According to a survey I just read, the online travel industry will be immune from the economic plague sweeping the globe. Don’t believe it? Me neither. But in the spirit of economic (and Joobili) optimism, I’ll share a few of the key findings. The poll included 88 travel companies, including airlines, agents, tour operators, hoteliers and shipping companies.

• More than half said they planned to increase budgets and a quarter said they expected online marketing budgets to rise by between 11% and 50%.
• 66% plan to increase spending on SEO. The preferred method for grabbing the attention of search engines was offering unique content… (cough) like Joobili events (cough).
• 50% planned to increase destination content and 47% expected to increase spend on AdWords.
• 20% said they expected to reduce spend on banners and six out of ten expected metasearch spend to remain the same.
• After SEO, user-generated content (34.8%) is the next priority for travel companies to add to their sites followed by video (28.3%), image galleries and marketing micro sites.
• Delivering content over mobile and localizing for non-English markets were the lowest priorities.