It seems like a paradox. Brazil faces "its worst recession in 25 years", reports Bloomberg News.
But Brazil will also see digital travel sales grow 14% this year, to $12 billion, according to a forecast from eMarketer, a New York consultancy.
Part of the discrepancy may be explained by Brazilians's rapid adoption of digital platforms. They are shifting the spending that they used to do with bricks-and-mortar agencies to online agencies and metasearch websites.
So, even if total travel spending drops, share gained by digital travel companies could increase.
This outlook may also be affected by the 2016 Summer Olympics, which Brazil is hosting.
It's also possible the forecast will need to be revised later.
In the meantime, how will local players fare in the economic turbulence?
Earlier this week, Hotel Urbano, a hotel booking website, obtained the financial help it will need. It received a $60 million stake from Priceline Group, having raised $135 million in total, with an estimated billion-dollar valuation.
Hotel Urbano had risen quickly in three years, appearing to drive heavy traffic from display ads, its Facebook page, and content marketing.
Earlier this spring, Decolar, a travel agency conglomerate headquartered in Brazil, also fortified its Portuguese-language Decolar.com and Spanish-language Despegar.com. Expedia Inc made a $270 million investment in the company.
Mundi, the largest home-grown Brazilian metasearch site, reorganized itself. It now says that it is profitable and growing.
For a while, Voopter, a metasearch startup in Brazil, claimed it had overtaken all of the metasearch players in Brazil, citing statistics from SimilarWeb, an analytics firm.
It feeds its verified Google Analytics data to SimilarWeb, unlike the other players, so the comparisons aren't exact.
But in the past two months, SimilarWeb recalculated how its algorithm works, lowering traffic estimates for many travel content websites.
This algorithm change may have lowered how much it appears to have been plumping up Voopter's traffic, without revising the older numbers -- creating the wrong impression that the startup has had a steep drop in traffic.
Yet even after SimilarWeb's recalculation, which cut down on spam and added more reliable data sources, Voopter continues to have more traffic than its metasearch rivals Kayak, Skyscanner, and Mundi -- if SimilarWeb estimates are to be believed.
When Tnooz was asked about this, Ana Araujo, Mundi’s CEO, said via email:
"Mundi is a mature company, investing in highly qualified traffic that comes back as engaged users, relevance for our partners, and clients and profitability for the company.
While it's tempting to buy any kind of traffic to build up an audience, this does not build a solid business model in the long-term. 'Traffic growth' is a fragile metric when not analyzed with other KPIs, such as the bounce rate and time spent site.
While discussing these SimilarWeb facts, I’d like to suggest looking at the whole KPIs spectrum, starting with the bounce rate.
When 3 out of 4 visitors leave your site without any clicks or interaction it may seem that something is wrong, however it’s also dangerous to be attached to one metric only.”
A spokesperson for one of the major metasearch companies said anonymously that SimilarWeb estimates that the bulk of Voopter's traffic is paid and that its user engagement is less than a minute-and-a-half, on average, while on Kayak, Mundi, and Skyscanner, engagement lasts more than five minutes.
When Tnooz checked with ComScore, another paid analytics provider (which does not offer free estimates online usually), Voopter was not even listed among the top 50 travel sites.
Then again, ComScore, like all third-party analytics firms without actual access to internal data, is not precise in its estimates.
An employee at the other large foreign metasearch company engaged in Brazil said anonymously that the SimilarWeb numbers were inaccurate based on their internal data of its own number of users per month in Brazil.
Both Skyscanner and Kayak said on-the-record that they are growing month-to-month, and that their focus is on mobile growth.
UPDATE: 3pm Eastern US:
Voopter CEO Pettersom Paiva has a response:
"A few months ago we noticed that there was a discrepancy between Similarweb's stats and our figures according Google Analytics.
Being a young startup brewed in the culture of transparency within the collaborators and external partners, it took us a minute to decide to connect our GA account to Similarweb so everybody could take the actual figures. I encourage other ventures to do the same.
We haven't implemented ComScore's tags to our website, that is why we will not display among their rankings. We haven't been asked by any partner to do so, but for the sake of the debate we will consider this in our next major deployment.
Voopter's interface is meant to make it a shorter journey for the user to be lead to the airlines' purchase pages - our unique multiple-dates calendar is a clear sign of that, on top of the simplified one-click-out results list.
So we don't take "5 minutes visits" as a sign of success, just the opposite.
But we might see an increment of some seconds as soon as we finish the integration of our editorial posts with our search/comparison services, something which is just about to happen.
With regards to paid campaigns, it is part of the business for any professional online venture. Although most of Voopter traffic is either organic, direct, or from major Brazilian publishers who partner with us, we run affiliate campaigns, contextual ads, and also SEM which eventually bring some quality metrics, such as bounce rates, down.
It is a matter of some months of optimizations to revert that. Being the new kid on the block, this is one - but not the only one - regular path for growth."
MORE:
Digital Travel Sales Fly High in Brazil -- eMarketer
Real Drops Amid Signs Brazil Faces Worst Recession in 25 Years -- Bloomberg News
Priceline Group books $60 million stake in with Hotel Urbano
In Brazil, metasearch heats up, as Mundi, Voopter, Skyscanner, and Kayak expand
Q&A with the new CEO of Mundi about travel metasearch in Brazil
NB: Photo of Copacabana by Mauricio Lima via Flickr/Creative Commons