December 22, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Pay Per Click Comes to Regions' Lodgings

A regional travel directory is delivering visitors to lodgings’ web sites on a pay-per-click basis like the major search engines. NYCgetaways.com guarantees to deliver a certain number of visitors online per year for 10 cents each. Any shortfall by year-end is either reimbursed or credited to the following year.

Lodgings now get most of their new business online. Marketing consists primarily of paying for listings in directories and search engines to get visitors sent to their web sites. Most travel directories charge for a listing through a fixed annual fee, which makes it hard for lodgings to check if they’re getting their money’s worth. So far, only major search engines like Google charge per visitor delivered. NYCgetaways bills lodgings each October 1 for the coming 12 months, getting their estimates of the number of visits they’ll deliver from the previous year’s figures. Lodgings can check they get those visits by installing a free traffic counter.

Visitors from regional travel directories tend to be more qualified than visitors from national directories. A good lodging web site will convert well-qualified visitors to bookings at a rate as low as 25 to one. At 10 cents per visitors, that’s a cost per booking of $2.50, within most lodgings’ budget. Google’s minimum charge is also 10 cents, but that usually  results in lodgings being so far down in the listings that they get very few visitors. To get more visitors, a lodging usually has to pay two or three times as much.

In the first two months it offered this service NYCgetaways signed up 16 clients at an average annual fee of $60. Clients get additional services at no charge such as being able to post their specials free and being included in pull-down menus for activities they offer and kinds of visitors they specially welcome such as pet owners. In August 2004 the NYCgetaways-family of regional guides got 20,000 visitors and delivered 10,000 lodgings inquiries, most from free listings. The 10-year-old family includes guides for the Sullivan County Catskills, the mid Hudson Valley and the Berkshires.

NYCgetaways is owned and managed by Shaun Johnston who lives at the center of the territory covered by the guides in Tillson in the mid Hudson Valley. One of his clients is Rick Rasmussen of The Hotel Vienna, for whom Shaun has also designed the hotel’s web site. Rick can be reached at (518) 734-5300.

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