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Luzi Matzig in TravelAsia
TravelAsia, February 12, 1999
Diethelm Travel Thailand now runs four sites on the Net, one of which has consistently been listed among the top 100 travel-related websites that generate the most traffic worldwide. Raini Hamdi speaks to group general manager Luzi Matzig about Net benefits.
Q: How did you start? A: Our first site http://www.diethelm-travel.com was set up in April 1995, concentrating on giving information on Diethelm Travel’s tour arrangements and offering a booking facility. The second one http://www.asiatour.com offers a lot of general information on all the countries we operate to: Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan/China. The third site http://www.incentives-asia.com focuses on information on incentive travel; and in mid-1998, we launched http://www.thaifare.com offering more than 1,000 ticketing options out of Thailand at discounted prices. We are currently setting up a hotel specific site for each country of operation. Q: How do you judge success – hits or actual bookings? A: Roughly, the hits to booking ratio is 1,000:1. On asiatour.com we presently get around 60,000 hits daily, followed by 8,000 hits daily on diethelm-travel.com Q: How have hits and bookings climbed over the years? A: The number of overall accesses to Diethelm Travel’s web pages has increased more than tenfold compared wtih the numbers we achieved in early 1996. Our most accessed domain, asiatour.com, has consistently been listed among the top 100 travel-related websites that generate the most traffic worldwide. You can check this out under http://www.100hot.com Q: Who are these people who access it? A: Most page accesses are by consumers. The domain http://www. diethelm-travel.com also includes complete price lists for agents and wholesalers. It’s roughly 85 per cent consumers, 15 per cent trade. Q: Over the years, how much actual Net sales has there been? A: In 1998, Diethelm Travel did around 10 per cent of direct business, 85 per cent of it booked through the Internet. Margins on direct sales are higher, compared with the ever-decreasing margins when dealing with large overseas wholesalers. Q: What makes a good web page? A: There is no substitute for quality content. If you want a popular website, you have to give people plenty of good reasons to view your pages. Pages can be attractive for a number of reasons – the best is providing comprehensive information. Another is providing attractive offers on items traded on the web. An important aspect is good timing. If you enter an area of the Internet early, you will have a tremendous advantage over competitors. For example, asiatour.com is one of the earliest sites to offer complete travel information on Thailand and the Mekong countries. There was a time when one could hardly place a query with altavista.com on Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Vietnam and Yunnan/China without receiving plenty of references to asiatour.com While there are many other sites offering similar information on these countries, our site is still linked to/from hundreds of sites. Excite, Infoseek and AOL all treat asiatour.com as a recommended site for information on South-east Asia. Such a position can only be achieved if one enters early.
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