Calling all travel industry renegades:
If you have followed my posts on the drive market opportunity and are going to bravely break the status quo and embrace the notion that the drive market is in fact worth pursuing, I can tell you firsthand that it won’t be popular.
The air travel market is sexy. The travelers spend more. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
I won’t deny that is true, but the fact is that I am not asking anyone to abandon the lucrative air traveler market.
What I’m asking is for you to realize that with a slight change in orientation, you can also reach the enormous drive market – on purpose!
So if you are going to pursue this market in a meaningful way, here is what you need to do.
- Read our short white paper on why the drive market is important
- If you are still skeptical or need to get more ideas on the opportunity, read our longer paper, Dare to Differentiate
- Make sure you understand the most current statistics from US Travel Association (see below)
- Develop a plan and implement it
There are over 2 billion annual trips. Of those, 77% of them are leisure and 23% are business trips. When you look at the split on spending, 70% comes from leisure travel and 30% comes from business.
But
take time to digest the numbers in blue. 1.4 million annual trips by
car, over half of which involve at least one overnight. And for
business travelers 308k trips by car annually, again over half of which
involve an overnight.
With 89% of leisure travel using a car versus flying, if this is your market, you must figure out how to serve them differently. And with 67% of business travel by car, if you sell to the corporate marketplace, you are missing out on an enormous amount of revenue if you are not managing travel for the field sales and service part of your client’s organizations.
If you want help crafting your story for your leadership or your board, I’m here. Click on the image below for information on how to contact me.
