Hawaii.com is an advertising based Hawaii travel site owned by the Gannett Company whose flagship publication is USA Today. They use 2 Internet business models:
- Affiliate program - Hawaii.com receives a percentage of the sale whenever they send a user to another website and that user buys something.
- Cost Per Click (CPC) - advertising where vendors pay every time a user clicks on their ad (a.k.a. pay-per-click).
For their affiliate program, Hawaii.com co-brands with Expedia.com and also uses Pleasant Holidays. This is pretty straight forward on the website. You can search for vacation packages, airfare, hotels and rentals right from the home page or choose package deals from internal island pages.
The CPC’s are setup as ads around content and whenever a client clicks on one of these ads, Hawaii.com receives a agreed upon payment.
Likes:
The positive thing Hawaii.com has going for it is that they have multiple sources of income. By taking advantage of more then one business model, they can cross sell and earn more income then they would otherwise.
Dislikes:
I have worked with Hawaii.com on their CPC model and on several occasions they have overcharged me for clicks. After showing them that my server stats were showing about half of the referral traffic they were showing, I was given a refund. But this has become a monthly reoccurring issue that has become quite irritating. Overcharging clients is not the way to earn repeat business and I am on the fence as to whether I should renew with them.
Another issue I see with Hawaii.com is their lack of content. The CPC model works best when its driven by lots of interesting content. Hawaii.com’s site has little content and is littered with advertisement. From an end users perspective, there’s not much use for the website unless you’re looking to buy something. This wouldn’t be a problem accept that the keywords bringing traffic to the site are broad “Hawaii vacation” terms. Additional content useful for planning a Hawaii vacation would go a long way in capturing their visitors attention which would lead to more clicks on their advertisements.
Conclusion:
With the high overhead of a corporate Gannett Company, this does not appear to be a sustainable Hawaii tourism business model. But with some slight changes to site architecture and the addition of content, Hawaii.com wouldn’t need to overcharge their clients for clicks to cover the cost of running the site.