we say, three cheers for the "Coalition to Save Chancellorsville Battlefield!"

We told you so: Fare wars spreading to business class

Yes, it’s unseemly to gloat, but we are a young and brash web site. For several months we’ve been criticizing the airlines for continuing to treat business travelers like dung by insisting on charging them far higher fares for their travel than casual or vacation fliers. As we said in our April 2002 newsletter story, “Taking Stock,” “Airlines are still in shock that their favorite patsies, businesspeople, are no longer willing to pay top dollar for atrocious service.” Well, the screw has turned: According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. airlines are now belatedly lowering business travel fares, in some cases up to as much as 30% and 40%. This is obviously a desperation measure, since airlines’ previous attempts to start jacking up non-business fares didn’t fly. But since business types were the cash cows of the industry, the airlines have to do something to get them back. Look for some increase in business travel, but also look for the carriers to hemorrhage some more. The final crossroads for several big-name companies is now just that much closer.

I am Woman, hear me roar: Can the pop-ups!

IVillage (www.ivillage.com) is a web site for women (ages 30 and up) that takes a combination of Redbook’s consumer practicality, Cosmopolitan’s breezy sluttishness and Working Woman’s workplace savvy and serves it up on a nicely organized, easy-to-read-and-roam site. So, this is an outfit that is solicitous of its readers’ needs. That’s why we had to grin when we learned that iVillage’s editor recently announced that it would banish all pop-up ads from its sites by Oct. 1. The source of this newfound regard for consumers’ sensibilities? It seems that in a survey of its readers, iVillage learned that 92.5% of women visitors to the site considered pop-ups to be the most frustrating feature. IVillage has tried to put a good face on the anti-pop-up revolt, saying it’s working to “develop a new generation of advertising formats.”  The truth is that there’s a limit to how many times you can shove unwanted information in people’s faces before they protest.

Japanese airline to offer on-board Internet

Giving jet travelers a way to get to the Internet while in the air is an idea that makes a lot of sense. Even though Boeing introduced its “Connexion” Internet-access service last year, with several U.S. airlines praising it, it’s the Japanese that will be the first to offer it in 2004 on 10 long-haul Japan Airlines jets. U.S. airlines’ initial enthusiasm for the service was tempered by the aftereffects of Sept. 11. We think the service is a great idea that eventually will become universal among airlines. We even see clients having temporary mailboxes they can access en route on their agents or operators’ web sites to pick up the latest information or communicate with reps about itineraries, questions, changes or alerts.

Oppressors just don’t get it

We’re intrigued by a Chinese government report that 45 million Chinese (about 3.75% of the country’s population) are using the Internet. The report, published in the People’s Daily, the government’s mouthpiece news organ, boasts that, "The Internet is now coming closer to the common people." Can you say “cognitive dissonance?” This report is from the same government that is frantically trying to censor all Internet content and has even taken to closing popular Internet cafes because of their young customers’ penchant for roaming the Web looking for news and views that are not a pack of official lies. China’s octogenarian oppressors are going to be in for a real hassle when the number of Chinese Internet users reaches 150 million or 250 million. We wish them many sleepless nights.

Web users will pay for content (after we said they wouldn’t)?

We were prepared to eat crow after we first scanned the results of the survey described below, but decided after further thought that half a crow would do. Which half, you may ask? It’s all dark meat, so it really doesn’t matter. Anyway, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) says that consumers spent $675 million in 2001 for subscriptions, usually to newsletters or services providing business and financial news, dating services, personal ads and fantasy sports leagues. This after we reported in a previous issue of Inside CT that it looked like Internet users would continue to hold out for a long time against paying fees for information off the Web. Still, while that $675 million is a tidy sum, the OPA concludes that it means “consumers are overcoming the idea that content on the Internet should be free.” So, we were half right since we expect this “overcoming” to be a long process. Thus, the half crow.