As far as marketing strategies are concerned, all three travel sites (Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz) are customized, personalized, user-friendly, and all contain promotional gimmicks. They are all presentable websites, physically appealing, and have interactive component for customization, and feedback mechanisms. All three also have customer support services. Apparently, these three websites aim to make themselves personalized travel sites for target customers, as inquiry tools are many. In all, three, marketing tools are varied and useful.
However, as with all e-businesses, customers tend to put a lot of emphasis on price comparisons, and they want to do this quickly for the most up-to-the minute information. Customer touch points are very important. The difference among these three travel sites is the level of interaction that travel buyers have with them. With competition very high in the travel sites sector, there can hardly be any customer loyalty with just one site. After all, all three travel sites equally have access to hundreds of airlines, thousands of hotels and cruises, car rentals, and last-minute vacation packages. They are all online real time discount travel agencies. The discriminating difference lies in customer service. For this consideration, Travelocity has the best service support system for customers.
Among the three, Travelocity has the most interesting site. It has the Travelocity Experience Finder that gives users the facility to search by experience or theme. It also has a search engine for Destination and Product Type. There are maps under each experience. This tool is very user-friendly as the user can overlay the map with hotels, activities, museums, among other bits of useful information. Another feature is the Wish List where the user can add hotels, activities, or vacation packages. Travelocity also adds a cool feature on Trip Ideas as it really thinks exactly how a customer would think. It also offers Neighborhood Search and Popular Car Destinations, thereby putting the travel agency in the shoes of the traveler. It adds Activities by Destination, happenings This Weekend and happenings Next Weekend. What’s more, Travelocity even has a feature called Need Ideas? where it offers suggestions to customers. The Travel Alerts are as specific as hurricane updates and new locations of airports.
