Using copious amounts of data, Joe Nguyen, VP South-East Asia for ComScore convinced us all that change is happening rapidly in Asia Pacific.  Did you know that travel information rules online?  130 million unique visitors were visiting travel websites in Asia Pacific in August 2010!

 

It was interesting to note that today, as many people visit travel info sites as they do OTAs, which means that people are doing a lot of research prior to making an actual booking.  In the travel related segments, OTAs have shown a 30% growth in the last year, and hotels were a close second with a 27% change.  Interestingly enough, the growth in the airlines sector was much lower, showing a miserly in comparison 12% growth in the last year.  

 

However, when you break the airline industry down into LCC and legacy airlines, the disparity couldn’t be more noticeable.  LCCs have shown a 44% growth whilst the traditional carriers experienced a much lower, 8% growth.  LCCs are changing the travel experience in Asia-Pac!  If we use Air Asia as an example, as of October 2010, they have over 500,000 Facebook followers which generates an impressive 12.7% of their total traffic.  Google in comparison contributes 17.6% of all their traffic.

 

Another interesting statistical comparison was between men and women and their behavior online.  The battle of the sexes?  Gender parity can be seen online in more mature markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong, while in ‘younger’ markets such as China and India, the net is still very much male dominated.  Nevertheless, did you know that women tend to go to travel sites more often than men?  Not surprisingly, they tend to do a lot more shopping around, or what they call ‘research’, then men.  Yet men spend much more time on websites than women do.  This goes back to the old adage, women shop around and men just buy!

 

I’m not surprised to find out that social networking captures a significant amount of ones total online time in certain countries.  The social media reach worldwide is 69.8% and in Asia it’s a lower 50.5%.  Yet when we break this stat down, we find out that users from Indonesia and Philippines spend more than 30% of their total time on social networks, more than in any other Asia-Pac country.

 

After hearing all the data confirming Change from Joe, the Confusion set it.  What to do with all this data?  How to interpret it?

 

Siva Ganeshanandan, GM, APAC of Autonomy Optimost helped us decipher all these numbers and clear the confusion that only stats can create.

 

We all know it’s important to research our consumers and gather feedback from them through focus groups, surveys, usability studies, testing and best practices.  But it’s as important to ask customers about what they expect from us, what kind of services are they looking for.  We need to get to know our customers better.

 

And here comes the dilemma.  Customer sometimes lie!  So all the data we collect trying to understand what our customer wants, can be awfully misleading.  Why does this happen?  Because sometimes we ask to direct of a question, such as ‘does my bum look big in this?’  You know you’re going to get a distorted answer to a question like that.  Consumers also over/under estimate themselves.  They tend to tell you things about themselves that are not entirely true.  Haven’t we all done that?  In addition, sometimes people are removed from reality, especially when there is a cost associated with a choice.

 

To make our life easier, Siva compiled some examples of where people don’t tell the whole truth.  Research has shown that when they make the following comments, the truth is, it actually makes no difference.

 

> I want to feel secure – security is an important aspect

> images are very powerful

> I can really identify with this

> customers want rich interactive functionality

> I want to feel like I’m in control, I don’t want to be forced into anything

> appreciate my business, don’t push it … don’t cross-sell and up-sell all the time

 

So next time you hear these comments from your customers, don’t waste your time trying to solve them 🙂

 

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