The Two Minutes Your Travel Business Never Heard About

Twenty past ten on a Sunday night. A woman is in bed with the lamp still on and her phone held up above her face.

She’s been at this for an hour. Three tabs open, one of them your travel company, and she keeps sliding between the itinerary and the price the way people do when they’ve already decided and are quietly hunting for permission.

She reads your trip page for two minutes. Then the phone goes face down on the duvet and she falls asleep, and on Wednesday she comes back and books the thing.

Not one second of that reached you.

Not the hour, not the two competitors she was comparing you against, not the two minutes on your page, not the three days of silence in between. A booking landed on Wednesday and Sunday night is a blank.

It didn’t have to be. Recording that evening is a setting on your website, and finding out whether yours is switched on is about five minutes of work that you can do sitting down.

The client who found out late

A client of mine ran a travel business for six years with nothing counting at all. Sharp woman, and considerably sharper than me about the actual product.

She was sure her Iceland page was carrying the company, because Iceland is what people mentioned to her at parties.

I got the counting switched on for her in March, and by the end of April the picture had quietly rearranged itself.

The Iceland page got opened now and then. The page doing the heavy lifting was a plain one about payment plans that she’d written in twenty minutes and been faintly embarrassed by ever since.

Which of your own pages would you bet on tonight? I’ve asked owners that question for years, and I can remember two who guessed right.

Analytics is what turned her Sunday nights into something she could look up on a Wednesday morning. Before that, the business ran on whichever customer had spoken to her most recently, which is a fine way to run a dinner party and a rotten way to run a company.

I went back through every check I run on this trade a few weeks ago, and analytics, where travel comes 26 of 47, is the only one I’d call a decent showing.

Decent is doing a lot of work in that sentence. 55.8% of the travel sites I audited have counting running on them, which is still under the 58% I find across small business sites in general, and it’s the best your trade does anywhere.

So. Phone out.

Step one: pick a day you already know about

Don’t start with a question you can’t answer. Start with one you can.

Think of a day when something definitely happened. The morning your newsletter went out. The week the local paper mentioned you.

Or the Friday a supplier posted about your trip and tagged the company in it, which is the one I usually pick, because everybody remembers those.

Write that date down somewhere, because you’re about to ask your own website whether it noticed the busiest day it had all year.

Step two: get in

Go to analytics.google.com on your phone and sign in with the email address the website was set up under. Not your personal one. The business one, or the one your builder used.

One of three things happens next. Either a property is already sitting there with numbers in it and you’re straight in, or the screen politely offers to create something new, which means nothing has ever been recorded about anybody. The third is that you get locked out entirely, because the account belongs to a company you stopped paying in 2019.

Locked out is commoner than you would think. Plenty of Washington DC businesses are counting visitors into an account nobody in the office can open.

All three of those are answers, and all three take under a minute to arrive. Which one do you reckon you’re going to get?

Step three: put your day in the box

If you’re in, find the date range at the top of the screen and set it to your day and the day before it.

Now look at whether the line moved.

If your newsletter went to eight hundred people and the line sits flat, then either nothing on your website is recording properly or nobody opened the thing, and I can tell you those two problems carry very different price tags. Which one would you rather own?

I run this same check on myself every time I send anything, and I’m wrong about the outcome more often than I care to admit in writing.

Step four: the question that separates everyone

Now the harder one, and plenty of businesses fail it with everything installed and working.

Ask which page people opened after your homepage last month.

Not how many came. Which page they went to next. When did anyone last tell you that?

If the answer is a list you can read in ten seconds, you’re in better shape than most of the companies I audit. If all your website can report is that strangers came and went, you’ve been handed a fact you already assumed.

For a long stretch mine could only give me a total, and I let it, because the total was flattering and I was busy.

If nothing is recording

Then it’s an hour of work for whoever looks after your site, and it is not the interesting hour of their week.

A travel client once asked me to make her site look current, and the four things I changed were all invisible. This was the first of them.

It joins the rest of the upkeep a website quietly needs, which is a shorter list than most owners fear.

She had three tabs open on Sunday night for a reason, and you should have two open right now, with my report in the second one. Choosing travel from the industry list in the explorer, with the city box left alone, prints every check I run with the number of sites standing behind it. I audited 1,562 travel websites out of 2,703 businesses sampled across 23 markets, and analytics is the first check I’d read.

The one job that waits to be asked for

I don’t think travel businesses are lazy about any of this, and I stopped believing it was about money years ago.

Look instead at what your website already got right without you. 91.2% of these sites load over a secure address, and I promise you almost none of those owners chose it, requested it or paid a penny extra for it, because the company hosting the site simply switched it on one Tuesday.

Nearly everything on a modern website arrives handled that way. The lock, the layout, the code underneath, all of it turns up finished, and nobody in your building ever had to want it.

Counting is the first job on the entire list that waits for a person to ask for it, which is why it can sit there unasked for six years while nothing visibly breaks.

Telecom companies have the opposite trouble. Their sites have been counting for years and nobody has opened the numbers.

Meanwhile you’re making real decisions about the business every single week. You drop the October departure because it felt soft. You add a second Portugal date because two people happened to ask in the same fortnight.

Two people. In a fortnight. That’s the evidence you’re running the company on, and you’d never in your life accept it from a supplier.

So why do you accept it from yourself? I did it for years, and my excuse was that I was too busy to go looking.

Every travel site I build launches with the counting already switched on, and it’s the least clever thing I do all month.

Back to Sunday night

That woman with the lamp on was real. She was on your website last week, or someone very like her was.

I can’t tell you her name and I wouldn’t want to know it. But whether she was there at all, how long she stayed on the page you sweated over, and which trip she looked at just before she put the phone down, all of that either got written down somewhere or it didn’t.

Five minutes tonight tells you which.

And next Sunday, while she’s lying there deciding about you, you can find out on Wednesday what she did. Wouldn’t you rather know?