by Bill Furlong, CEO
Peter Yesawich, President and CEO of the Ypartnership, the PR agency used by the VRMA, gave a very informative and entertaining presentation on how the consumer travel landscape is changing. The following were his main points:
...Travel is down from the peak
- 55% of households took 1 trip/year75 miles or more from home.
- That number has dropped from a peak of 66% in 1999 and 63% as recently as 2007.
...the Web is the dominant way people are planning travel
- % of households with web access has increased from 11% in 1996 to 80% in 2008 and 2/3 of that access is high-speed.
How do people plan and purchase travel:
- 61% use the Internet exclusively
- 24% use a travel agent and the internet
- 7% use a travel agent
- 8% use neither
(sample base is leisure travelers using airlines and hotels in 2009)
- % of people using the web was 53% of people in 2002. That number has increased to 66% by 2009.
...and the % of people using the Web to book travel is also a majority
- 35% used the Web to book travel in 2002. 56% of people used the web to book by 2009. BUT, the % using the web to book has been flat from 2007-2009.
... what do people think is important on a Web site
- 87% lowest fares and rates
- 74% easy booking
- 72% photos
- 46% user reviews
...the next generation of search is meta-search sites like Kayak that search a large number of travel sites for rates, availability and more and let people compare
- only 5% of travelers use meta-search today.
...Meta-search powered price shopping will make it more important to build equity into a brand
- But consumers today care less and less about the brand.
- A survey asked people when they fly whether they prefer to use a legacy carrier that they have used before, a low fare carrier or had no preference. 21% said a legacy carrier; 29% said the lowfare carrier; 50% said they had no preference. So half of consumers didn't care about the airline brand.
- A survey asked people how important the lodging brand name was. 57% said the brand name was very or extremely important in 2006. That number has dropped to 44% in 2009. So brand importance is dropping for hotels.
... blogs and advisory/review sites are increasingly important.
- 19% use blogs and advisory sites today to plan travel.
- 1/3 of next generation, younger travelers use them.
- What do they use? 42% use YouTube, 33% use Facebook, 30% use MySpace, 27% use TripAdvisor.