Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) And we will move to our first question from Michael Millman with Millman Research Associates.
Michael Millman – Millman Research Associates
Thank you. Could you talk about trends, specifically, I was interested in click trends, I was interested in trends in terms of advertising relating to more hotels and more air or other or packages, I was interested in whether you're seeing more very short term promotions or almost last minute deals or more longer term, I was interested in are you seeing more resort type ads or more a large city’s luxury hotel kind of ads, and any other trends that you might be seeing that you could let us know about. Thank you.
Holger Bartel
Hello, Michael. This is a good question and it relates pretty much to a broader question of how the recession in overall, the economy, the bad economy is affecting us as a business, as a deal publishing business. Let me first talk about North America. As we all know from the news media the travel industry is very heavily affected by the economic downturn, particularly hotels and cruise lines – their business is down, occupancy rates are falling. In general, that is bad news for every travel company. I think as a travel deal publisher, however, we have an opportunity to help these companies, to help hotels, to help airlines, to help cruise lines, sell more inventory. Hotels in Hawaii are very empty these days. They turn to us and ask us to help them, bring them more consumers, more visitors who spend money over there. And the deals is what motivates our users to take these trips. It's still too early to say exactly how that will affect our business in 2009; however, we hear from our partners that we offer some solutions that are very helpful for them in these tough economic times. Let me also actually also turn over to Chris, and ask him how this is in Europe.
Chris Loughlin
Michael, Thank you. Thank you, Holger. One thing just to point out, in Europe, we are still experiencing rapid growth that we see in local currency. We are expanding at about a 100% in the last year. Just one stat I was looking at earlier today, 183,000 people typed in the brand name, Travelzoo in UK into Google in January of this year versus 36,801 in the same period last year January. Now is that because more people looking for deals? Well, certainly I get the impression that they are, but that's my own personal opinion. It may tell us that that's the case, but it also could be the fact that we’re just growing very, very quickly here in the UK. We continue to see fantastic deals across US at this time. One other thing which is quite interesting, Michael, is that international consumers across all markets are finding these deals very attractive. So, we’ve recently ran a UK hotel. It was actually in Chelsea in London, and we had subscribers from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the US, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong all booked that deal directly with the hotel in London. So it also points out helping the asset holders at this time, while the hotel booked $100,000, and that actually ran on the 30th of December. So, clearly consumers are traveling, but perhaps they do need a deal.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
