Last-Minute Summer Travel
By Jamie Mark

Looking For a Deal?
Online travel agents fight for price conscious traveler dollars. Over the past two weeks, Lowestfare.com, Travelscape.com, and Trip.com, the top three online travel advertisers, focused their ad campaigns on saving customers money. Each company gave a different type of discount: Lowestfare.com used a percentage discount, while Travelscape.com gave rebates and TRIP.com offered discounted prices. In this competitive market where advertisers compete on price, using discounts to pull customers in is key.

Building Interest
Another way to pull customers to a site and build interest is through the use of incentives. Both Travelscape.com and Lowestfare.com created sweepstakes to pull customers to their sites. These contests give customers the opportunity to win vacations and the companies the opportunity to obtain customer data, enabling them to build their databases and make customers aware of their services.

Last-Minute Travel
Companies such as LastMinuteTravel.com and the Hotel Reservations Network created last-minute travel planners to help customers save time. In addition, these companies created direct links to last-minute offering pages from their ads. The planners give the spontaneous traveler and the procrastinator opportunities to plan their vacations. These companies have done a great job of addressing the needs of the late summer traveler.

Conclusion
Discounts, last-minute deals, and sweepstakes are great ways to attract customers. In fact, using percentage discounts and incentive ads, Lowestfare.com saw a near fivefold jump of average daily unique visitors (Source: Media Metrix). Large discounts and giveaways provide customers reasons to visit sites, but not necessarily stay. This is why companies are adding value through last-minute travel planning assistance. Additional value can potentially retain viewers, while large discounts and sweepstakes continue to pull in new customers.