directline-holidays Attests Enduring Success To The ‘Three Ps’ And Embraces Further Growth

directline-holidays Attests Enduring Success To The ‘Three Ps’ And Embraces Further Growth

directline-holidays is confident that its current strategy stands it in good stead to capitalise on further developments in the online travel agent space.

Reporting year-on-year growth in visits to the site of 26% in 2009, CEO directline-holidays, Maria Whiteman attributes the site’s continued success to a mix of profile, proposition and performance: “We’ve achieved high visibility and deployed a low-cost customer acquisition strategy to underline the depth and breadth of our product offering, while investing in our core website and focusing on customer service improvements such as the call centre”.

Site visits increased by 26% year on year in 2009, bringing the total visits to 18 million including direct traffic, natural search, paid traffic and referrals from other sites. Sales grew by 50% year on year to over £50 million.

Whiteman continued: “We are building on search equity that has been established over the last eight years and made a conscious decision to invest in this. That said, trusted recommendations are still very important to us as our investment in customer service demonstrates, by focusing on engaging repeat customers.”

directline-holidays leads the industry for natural search visibility, driven by its strength in generic and short-haul keyword terms while its SEO performance is based on enduring focus and investment in building unique content and relevant page links. Recently the team has been creating unique and useful bite sized content to make directline-holidays an authority on popular destinations. 

Whiteman embraces changes to search engine algorithms that seek to include social media content and predicts that directline-holidays can benefit by continuing with its strategic creation of useful and optimised content and strong page links. She said: “There remains plenty of scope for us, as an independent online travel agent, to reach new customers while continuing to deliver great value flights and cheap holidays to UK travellers to our established base.”