Data Feeds for Travel Suppliers; Good, Bad or Ugly?

[BarrheadTravelUK]

Tweet

Good day to you all,

We at Barrhead Travel have been in the Affiliate World for all of one week now and it's as we expected, trial and error/a learning curve.

It was a long road to get the programme up and running and the main obstacle for us was creating a workable data feed. A couple of weeks ago we righted the remaining few problems and got the show on the road.

Only, we don't know if we like it.

We understood that having the data feed would be integral in making our programme appealing to affiliates - over and above the 5% and free holidays of course. But now that we're seeing it in practice we're not so keen and think it could, worst case scenario, be detrimental to the brand.

The travel industry, and tour operators in particular, are a funny old bunch, clinging resolutely to extremely antiquated technology. We're locked into that and the chief problem it presents is that our data feeds can only be updated once daily, and after that if the price changes ... it changes. Meaning that we could have listed an amazing deal of a week in the Maldives at £599 which then sells and pushes the price up 30/40% or more. Not good when the user clicks through and finds that out.

What's more, with AW, we're severely restricted as to the amount of info on a deal that we can put out there. We'd like to be saying that it's 7 Nights luxury 5* All Inclusive at the Naladhu Resort on the South Male Atoll, flying direct from Heathrow and departing on Saturday 12 December for only £599 per person. When this comes out to affiliates/users from the data feed it'll show as:

Maldives, LHR to MLE, Naladhu, £599

Is that going to get us both a sale? Maybe, but we'd really be looking to make it much more attractive.

What we're wondering is, until such times as AW and the Tour Ops can get to a sophisticated, live system which will show accurate pricing and detailed product descriptions - until then, should we scrap the data feed idea entirely and just go with generic message and creatives?

What do you all think? WIll be grateful for any thoughts.

Paul Kelly, BarrheadTravel.

[pistol101]

Hi Paul,

To make the most out of affiliate marketing you will need good feeds. A meta search site can't work with you unless your providing all the detail. The meta search engines are busy grabbing all the inventory so there wont be many slots left if your not in them.

Sounds like your trying to use static files, to go with these you need to provide price updates throughout the day. There are ways to make it work, the tour operators are making this work and are in a similar boat.

[leebrignellcash]

Hi Paul

FusePump is a business that is dedicated to the creation, management and distribution of high quality product feeds.

What's different about our approach is that we build the feed by consuming the rich data that is available from the merchant website (or by combining this with other data sources if/when appropriate/available). The key thing is that we aim to bring all the data that is available from the site into the feed so that the user experience on your site most closely matches that of the merchant (and means that they are closer to conversion when they arrive at the merchant site).

Hence, FusePump Feeds have a very rich set of attributes which you are able to use to create engaging and quality listings/applications on your website. This means that you are not restricted to the simple listing style that you cite in your post.

You can preview the FeedCreator tool for Thomson Late Deal Holidays at this URL FusePump FeedCreator Tool which allows you to see and configure exactly which attributes you would like to consume, as well as which product types you would like contained within the feed. Please ensure you sign up via Commission Junction if you would actually like to use this tool as the demo will not contain your affiliate tracking.

While you are working with your feed integrations, you can also make use of our dynamic advertising tool, AdCreator, which allows you to confiure the same product filtering as you would for your feeds, but to output these as standard IAB advert formats. Again, you can demo this tool at this URL FusePump AdCreator Tool.
Similarly, ensure you pick this up via Commission Junction so that it contains your tracking.

The Thomson merchant is brought to you through FusePump's partnership with Commission Junction who have supported the merchant with the launch of the feed and these tools.

We are also launching other travel merchant feeds in a similar way in the near future.

The frequency of update is of course an issue throughout the affiliate marketing industry and we are working on solutions to make our feeds more frequent (or even "live"). However, the first step is to get rich data feeds in your hands so that you can provide a great experience for users on your site.

Please do get in touch if you would like assistance working with the FusePump tools.

Kind Regards

Lee

Lee Brignell-Cash
Co-Founder and COO
FusePump Ltd
020 7199 7854
07917 760 754
lee@fusepump.com

[cottageguy]

Hi Paul

Thank you for an open and collaborative post.

Most travel technology dates from an era where people were cheap and computing was expensive. Those days are gone.

It is very noticeable that the companies who are succeeding in this world have bought new systems. Instead of wasting time linking their web site to their res system, they are driving both from one content database. Which gives them time to enrich the content, and keep developing everything until it works effectively.

so you may have discovered that after all your hard work, you now appreciate you have to transform your res system, not just bolt on an inadequate affiliate scheme. There are bodges to get past some of your problems, but they are bodges, not answers. A res system with an open database back-end, and browser-based front end is where you need to be sometime soon.

Sorry!

Jon

[mattg]

Phil,

If you're really publishing a product feed (that means a data file, perhaps XML or CSV, that can be downloaded & processed, and includes product, date and price information with URLs) please drop me a mail and I'll take a look to see if we can use it.

Re "Maldives, LHR to MLE, Naladhu, £599" this is presumably some kind of widget your network has produced on top of some data you supply, with the intention affiliates embed it on their site. The cryptic format is presumably down to space constraints. We don't use these things, can't help you further on that.

"should we scrap the data feed idea entirely and just go with generic message and creatives?"

We don't run banners and generic logos etc on a CPA basis. Someone clicking a generic banner is not close to booking. In our opinion the chance of a visitor seeing and clicking on a generic banner, then booking as a consequence, and our cookie still being intact at that time and then of the sale not getting (silently) deduped against another channel are close to zero. Commercially it would be a waste of time.

(Of course from your point of view, get your banners on as many sites as you possibly can. It's great free brand advertising).

Q: there's a prominent telephone call to action in your site header. If an affiliate referred visitor then books by phone, are you tracking and paying commissions on that sale?


Jon said:

Thank you for an open and collaborative post.

Amen.

[BarrheadTravelUK]

Matt,

Just a quick reply on the site header. This is only on our public site - When users come through on the affiliate link (available at http://bit.ly/48rbkB) we've ensured that no phone numbers are displayed.

Thanks for the reply.

All the best,

Paul.

[pistol101]

The frequency of update is of course an issue throughout the affiliate marketing industry and we are working on solutions to make our feeds more frequent (or even "live"). However, the first step is to get rich data feeds in your hands so that you can provide a great experience for users on your site.

It's not really an issue and hasn't been for a while. There looks like confusion as to what a data feed is and what is actually being used. Travel is very different to the retail sector and where a lot of people go wrong is trying to use the same formula.

Paul runs a travel agent so you can't really compare what he's doing with Thomson. Very different sources of data.

[mattg]

Matt,

Just a quick reply on the site header. This is only on our public site - When users come through on the affiliate link (available at http://bit.ly/48rbkB) we've ensured that no phone numbers are displayed.

OK, sorry for calling you Phil.

Drop me a mail if you have a downloadable feed, and please update this thread when you have some more thoughts (it's a 2 way thing, and notably on this thread you have some of the smarter people who lurk here contributing so you should get some value out of it).