Recently, PhoCusWright published a press release that talked about their most recent consumer research debunking six online travel myths. As usual, PhoCusWright nailed the issues right on the head and have backed them up with research.
But I firmly believe that the myths that we need to break down are actually at a much higher level than just online travel. And rather than rounding up the usual suspects for online surveys (the air traveler), we need to open up our world to include the broader spectrum of travelers.
Few are aware that with online travel ecommerce at $137b, that still just represents 18.5% of total US travel spending. TIA reports that travel spending is at $740b. Since travel agents represent $129b of that spending, there is still a tremendous market opportunity, irrespective of what channel and what model is used. In fact a $474b market by my calculations!
At Solutionz, we call them T-Myths™ and irrespective of what channel consumers use, it is imperative that we as an industry break them and find ways to tap into the incredible upside that still exists in what we call the “real” mass market.
We address this in our latest “Not-So-White” paper series on the Drive Market, which on November 1st is being updated and republished under the title “T-Myths – Breaking down the travel myths and tapping into the real mass market”.
Here are our top 3 T-Myths:
- Air travel is the mass market
- The current technologies meet the needs of the mass market
- We know our customers and their behaviors and intent
We will be addressing each of these in an upcoming T-Myth blog series.
Stay tuned, as Solutionz is also crafting a special version of our RapidStrategy™ workshop to help companies explore and capitalize on this growth opportunity.
Chicke Fitzgerald