Offline US Travelers are Moving Online
A new report out by PhocusWright highlight the many online travel trends. No surprise, online travel is strong and growing. Following are a couple of highlights from the report:
Exclusive online buyers account for two-thirds of all online travelers and represent an important source of future revenue opportunity. Players in the U.S. online travel market need to stay on top of the latest intelligence about their customers.
OTAs dominate every leisure travel component category purchased online and across different travel scenarios tested. This underscores not only the power of increased advertising spend but their broadening reach, brand awareness, appeal to the novice user, diverse content, complex offering and user-focused approach.
Despite increased rates and increasing economic pressures last year, hotel was the top component purchased overall. This underscores consumers’ need for a change in venue to really disengage while traveling for leisure, ability to find deals and the plethora of inventory and more unique hotel options available online.
With half of online travelers using the same purchase method for leisure as they do for business travel, travel providers have the opportunity to cross-sell leisure travel to this coveted group of business travelers.
Frequent travelers and seasoned online buyers continue to dominate, but now the former “diehard” offline users have begun to use the Internet as their usual method for travel shopping and purchasing. As novice users, this “late majority” possesses different travel and purchase behavior, has varying levels of online technology savvy, requires different messaging and is demographically unique.
What does this mean to you, the vacation rental manager? You better be online – in a simple & pleasant way. Have an online experience that is similar to what travelers will find in booking business travel. Vacation homes are right in the sweet-spot of the trend that people need a change of scenario to vacation. Know your target customer, and niche – because you will get outspent in marketing by the big online travel agencies.
Ralf
www.liverez.com
Tags: Online Booking, online travel, property management, travel, vacation, vacation home rental, vacation property management
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Industry Trends, Online Bookings, Online Marketing, Website.
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