Which Copy of Your Travel Page Did Google Keep?

You’ve got a saved reply.

You never sat down and wrote one. It happened on its own, because a travel inbox gets the same three questions every week, and somewhere around the fortieth time you started pasting instead of typing. Dates, what’s included, what the deposit gets them.

Then the phone goes and you’re reading a supplier’s PDF off one screen while a customer waits on the other, and you already know the answer perfectly well. You just want to see it in writing before you say it out loud.

I spent most of last Thursday doing something a lot like that to your whole industry.

I ran my standard audit across a long list of travel businesses, working the checks in the sequence I settled on years ago and have long since stopped arguing with myself about.

That sequence goes from what a stranger meets first to the parts of your website she will never see at all. Three stops made me stop typing.

Stop one: is there anything to open

Every audit begins with a question so dull that I nearly took it off the list altogether. Is there a website on the listing?

I expected this trade to sail through it, because your entire business runs on people deciding about you before they have ever heard your voice.

So the first answer wasn’t what I was ready for. 71.0% of the travel businesses I sampled list a website at all, 45 of 47 among the trades I check, which leaves an enormous number of owners asking a stranger to commit two thousand dollars off a phone number and a star rating.

Some of those are one-person operations living on referrals and a personal account, and a few of them do perfectly well out of it. Most aren’t fine. They’re a business that got busy in year two and never got round to the website.

How many trips did you sell last year to someone who had never spoken to you before?

Stop two: the phone in her hand

Next I check whether the page behaves itself on a small screen. 73.2% of these sites clear Google’s basic phone checks, 42 of 47, and I’m going to walk straight past it.

Not because it doesn’t matter. Because fitting a screen and being worth reading are two different arguments, and whoever built your site won the first one on your behalf without ever mentioning it.

The pages fit. The lock is on the door. Neither of those is where your money is going.

One travel client had a rebuild costed out before she rang me, and modern was never her problem in the first place.

When a customer of yours gives up on your website, which part do you think she gives up on?

Stop three: how does she start

Now the stop I care about most, and the one nobody ever quotes for.

Picture her at eleven at night. She’s decided, near enough, and she has one question left before she’d feel silly about handing over a deposit. What can she actually do about it, right there, in the next ten seconds?

20.0% of these homepages carry a box she can type into, 39 of 47 when I stack the trades up, so most of the time the honest answer is that she writes an email or she waits until morning.

Writing that email costs her more than it looks. She has to guess what she’s even allowed to ask, then send half-formed dates off to an address that might get opened on Monday.

Plenty of people won’t bother. They go back to the other tab, the one they left open an hour ago.

How many of your enquiries arrive after nine at night? Mine do, and I sell something nobody dreams about.

Stop four: the line I never see on an invoice

Last stop, and the one I’m actually writing about.

Say a woman searches the exact name of a trip you run. Your website can answer her at four addresses at once: with the www on the front and without it, with a tracking tail stuck on the end from your last newsletter, and again through whatever your booking software builds when a supplier sends someone over.

She sees one of the four. She has no idea there were four, and unless you’ve gone looking for yourself, neither do you.

A canonical tag is one line inside the page that makes the pick yours instead of a machine’s. Leave it out and the machine decides, and what it hands her is sometimes the copy still carrying last season’s departure dates.

72.7% of the travel sites I audited carry that line, 47 of 47 and dead last of everything I audit, and I have never once seen it written on a proposal, a quote or an invoice.

It isn’t hopeless everywhere. Raleigh nails this exact tag better than any city I ranked, and nobody there did it on purpose either.

Which is the strange part, because it isn’t a skill and it certainly isn’t a cost. 84.9% of everything I audit has it, and most of those owners couldn’t tell you so, because the software wrote it for them on the day the site went live. It sits among the last things I confirm on launch day, down where the boring wins live.

Why your trade in particular

I’ve got a theory about this, and I’ll happily be talked out of it.

One trip on a travel website tends to exist in four or five places at the same time. It sits on the destination page, and it sits on the season page, and it arrives all over again from a wholesaler’s feed with an address of its own.

Then someone built a landing page for the spring campaign back in 2023 and never took it down.

Every one of those is the same holiday wearing a different hat, and not one of them was created by a person who was thinking about search engines that morning.

So the duplicates pile up faster here than anywhere else I audit, and the single line that sorts them out is the line least likely to have been typed.

Painters do the same thing with a line of their own, and I have heard five excuses for leaving it unwritten.

Would you know how many addresses your best-selling trip currently answers to?

Every travel website I build ships with that line printed on every page, and not one client has ever asked me about it, before or since. It’s dull work. Dull work is most of the gap.

Come and argue with me

I’d rather be wrong about this than right about it, so make the case.

Maybe every booking you take arrives through a wholesaler and the website is a business card you keep out of habit. Maybe you sell one trip a year to a mailing list you’ve had since 2012, and a stranger has never once found you cold.

Two owners have changed my mind on things like this since January, and I went back and rewrote the post both times, which I’d rather do than be quietly wrong for a year.

One thing first, though. Type the name of your best-selling trip the way a stranger would, look hard at what comes back, and click it.

Then send me the address it landed on, and I’ll tell you which of your copies she’s being shown.