Video is increasingly playing a role in the planning and booking of travel arrangements by all classes of travellers.

The Google OTX research noted that more travellers are watching video online.

• 56% of business travellers watched travel videos online (compared to 36% of personal travellers)
• Online video is used throughout the travel planning process and most often by business travellers
• Video is used in planning right from the point of thinking about a trip through to deciding on accommodation and transport

Videos By “People Like Us”

As with online travel reviews, video viewers are more trusting of videos created by peers than those produced by the supplier themselves. For example 55% of business travellers trust videos made by their peers versus 42% trusting videos made by suppliers themselves.

Additionally, 16% of business travellers (and 6% of personal travellers) have uploaded a travel video in the past 6 months. This is up from previous years and indicates an increasing trend towards UGC by travellers.

TIP: Encourage your travel clients who have positive experiences to create videos of their experiences and to post them online.

Consider running competitions for people who upload videos; or giving a “thank you” incentive to travellers who endorse you in this way. Social Media spaces can be fickle - so if you engage - do this subtly and in an authentic way. 

The King of Video

YouTube is still the most popular place for both business and leisure travellers to go for online videos and it’s nearly twice as popular as the nearest alternative channel (Yahoo). 

Most popular place to watch travel videos ?
(OTX Research for Google 2009: “The Travelers Road to Decision.”)

These figures are from a survey conducted for Google. Google owns YouTube – however this doesn’t detract from the fact that YouTube is the most popular online video site and the second largest search engine in the world.

Recently YouTube changed its masthead to orient it more towards search. It would be logical for it to strategically leverage its position and content, since it is increasingly a significant search engine.

This has ramifications for what you do when you post videos to video sites. Make sure your videos are optimised properly when they get uploaded to sites.

Ideally, even user-generated video content should be search optimised. Encouraging travellers to adopt basic video search optimisation techniques can help in getting their content (about your service or location) visible on the video channels and search engines.

• Videos should be given relevant, eye catching titles
• Make sure videos are tagged properly (use appropriate keywords, where relevant)
• Create good video descriptions and encourage them to include links to your site
• Get the video embedded on a website or blog (either theirs or your own blog)
• Linking to a video can build relevancy - so link to it on websites or from social media sites

TIP: Makes sure videos are posted to most popular channels - where they are likely to be seen by more people - like YouTube, Yahoo, FaceBook and Hulu.

Help your travellers understand how to optimise videos – by offering them free helpful information about loading up video from their trip.

If you don’t want videos about your site posted to sites like YouTube (some people have their reasons for this) consider using a paid service (like Viddler or Vimeo). You can facilitate or encourage your clients to upload their experiential videos there (where you can carry the bill to host the video and have more control).

Encourage their behaviour by recognising references to videos that people who have used your services have made.

Given the rising video volumes online and increasing use by travellers of video to inform their opinions – this is a channel travel marketers need to experiment with to figure out what will work for their brand and service.

Data Source: The statistics in this post were obtained from “The Travellers Road to Decision”. OTXResearch survey conducted on behalf of Google in April/May 2009.

This is the final article in a 4-part series by Quirk’s Head of Search – Suzan Gray.

Part 1: Business travellers

Part 2: Leisure and Affluent travellers

Part 3: The Brand Value of Search for the Travel industry

Part 4: Online Video and Travel Search