The post Multiple Bookings and More with Rezgo v.5.4 appeared first on Rezgo.

Online Revealed brings together the best and the brightest in the travel industry together from across Canada and into the US to share best practices, case studies and experiences in digital and social media marketing, with speakers hand picked to provide the best in online marketing education.

I will endeavour in posts to follow to provide some key insights, content from the 15 digital and social media marketing workshops that were presented, and trends and tips shared with delegates of the 8th annual event.

The first of our recaps outlines the Canadian Travel Trends that were presented by Expedia’s Vice President of Market Management for North America, Hari Nair.  The detailed report of Hari’s presentation can be found on the Online Revealed Blog, with some of the key insights outlined below.

Also, I would be remiss not to point to the reviews of the event by Hotelier Magazine, Restaurants and Hotels and Travelweek, who were among the delegates at the conference.

Expedia’s Hari Nair Presents Expedia’s latest research on Canadian travel trends.

Some key highlights included:

1. Year-over-year hotel revenue by geographical source shows bookings on Expedia (for travel in Canada) are 32% from Canada, 25% from the USA, and 11% International.
2. Rates are dropping closer to booking, but Canadians are shifting down from preferring luxury priced travel, to a value brand price points – where the International traveler has showed an increase of 182% in 4-star luxury bookings across Expedia travel sites.
3. Consumers have increased same day booking by over 30% (noting the increase of mobile access as well as a caveat to this trend).
4. Expedia’s data indicates that Canadians book travel packages, but Canadian hoteliers need to continue to package travel throughout the year (even in peak seasons) as consumers are willing to spend more, as long as there is perceived value overall.

The full article is available on the Online Revealed Blog with additional statistics and trends covered in the opening keynote presentation.

Hotelier Magazine also covered the event, and provided this recap of the conference.

“Experts at the conference agreed that when it came to travel marketing online, content was king. Travel Marketers need to optimize content on their online properties by utilizing a mix of tools, such as photos, reviews, blogs and social media that’s right for them. In addition, mobile was picked as the fastest growing trend with Expedia’s Nair pointing out that “You don’t want to just look into mobile, you want to invest into mobile.”              - Hotelier Magazine

Restaurants and Hotels.ca also provided some key takeaways with a 2-part conference recap:

“Marketers are spending 88% of digital marketing budget on PPC (pay per click), which yeilds 6% CTR (click thru rates), while 12%  (on average) or budgets are invested in SEO (search engine optimization), which yields 94% CTR”     -  Restaurants and Hotels Magazine

My next posts will cover some of the other speakers and takeaways from the 15 workshops, highlights from the annual Google eTourism Awards, closing keynote Mitch Joel, and key insights from the 2012 Destination Benchmarking program, which compared Canadian destinations in online performance to each other, and to International peers in NewZealand and the US.