The long tail of travel - Niche tour operators can now unite
April 30, 2008
The longtail concept has been around for a long time. Chris Anderson popularized it in his creatively name book “The Long Tail“. The Wikipedia definition is that “The distribution and inventory costs of these [longtail] businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”
This concept has been applied to the tourism industry, and there is quite a fit. PhoCusWright brought this to our attention at the Sept 2007 conference in Florida, and Alan A Lew wrote a great article on it in 2006.
In Mr. Lews article he makes some claims about the long tail market. “The long tail market has huge potential. However it is highly distributed and highly individualized. Therefore, accessing it requires marketing and distribution channels that are both broad and deep. To sell relatively less popular products requires being able to store smaller inventories and being able to minimize distribution costs.”
Being in a business that is attempting to help small and niche tour and activity operators, these books and articles have influenced my business development. In an attempt to provide a solution that encompasses all of the many facets and challenges for marketing and distributing a long tail tour providers product, we have revamped our product, Rezgo.
We are releasing Rezgo Free on June 1st, and are confident that this solution will consolidate the long tail of tour and activities.
We recognized that suppliers needed more than simple book-now functionality; we found that they need a tour management and distribution suite that centralized all of their sales channels. We found that tour operators were more concerned with power and simplicity then with a “feature rich, function less” system.
Rezgo Free eliminates all of the traditional barriers that tour operators face when trying to adapt a new technology. It is intuitive, 100% free to sell products through their website, and it also has the capabilities to increase distribution and consolidate all of their sales channels. This will help ease companies into structuring their products for online sales, and will give them a platform to grow their business with expanded Internet distribution and marketing.
Offering this solution for free is a challenging proposition for the business stake holders, but empowering tour operators to standardize their products will help the long tail of tourism flourish. What do you think? You can find more information on www.rezgo.com.
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Written by 
Phil · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Misc, Travel Distribution, Travel Technology
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5 Responses to “The long tail of travel - Niche tour operators can now unite”
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[...] Original post by Phil [...]
Bonjour Phil,
interesting move for Rezgo
If you can put a simple channel manager with your sales channels it will help your customers with their Yield Management.
As in the hotel industry who need to handle many distribution channels from a single point of entry but with a intelligent tool to open and stop channels
Good luck for this move
best regards
Claude
Thanks Claude,
We are looking to further develop our Yield Management capabilities for Rezgo. Currently suppliers are able to open and stop reseller channels on the fly and develop channel specific reports.
All the best,
Phil
Thanks for pointing this out for me, I hope I would have found Alan’s article one year earlier!
Ilkka,
Alan is a smart man, and an inspiration to our company. What do you do in in Finland? Do you work with a travel marketing firm? I was able to spend 3 weeks in Helsinki a few years ago, I am a big fan!
Phil