Interesting findings from PCW and Ypartnership
August 29, 2008
Ypartnership has released an expanded summary of the findings that they and PhoCusWright have found on the “Next Generation Traveler”
These findings are really inline with the projections of current online usage, here is a summary of the key stats for the next gen traveler:
- They are smart (30% with a 4-year college degree; 20% with at least one year of graduate school)
- Affluent (30% of households with an annual income in excess of $100,000)
- Multi Generational (50% Echo Boomers (18-28 years) and 50% Baby Boomers (43 to 61 years)
- 71% use the Internet to search for travel information
- 41% have taken a virtual tour of a destination
- 38% have built a trip itinerary online
- 58% cite the “ability to check the best fares/rates” as the most important feature in a travel web site
- 37% report being influenced by personal comments read on social networking or travel advisory web sites, but they frequent social networking sites such as MySpace.com (56%) and Facebook (30%) more than travel advisory or review sites such as TripAdvisor (14%);
- 33% have authored and posted a travel review online.
The summary goes on to state that these consumers are less likely to be influenced by advertising messages. With all of these stats taken into consideration, it is no surprise that the travel industry is in a battle against comoditization.
As Jeremiah Owyang points out with Facebook’s new advertising model, there are new attempts to engage this demographic, and advertisers are striving to penetrate this attention lacking group. These trends are leading me to believe that travel has to really engage the senses and imagination of this new market in order to prompt buying action. A recent interview with Jess Butcher, head of partnerships at online travel experiences company isango!, shed some light into this area.
She was asked what was on the horizon for travel, here is what she said:
“The marriage of ‘where-to-go’ inspiration and commerce functionality is still one that no one’s quite nailed online just yet and we really believe the opportunity here could be immense. There are an increasing number of inspiration-style tools that take activity preference and demographic-detail into consideration, but they tend to culminate in standard flight/ hotel/ car booking engines. There’s a proliferation of new community style-sites, technologies, widgets and trip planning tools emerging right now – from which we expect to see a bit of boom and bust cycle – but looking forward to seeing the winners.”
I agree, there is an ever increasing decline in what hotel, which airline, and which car rental company consumers choose, and more of a focus on “I did the most crazy tour when I was in ____________, check out this amazing tour website!”
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Phil · Filed Under Marketing 2.0
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