Helping consumers to control their digital as well as carbon footprint when travelling this summer
Dave Deasy, vice president of marketing at global data privacy management company, TRUSTe, talks through the company's analysis of travel company websites and their data handling and highlights the organisation's own role in assessing data compliance going forward.
According to Google, the average holiday decision involves a massive 50 searches on the internet over 2.5 hours and in the UK, four out of five travel purchases are made online – the highest figure for any country in the world. So if ever there was an industry with a vested interest in maintaining consumer confidence online the travel industry is at the front of the queue.
As the school summer holidays start, and we enter the peak period for the travel industry, we used TRUSTe’s Website Monitoring Service to scan the 25 top global travel industry websites (as ranked by alexa.com) and uncovered 373 unique companies responsible for a total of 1,187 tracking occurrences.
The analysis shows that EU airline websites have on average significantly more third party trackers (66) than US airline websites (40) and just slightly more than global travel portals (65).
The data also reveals a growing shift towards online behavioural advertising (OBA) which accounted for the majority (55 percent) of third-party tracking across all the sites. There is more third-party tracking activity on travel portals than airline websites globally but affiliation to advertising associations is also high. EU airline websites have the lowest percentage of advertising association affiliations (e.g. IAB, IAB Europe, NAI etc).
It’s all too easy to produce a quick scare-mongering headline about how consumers are being stalked by advertisers when browsing, researching and booking their travel plans online. But that presents just one side of the story.
Our findings show the need for online travel businesses to ensure they have additional insight and can proactively manage any third party tracking on their websites in order that they can be fully transparent and sensitive to consumer privacy concerns.
Behavioural advertising can offer consumers many benefits – often including pricing deals and free related content but TRUSTe research has consistently shown that consumers want clear notice and choice regarding online tracking. Businesses that are fully transparent about the tracking on their sites and provide consumers with ways to opt-out have been shown to have the most success in OBA.
The report's release follows the launch on Monday of a brand new Trust Seal by the European advertising and media industry. This announcement is part of the EU Self-Regulatory Programme on OBA aimed at increasing consumer trust, transparency and control of OBA across Europe.
Independent research by Harris Interactive on behalf of TRUSTe found that 79 per cent of UK consumers are aware of OBA, and 53 per cent did not like it. However, 51 per cent of UK consumers are more inclined to click an ad that provides an opt-out option like the EDAA programme and 60 per cent of UK consumers check for a seal that indicates privacy approval by an outside organisation.
The EDAA Trust Seal (pictured above) is designed to be an easily recognisable symbol for both consumers and businesses alike and enable companies to demonstrate that they meet the standards set out in the European Principles on OBA.
As an EDAA-approved certification provider, TRUSTe will be responsible for independently assessing company compliance with the European Principles on OBA and issuing the EDAA Trust Seal to companies that can demonstrate that they meet the standards required. The European Principles on OBA will be actively enforced by national self-regulatory organisations (SROs) across Europe (such as the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK) based on the consumer complaints they receive.
This is just the latest in a series of developments for the Programme as last month the EDAA launched a pan-European consumer awareness campaign for the OBA Icon. As Oliver Gray, Director-General of the EDAA, commented in their press release:
“We are excited to embark on this new trust phase of the Programme, proving the accountable and responsive attitude of the industry to self-regulate, and today’s announcement highlights just how far the EU Self-Regulatory Programme has come since the public launch of the EDAA in October 2012.”
These are indeed important steps in respecting consumer privacy concerns and maintaining confidence in an advertising practice which can have such important benefits for not just the travel industry but all online businesses.
For details of the new requirements on Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers under the EU Self-Regulatory Programme download a copy of the joint TRUSTe/EDAA Whitepaper - Building Trust in Online Behavioural Advertising.