The travel market traditionally sets great store by what happens in January. It is a peak period for people selling holidays and is treated as a signpost for the year to come.

Sadly, 2012 doesn’t look like being a vintage year.

With an exciting update rolled out to España Breaks in time for the traffic rush, we were feeling pretty good.

The hard work was looking solid as our search improvements kicked in and bagged us even better exposure and ever higher visibility in the search engines.

The net result: Traffic dropped 10% on the same period last year and lead generation fell 8.5%. What on earth is going on?

The market has changed

This result wasn’t entirely unexpected. As January rolled, chatter in the travel industry wasn’t good. Analysts were reporting a sector-wide drop of 10-12% and for some it was far worse – Thomas Cook was reporting a 33% fall.

The primary reason is the ongoing squeeze on household spending – people are broke. This feeds into a general lack of confidence and, as we remarked before, until business starts hiring and investing, things won’t get any better. A drop in inflation and a resolution to this Keystone Cop-style Euro crisis would be a fine start.

The net result for ordinary people is that they’re clinging to cash and delaying their holiday decisions.

Click to read the full article at Hitwise

Experian Hitwise published some excellent figures this morning showing a general shift away from January being the peak season, as people defer booking until later in the year. For some it’s because they’re worried about the future. For others, they hope to get a better deal by leaving their bookings until later.

Save, save, Savecations!

It’s tongue in cheek but apparently savecation is the latest word to enter the travel lexicon. Silly – yes – but it does reflect what people want this year.

They want a deal. They want more for less. They are driving a hard bargain.

We know it can be pretty depressing for owners when lots of enquirers seem to start a conversation by beating you up on price. To save your sanity it is best to simply expect it from the outset and be proactive by running regular offers for selected periods. The rest of the travel market is already heavily discounting to shift inventory.

Our deals page, as ever, does a lot to elevate eyeballs on an advert. It’s well worth using.

What we’re doing next

We already had plans in place for 2012 and we’re certainly not getting distracted – we moved to a larger office for good reason.

In broad terms, 2012 will see us throw more resources into marketing the site. You’ll shortly see a whole new section packed with fun, fresh content actively spotlighting and promoting the greatest holidays in Spain. Writers are the new heroes of our business.

We’re also ramping up the way we handle deals and newsletters.

In an age of Twitter and Facebook, why an old fashioned newsletter? Because newsletters remain the strongest driver of traffic in an online business – and with 28,000 subscribers, we want to do it better. We’re combining this with consumer discount culture to create a new Daily Deals section; it’s topical, it works and it gets holidaymakers interested.

As ever, watch this blog for updates.

Happy renting!