A lot has been going on this year in the travel industry and flights in particular have been one of the most damaged markets worldwide. However, for the past months there has been a new uptrend in demand although we are far away from 2019 levels. That is why pricing is becoming the most important factor during the recovery for travel companies to survive and get as much sales share as possible.
Probably the biggest traffic acquisition channel right now are metasearch websites. Not only are they increasing their volume but also they keep adding new features that make the customer choose them more as the starting point for flight prices research.
As the meta channel relevance grows, so does the efficiency and level of sophistication companies need to have in order to be competitive. So long are the days you just appeared with the same price as your direct website. Now you need to be in constant analysis of the competition and all these tactics lead to what now we call MSEO, metasearch engine optimization. This is similar to the SEO logic, we always want to be as high as possible on the results page because that will translate into more traffic and more sales.
So let’s do a review of all basic MSEO concepts and how to act on them.
Growth
On each itinerary check the difference between your price and the one appearing on first position. If that delta is small enough you still end with an acceptable margin, then you should definitely act on that price change.
Margin
When you are already the cheapest option, compare yourself with the second competitor. If the difference is too big, consider increasing your price. You still aim to be the first one, but not by more than 5% or you’d be leaving money on the table.
Itinerary
Assuming you are the first option, you have control over the whole itinerary. Meaning if the itinerary is appearing 10th on the results page, it’s in your best interest to move that item up to the 9th or even higher. As it happens on Google, most clicks go to the top two or three results. And by the way, only 5% of people use filters on metasearches.
Content
What if you are not appearing anywhere on the first page? Well you might have an inventory issue either on your API or maybe the meta is filtering you out for some reason. You should dig into the reason and solve it, because you are losing tons of traffic on every search.
Now you might think it looks simple in theory, but how can you actually implement this for your brand? There are two ways of doing it. You can manually check the prices and do the analysis, but you should limit to your top ten routes only in this case. If you want to do every route and market, there are tools like Traveldax that automate the full process and generate all the insights based on the strategy.
Either way, if you want to play in the meta world you have to know the rules. It’s a pricing war where the most efficient player wins.
