We had covered how the tourism industry was using social media and now there is data to support mentions of travel industry. Omllion , social media monitoring service, setup keywords for leading travel portals in India and assessed their social media mentions during the period of 19th March, 2011 and 18th April, 2011.
This study was conducted on 15 travel portals with Yatra and Make My Trip being the most talked about. MakeMyTrip received 3000 mentions and Yatra received 2500 mentions in the month long period. Other travel portals in Cleartrip, TravelGuru and TravelChacha received 318, 115 and 99 mentions respectively in this period.
Yatra
The report establishes that the tool detected 8150 mentions of the keyword ‘Yatra’ which in most cases wasn’t related to the brand at all. Yatra is a common word meaning ‘trip’ so it was necessary to filter mentions which only spoke of the brand. Of these 8150 mentions, only 2500 were related to the brand; thereby indicating a majority of the mentions were unrelated or talked of other aspects.
MakeMyTrip
MakeMyTrip amassed the most mentions amongst the top 15 travel portals with 3000 mentions. Interestingly, 1601 social media mentions came on a single day on April 14, 2011. These 1600 mentions weren’t due to concerns or positive feedback but negative in nature. On April 14, an unsatisfied user of MakeMyTrip’s services launched Ruined My Trip which was a take on the poor management of MakeMyTrip. This forced the company to apologise through a blog post. Otherwise, the company receives an approximate 50 mentions a day.
Most of the conversations that take place in social media towards travel industry take place on blogs, microblogs and social networks (in that order). Most users prefer to share their experiences over travel blogs while microblogs and social networks are used for quick experiences or for sharing videos/images of the travel.
