Each month, we create a league table in a particular industry, leveraging our ASK BOSCO® Index to evaluate the performance of various retailers in both organic and paid search. This month, we focused on luxury travel brands.
What does the online luxury travel sector currently look like?
Despite recent challenges, the desire to travel remains strong worldwide. YouGov’s travel sentiment tracker has revealed that 74% of consumers are planning to take at least one trip in the next year, with an even higher percentage among high earners.
This heightened demand is driving growth in the luxury travel market. Airlines are enhancing premium services, while airports are upgrading lounges and retail options.
Driven by strong demand and a desire for longer holidays, the luxury travel sector is set to become the fastest-growing segment in the travel industry.
What is the ASK BOSCO® Index?
Do you want to know how your brand compares to the competition online? The ASK BOSCO® Index is the perfect tool for measuring your digital presence and assessing the effectiveness of your investments in organic and paid media channels.
Unlike other metrics that only consider your marketing budget, the ASK BOSCO® Index takes into account your potential in both paid and organic search. It provides an accurate overview of your online performance based on your previous digital interactions by analysing data from trusted third-party sources.
What is a good ASK BOSCO® Index score? It ranges from 0 to 1000, with the average score for brands and retailers being around 575. The higher your score, the better your online performance as a retailer. Think of it as the credit score of digital marketing.
Here’s how we scored the brands
We scored ten leading UK luxury travel companies for the month of October. Here’s how the top five ranked on the ASK BOSCO® Index league table. Download the league table below to see the full results and see who the remaining five online travel brands are.
What do these scores mean?
Vying for top spot at the head of the ASK BOSCO® luxury travel league table are three luxury travel brands – eShores, Black Tomato and The Luxury Holiday Company.
Founded in 2005, Black Tomato has become a renowned name with bases in London and the US, a growing team of passionate travellers, and a global clientele. Whether catering to luxury seekers or daring adventurers, all Black Tomato travel experiences share a common bond – a thirst for exploration.
Black Tomato’s most recent campaign launched in October 2023 called ‘See you in the Moment’ saw the brand launch a new range of experiences that enabled groups of travellers to come together and “share moments” in iconic and remote destinations around the world.
Tom Marchant, co-founder of Black Tomato, said: “See You in the Moment encourages being fully present in the moment with others; being mindful, which by design is innately therapeutic.
This campaign is in response to a post-pandemic boom that Black Tomato experienced in people booking group trips, which currently make up 30% of the company’s business which is a 35% increase from 2019, before Covid stopped travel in its tracks.
eShores’ offers a highly personalised service, creating tailor-made holidays for discerning travellers and specialising in multi-centre itineraries around the globe. Each customer is assigned a dedicated travel expert agent who curates the perfect holiday for their clients based on their dreams, wants and needs. This unique approach ensures that returning clients can easily reconnect with the same agent, streamlining the holiday planning process over time and importantly resulting in a large number of highly satisfied customers, which the brand have capitalised on to help with their SEO, achieving an excellent 4.9 stars out of 5 on both reviews.io and TrustPilot.
As an online tour operator & travel agent, eShores is able to search the market to ensure that they find the best price for their clients with none of the overheads of traditional travel companies allowing them to create luxury holidays at the best price possible – again, leading to customer satisfaction.
Contemporary luxury travel revolves around fulfilling as many aspirational experiences as possible – and it seems the companies at the top of this list are fulfilling many of the tick boxes for digital marketing too!
