David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

Do you know how incredibly difficult it is to try and book a holiday (honeymoon)?

I've spent two days price checking sites, only to find out that they all use different figures. Some include taxes and transfers, other's don't. Some include flights, other don't.

But there's a major flaw with travel affiliate programmes: leakage.
 
I researched honeymoon ideas online. But I found it difficult to get a feel for places so ended up ordering brochures and going into a bricks and mortar travel agent.

Once we narrowed the ideas down, I went online to get prices. Having never booked an overseas holiday myself before, I was under the impression that the price I see is the price I pay. Wrong!

The price I see may or may not include departure taxes, airport taxes, fuel taxes, flights, transfers, accommodation, ... and so the list goes on.

I trundle on and then yesterday I had made a shortlist of who I would be quite happy to book a holiday with. Given that all the prices were different, I wanted to speak to a humanoid to make sure everything I expect to be included is included. That's when I discovered the art of haggling.

Take Thomas Cook for instance. The price on their site for the holiday was around £1500 per person, including all taxes and fees. By the time I had finished on the phone, this was down to £1350 per person. Not a huge saving but one freephone telephone call saved £300 on the honeymoon, enough for a few drinks and an excursion or two.

In all fairness, Thomas Cook was one of the cheaper companies. Co-op Travel's website quoted £1256pp with a telephone quote of £1472pp (turned out the total price shown on the site (the total billing price) excludes taxes and transfers. What a great holiday that would have been, being walloped with taxes as soon as you leave! After a bit of negotiation, they said they would charge £1340pp all inclusive of taxes.

The one I opted for saved us another £15pp all inclusive of taxes and transfers as well as prepaid gratuities - a £63.18pp fee many others didn't include.

So what's the morale here? Firstly, if you are working in the travel affiliate industry, you need to take a different angle with your website. Just listing random prices of holidays isn't enough. If you can, set up a reliable price comparison search. Some people will buy online regardless of the telephone savings available. Other people will buy over the phone because the internet price is more or less a brochure price. You need to find a way to fill your visitors with confidence that the prices shown are the total prices.

Also, niche tools work really well. Whilst I didn't make any bookings through it, James Avery's Flight Mapping tool is very handy for working out what flights are available from various airports. But had I have been looking to book a specific flight, I would have used this site.

James' website is a niche tool. It focuses on one specific sector of the market and focuses on providing the available options, rather than price.

It's worthwhile mentioning that Thomas Cook hid their telephone number as soon as I entered the quote process, helping to minimise affiliate leakage through telephone sales so a pat on the back is well deserved there.

The overall message from this post is that the travel market is highly competitive. The feeling I got from the telephone calls was that most places were willing to undercut rivals. But that often included their own website prices. Affiliates can prosper from customers who prefer the ease of ordering online and the fact they don't have to speak to sales people. The customers who shop around are getting away.

If you are looking to enter this market or grow within it, take a leaf out of James' book and find something different and unique. Niche, focussed sites which can offer something of value will inevitably do better than those offering a wide array of holidays, packages or component parts.