Australia
Blogs are best for travel info reveals Visa survey
Sydney, 03 August 2009
Visa survey finds one in three respondents look to travel blogs when planning a trip
Travellers are shunning “expert” opinion from TV shows, newspapers and specialty travel magazines in favour of bloggers, friends and family, reveals a new survey from Visa[i].
The Visa Travel Survey questioned 1,000 Australians about where they look for credible travel information when planning trips. Top billing went to travel blogs, which were named by one in three jetsetters (34 percent) as the best go-to, with one in four (24 percent) preferring to consult family and friends. Travel agents were third, with 13 percent of the vote.
The lowest ranked were newspaper travel supplements, which attracted just four percent of the vote, behind travel TV shows (seven percent) and speciality travel magazines (10 percent).
In another regional Visa study[ii], when asked where they turned to for information on their current trip, Australian travellers preferred web sources over choices including travel destination books and physical travel agents. The top picks were any online sources [iii](57 percent), search engines on the internet (44 percent) and travel sites on the internet (29 percent).
Despite global financial woes, 100 percent of Aussies polled in the Visa Travel Survey intend to travel in the next two years; with 40 percent wanting to jet to Europe, 31 percent heading to Asia and 17 percent favouring North America.
According to the Visa e-Commerce Consumer Monitor[iv], online spending by consumers in Asia Pacific held steady compared with the previous two quarters. Further to this, the top three biggest online spend areas were all travel related services. The highest areas of spending per person in the past 12 months were airline/airline tickets (averaging US$970), online travel agents (averaging US$647) and travel accommodation (averaging US$527).
The Visa Travel Survey also revealed respondents thought the most useful advice for first time travellers is the inside story on local culture (35 percent) and help planning a budget (33 percent).
Chris Clark, Visa’s General Manager forAustralia, New Zealand and South Pacific, said: “As online communication tools are evolving at such a rapid rate it’s not surprising that consumers are increasingly looking to the internet for travel advice.
“The Visa travel site (www.visa.com.au/happytraveller) provides tips and advice on how to keep holidays hassle-free, such as the range of credit, debit and prepaid cards to suit every traveller and where to get them; advice from Visa Global Customer Assistance; and foreign currency exchange and ATM locations around the world.”
Media Contact
Kate Dudman or Kirilly Smith
Porter Novelli on behalf of Visa
ausinfo@visa.com
[i] The survey was commissioned by Visa in April 2009, and conducted by Pure Profile with 1,000 respondents from across Australia
[ii] Survey interviewed departing or arriving visitors/transit passengers (aged 18 years and above, trip length was at least 48 hours) at Singapore Changi Airport. A total of 2,226 respondents were interviewed from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Fieldwork was conducted from 26 September to 15 November 2008
[iii] Any online sources include search engines on the internet, travel sites on the internet and online travel agent
[iv] The Visa e-Commerce Consumer Monitor Q2-Q4 2008. From April to December 2008, Ipsos conducted 9,142 online interviews on behalf of Visa with internet users (those who access the internet at least once a week) aged 18 to 49 years from six countries and territories (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Australia and India) in an effort to measure their online usage behaviors. All figures in this survey are based on amounts as reported by respondents
About Visa
Visa operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network providing processing services and payment product platforms. This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments, which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and
