UK travel metasearch site TravelSupermarket confirmed big falls across its key performance indicators this morning as the economic outlook showed little sign of improvement in Q1 2010.
Results released as part of parent company MoneySupermarket’s six month interims for the first half of 2010 indicated a 20% drop in revenue for the travel division.
The company publishes results for a number of key indicators across its channels (money, insurance, travel, home services).
For TravelSupermarket:
| H1 2010 | H1 2009 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visitors (000) | 19,991 | 23,959 | -17% |
| Transactions (000) | 12,539 | 17,014 | -26% |
| Revenue (£000) - click based | 6,804 | 8,530 | -20% |
| Revenue (£000) - other | 739 | 948 | -22% |
| Revenue (£000) - total | 7,543 | 9,478 | -20% |
| Rev per visitor | £0.38 | £0.40 | -5% |
| Rev per transaction | £0.54 | £0.50 | +8% |
Officials say:
“In what remains a challenging market, with consumers managing discretionary expenditure tightly, the group has continued to manage the business for margin in the first half of the year and in particular has minimised its marketing costs. Consequently visitors to most channels within the travel vertical were lower than in the same period last year.”
The company intends to manage the travel vertical in a similar manner over the short term, but plans are in place for improvements in the second half of 2010.
The group will devote some development resource “in improving the product proposition” in some of TravelSupermarket’s channels (hotels, flights etc).
The effort is to ensure TravelSupermarket remains “well placed to compete” when the travel market returns to normal levels in the future, officials predict.
Interestingly, Google Trends doesn’t really seem to indicate a near 20% drop in traffic: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=travelsupermarket.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
It would be interesting to hear if other UK travel companies seeing similar drops as my gut feeling (combined with some of our own numbers) seem to actually indicate the opposite of what’s showing here…
I’ve got a way to help with their revenue slump… its simple.
When I email you to ask about advertising on your site, how about replying to me?
Just a thought…