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As a travel affiliate I have seen a sudden and very drastic drop in biz....however my sites are thriving in terms of SE referals..very targeted ones at that. The same traffic that was producing hundreds of $$$$$ in commissions per day last week has gone to zippo.
Is this something everyone is seeing?. This question is specific to travel affiliates.
Thanks!..i need help asap...else i'll drown.
If ya can't get out of the driveway, you're probably not going to fly anywhere.
Powers that be here say that occupancy rates are still high, but they always forget to mention that a large handful of properties were forced to close their doors. It's always nice when you're the one able to spin the numbers.
Firsthand knowledge from working trade shows to bring in extra bucks is that people are not staying in town as long. Larger companies cutting back on travel - staff comes in night before or morning of show and is on first plane out after show closes. Independent retail-type folks no longer "make a weekend" of it. Instead of coming in Friday eve, catching a couple of shows, having a good meal, etc., they now tend to drive in from Maine, Ohio, Virginia, etc., morning of show and drive home same night. They no longer have the bucks to do the town.
It's going to be a long, hard road back.
I dont want to be specific but the agency I work for it the largest in the UK. The travel industry is in a bad state of afairs just now because of all the war talk. People simply wont book because they dont know if their holiday will be effected or canceled if it comes to war.
Same or better clickthroughs and traffic, just less folks booking.
I don't know what it is. Likely a combination of things.
I had quite a run of room bookings in Kuwait City about a month ago. :-)
What is sure to affect travel though is not the war itself so much, but the retaliations worldwide which imho opinion will occur when and if war does break out.
Also I think the general world economy is in such bad shape that people are thinking twice about travelling.
Affiliate bookings have more erratic. They were very strong for much of January, but they started slipping around the time that Powell delivered his war pitch to the UN Security Council. February car bookings have been off by 1/3 compared to January. Hotel bookings are up, but only because I added a booking partner near the end of January. My gut feeling is that the look-to-book ratio is unusually high right now--not only because of war fears, but also because Americans (who represent 65-70% of my traffic) are afraid of encountering hostility abroad. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's "Code Orange" alert hasn't helped, either.
TRAVEL WEEKLY CROSSROADS ran an article on February 17 titled "Int'l climate puts chill on sales." The story quoted one travel agent as saying that the phones have been "creepily, eerily silent" since early February. Another agent said her phone had been "dead for weeks" and that "no one is going to Europe because Americans, with their grasp of geography, know that if they strain their heads a bit, they can see Baghdad from Westminster Abbey." In general, agents are reporting more short-term or last-minute bookings, as are cruise lines. (In fact, a couple of cruise lines are now offering more liberal cancellation policies in the hope of getting travelers to commit.)
A recent L.A. TIMES article said that the rich are still traveling, and that makes sense: They're likely to be older, more experienced, and less easily intimidated than the average middle-class traveler is. On my own site, I've noticed that affiliate bookings seem to be skewed toward the low end (students and adventurous young people, maybe?) and the high end (people who feel they're safe at a five-star hotel where someone dressed like Osama bin Laden or Che Guevara would never get past the concierge).
If the U.S. invades Iraq, will the effect on travel be short-lived, or will travel bookings be down indefinitely? The Vietnam war went on for years, but that didn't keep Westerners from visiting Japan. IRA bombings certainly didn't keep Americans from visiting London. And the Lockerbie bombing was bad for Pan Am, but it didn't have a long-term effect on transatlantic travel. Still, in the short term, talk of war and terrorism is certainly bad for the travel business.
It cannot be compared to any of the example you have given here "The Vietnam war went on for years, but that didn't keep Westerners from visiting Japan. IRA bombings certainly didn't keep Americans from visiting London. And the Lockerbie bombing was bad for Pan Am, but it didn't have a long-term effect on transatlantic travel."
This new war will be very different and I for one fear greatly the retaliation and the enormous problems it is going to cause.
If you are in travel you will know how the Bali bomb affected travel to Asia, I humbly think that retaliations against a war will be so enormous, Bali will be a grain of rice compared to the mountain of trouble.
As I said in a previous post it is not the war I fear but the unknown door it is opening.
not true to say ira bombings didnt affect travel to the uk
I agree with you all the way on this. Americans stop travelling whenever there are conflicts
UK hotels saw American business drop in recent times with Lockerbie, Libya Bombing by US jets from UK, Achille Lauro Hijacking, Gulf War, tourist shootings in Egypt, etc, etc
PriceWaterhouseCooper's assessment [caterer.com]predicts bad news for UK tourism, and London hotels in particular are dead cheap right now for anyone wanting a break there!
There is one document at tourismtrade.co.uk that may be interesting, and I hope no one will mind my posting the URL here, since it obviously isn't plugging anyone's site:
[tourismtrade.org.uk...]
The document has the rather unwieldy title of "A Summary of how markets (by purpose of visit) performed during and after the Gulf (1991) and Libyan (1986) conflicts." It's from the British Travel Authority's Market Intelligence Department and is dated October, 2001. The purpose of the document was to predict how the British tourism market might fare in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the U.S.A.
Two key quotes: "Most Holiday Independent travel bounces back fairly quickly" and "The opportunities following cessation (or prolonged lull) in the war on terrorism are many. Most markets (and segments) tend to bounce back with long haul leisure visits showing particular growth." (Disclaimer: The punctuation errors are the BTA's, not mine.)
It's also worth noting that terrorism and war aren't the only reasons for fear of travel. Just today, I read that two young Frenchwomen were run over by a cop in an SUV on a Miami beach. The cop was looking for a robbery suspect on a crowded beach and just drove over the young women, who were sunbathing. One woman was killed; the other is in critical condition. This kind of incident, isolated though it might be, could have a measurable impact on French tourism to the United States--just as the murders of German tourists in South Florida made the U.S. look less appealing (and safer countries like Turkey look far more appealing) to German travelers back in the early 1990s.
hey..its not just bombs that stop Americans coming over to the UK..then didnt want to come when we had a problem with our cows either!..now.any figures on the correlation of cattle and tourism?
No, but at my local antiwar march, I saw a cute sign that read: "STOP MAD COWBOY DISEASE." :-)
