Double Standards On The Beach

Just seems a bit cheeky to me. On The Beach (an online travel agency) launched on Affiliate Future today, with the following in their terms & conditions -

PPC Policy: No affiliate may conduct direct PPC to the on the beach website. No affiliate may mention on the beach in any PPC ads for their own site and may not bid on any brand term or variations of the brand

and

PPC Policy: The following is prohibited from On The Beach affiliate programme: Using the On the Beach and otbeach.com brand names, brand misspellings or similar variations in the written copy of adverts on PPC (Pay per Click) search Using the On the Beach and otbeach.com brand name, brand name misspelling or similar va

A quick search on Google for “sunshine holidays” -

and it’s been like that for a few months now. I’m aware it doesn’t break any of Google’s new rules, and some of you won’t see anything wrong with that, but it just sticks in my throat. A lot.

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Screenscraping - How To Stop It

It surprised me when we started building sunshine and continues to do so today, how much the online travel industry relies on screen scraping. It must create so much extra load on airlines and tour operators hardware, as well as breaking down at the first signs of any small changes made to any of their sites.

Last week Ryanair announced they’d be cancelling any bookings made via third party sites using screen scraping. They’d also be working with their developers to make screen scraping harder (Captcha anyone?)!

At the moment it’s unclear whether they are going to cancel all bookings made from today onwards or all previous bookings, which is a Monday morning headache we and most of the travel industry don’t need! As usual Ryanair’s need to sell “ancillary” products along with their cheap flights seems to be causing them to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Flybe on the other hand, are moving to offer their search and book facilities via XML Web Services, in an admirable attempt to lessen the impact of screen scraping. By doing so they place themselves head and shoulders above their competition, finally an airline fully embracing the internet and the free sharing of information! By offering this service to third parties they can control any load issues previously created by screen scraping.

So congratulations to Flybe and booo to Ryanair.

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Daughter of Geek

Conversation between daughter #1 and the good lady wife at the weekend.

D#1: Mummy, come here, there’s a spider!

W#1: Where is it?

D#1: On it’s web-site!

Heh!

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I Blame The Kids

Thought this was worth sharing, giving you an insight into the daily trials and tribulations of an Online Travel Agency.

We received the following email one day last year from one of our suppliers -

I just wanted to provide you with information regarding one of your clients, Mrs removed who booked through sunshine.co.uk to stay at the removed in removed.
 
The clients arrived on removed and we were informed by our local agent that the the hotel manager contacted them this morning to advise the clients have been arrested in a drunken state due to fighting between themselves and also for mistreating their children and the parents have also caused damage in the hotel which has to be paid for.
 
The children are being held in a childrens detention centre whilst the police take necessary action and none of them are allowed to return to the hotel other than to collect their luggage but they must have a police escort.  

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SEO - Aim High

When I was first starting out in Affiliate Marketing I read everything that was out there on SEO. I spent more time reading than doing to begin with. Most of what was true then still holds true today, the rules of SEO haven’t changed all that much.

Using the now defunct Overture Keyword Tool I’d choose my keywords and aim for a phrase somewhere below the top, assuming that the main one or two word phrases would belong to the big online brands and SEO Jedis.

This seemed like a good long tail tactic to get started as a noob and produced a few trickles of traffic. When I accidently started ranking for a few of the “top” keyphrases I’d tried to avoid, I realised it was possible to aim higher with some success.

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