On line budget simulators, how to stay competitive ?
Consumers are now much familiar with internet, and whatever they want to buy, they start with a search. Once the several options are identified, they compare the prices and go ahead with the best deal.
For most of purchases the process is simple, when looking for a blue pair of baskets, google or any other market place put on display a large choice of products showing both several photos, and few price options.When it comes to vacation package deal or insurance, the process requires more steps. Pricing depends of a set of options, and the on-line selection tree will lead you through a complete path to the final product.
Let’s have a look at the case of cruising.
Imagine that living in the country side of Belgium, you wish for the next summer to brin your family on a cruise over the Mediterranean Sea. You initiate now your search typing “Cruise in Mediterranean Sea” on the google search. After few iterations, you search is getting more accurate and you get back several useful links from cruising companies, travel agencies and online price comparators.
Whatever your choice, you land on a home page, that pop up a selector guide. This one is placed in most cases on top to make sure that it’s visible. It’s up to you now to fill up the proposed fields step by step with the ultimate purpose: what is the price?
The logic behind the selector guide much depends of type of providers that you selected: a travel agency, a tour operator or a cruising company. My conclusion after visiting many of them, that they are all different.
The consumers will play with the selector tree, and test several options allowing him to validate that the offers fit his budget. And to get the price of this combined flight+cruise project, the internaut answered a complete check list that includes: Vessel name, Departure harbor, Departure date, Cabin type, Cruise length, then Departure Airport.
When you are a tour operator or a cruising company, you monitor your booking rate. In this competitive market, the slow booking can result from a more aggressive sales offer from one or few competitors. So, you need to monitor all of them.
This is where the main difficulty begins. We saw above that selector trees, which we can call budget simulator for bundled vacation package, have a different structure. The number of breeding fields is large, at least more than 6. The acquisition of the entire price list of your competition becomes your nightmare.
Websites develop protection against massive copy, you might not know how to bypass and go through. These protection solutions improve overtime and require permanent development and adaptation. Selection trees are also evolving regularly to adapt to new marketing strategy and latest web technology and your dedicated crawler is becoming obsolete.
Data acquisition is a dedicated expertise, that you might have find within your organization or on the job market.
PITOBI is the solution. We develop, run and maintain complete “Multi Dimension Competition Price Analyzer”. Based on customer business environment and requirements, we develop and adjust our data acquisition crawler to make sure that you get all of the needed information, to quickly adapt to market conditions.
Linkedin : Data Acquisition – a key expertise in the competitive tourism industry