travel tech insights

The travel industry has always been a complex distribution system comprised of retail travel agents; wholesalers supplying travel services options including transport, accommodation, tours and attractions; and local tourism resources who contract their services with wholesalers. Over the past ten years this distribution system has been impacted by the Internet as consumers can bypass travel agents and go directly to the local tourism resources. However, for the most part, these basic high level relationships are still intact.

Who are the millennials and why are they important to your travel business? It’s certainly no problem finding articles identifying millennials by the numbers: did you know they check their smartphone 45 times a day, and are 50+% more likely to ditch search engines and email in favor of social networks to find brand content? Or that 44% of them praise or flame product and services experiences with text messages and 38% of them use social media to do the same?

In fact, millennials are a widely diverse group, and any implication it can be accurately characterized by various data points is misleading.Demographically speaking, the group is defined as those born between 1980 and 2000 – or 15 to 35 years old. Does any doubt fifteen year old girls check smart phones 45 times a day? Does anyone believe 35 year old men do the same? The age band is simply too broad to support general  assumptions about specific behaviors, not to mention it also covers the span in which people mature to adulthood: young adolescents go into the group and mature adults come out.

Whether you’re a travel agency, a tour operator or a travel management company, you face the challenge of a changing travel market and the sobering reality that your competition is not standing still. In order to grow, your company has to aggressively find new product and service opportunities, adjust quickly to changing economic conditions and stay ahead of competitor strategies. The travel industry is complex and no single operational dimension will be the deciding factor for how well these challenges are met, but certainly a company’s software system will play a major role.

Based on the number of blogs I see on travel websites it seems as though the argument for their presence has been won.  The same holds true for most industries. With few exceptions, navigation bars will link to a blog. Some are easier to find than others, but look hard enough and you’ll usually find one. But, as a professional writer and blogger, I often find myself wondering why some websites appear to have let their blog drift, with posts seemingly unconnected by themes or uneven in format and content. That’s not meant as a negative comment from one writer to another, but an observation based upon professional experiences with a range of clients. The point of this blog is to share some of those experiences and a few lessons learned along the way.

Just this past November a bargain-hunter found a NYC hotel right on Central Park with a 35% discount off regular rates. A quick Google scan showed strong 4 star review averages across several booking sites.  Then she noticed a different result on Yelp. That site showed a 2.5 star review average. Yelp’s average was based on several hundred reviews whereas the other sites averaged several thousand, but both struck her as good sample sizes. It didn’t make sense for the ratings to be so different.