3 in 30: The Tech Talk - Hopper - Phocuswright Europe 2018. Keynote: Asia is Eating the World - Skyscanner -Phocuswright Europe 2018. Research: Bleisure Travel Is Booming | Hotel Business. BELLEVUE, WA— Domestic and international bleisure travel is booming, and business travelers are invested in making the most of their time away from home, according to new insights from Expedia Group Media Solutions, the advertising arm of Expedia Group. The findings, from a multinational study commissioned by Expedia Group Media Solutions and conducted by Luth Research, spotlight the behaviors, influences, resources and preferences of American, British, Chinese, German and Indian bleisure travelers—or business travelers who extend their trip for leisure.
Unveiled at Phocuswright Europe, “Unpacking Bleisure Traveler Trends” shows that on average, across the five countries, bleisure travelers take more than six business trips per year, and more than 60% of business trips during the last year were extended for leisure purposes. In the U.S., bleisure travel conversion is consistent with the multinational average of 60%, revealing a nearly 40% increase in American bleisure travel since 2016. Younger European travelers are interacting with travel brands in these two ways: Phocuswright. Tours tech land grab intensifies as TripAdvisor acquires Bokun. It wasn’t that long ago that TripAdvisor boss Steve Kaufer was talking about making much more of its non-hotel division. In line with that strategy it has announced with acquisition of Iceland-based tours and activities distribution platform Bokun. A statement from the reviews giant says the acquisition expands its offering by providing suppliers with technical solutions.
Many will remember that TripAdvisor acquired Viator for $200 million just under four years ago, and the company has talked recently how well its non-hotel business, which also includes vacation rentals, is doing. In its statement, TripAdvisor president Experiences and Rentals Dermot Halpin says: “We’re committed to taking the experiences sector far beyond its current online penetration of just 20%, and Bokun will play a critical role in this mission.” He adds that this signals a new phase for the company which aims to simplify distribution for suppliers and improve the shopping experience for travellers. So, who is left? Gen PR Final. 4 Charts Showing Growth of Online and Mobile Travel Bookings by 2020 – Skift. It may be surprising to some that, in 2016, more than half of all travel bookings still occur offline by phone or by retail travel agents.
But the 50/50 split is more than a respectively number: By 2020 the travel industry will have the highest percentage of online payments in relation to all sales than any other industry on Earth. Some 44 percent of travel sales and bookings are expected to occur online through either desktop or mobile devices during the next five years, according to data from Euromonitor International. That’s four times more than the retail industry (11 percent) and nearly five times as much as restaurants and dining (seven percent).
Global travelers will book about $278 billion worth of travel online during the next five years, smaller than retail ($792 billion) but another affirmation that travel is one of the world’s most lucrative industries for digital commerce. “Of course it’s important to note that’s only two to seven percent of all consumers using mobile. The Growing Significance of the Mobile Concierge · TrustYou. Today, technology, almost more than anything, plays a huge role in how consumers book and experience travel. Prior to our hyper-connected world, travelers relied on brands and hotel concierges to get trusted tips and tricks. Now there’s more information than travelers even know what to do with. There is an ever-growing number of mobile apps to help people get where they’re going.
New mobile technology helps make it easier for business to provide information and consumers to receive it. Personalized travel is becoming the new norm and now startups want to help solve consumers' pain points. Personalized travel is on the rise and consumers want to feel important. Lola Lola is a startup that was created by seasoned travel industry experts, including the co-founder of Kayak, Paul English. The app is like an extension of a hotel’s concierge, except you’re not limited to just one person’s advice. Scout Scout uses local experts to help travelers find the best spots around the city. Alice App. Virtual travel agent and mobile travel assistant - Pana.
Ulmon. Travelers Visit 38 Sites Before Booking a Vacation, Study Says – Skift. Some people truly enjoy planning a vacation, with all the excitement about choosing a destination, a place to stay, and what to do once you get there. But, for many travelers, trip-planning is considered a giant pain in the butt. Along those lines, consider the results of a new Expedia Media Solutions study, performed in collaboration with Compete. The study found that travelers who visited a destination marketing organization (DMO) site, such as VisitBritain, within the 45 days prior to booking a vacation package on an online travel agency site, made 38 visits to travel sites before purchasing the vacation package.
This is the impetus behind the efforts of the Hoppers of the world, and similar trip-planning startups that have come (and fallen) before. In the Expedia Media Solutions chart, below, the study shows that those visits to travel sites increase dramatically to 15.5 visits on average in the week before the vacation package booking. Similarly, on retail sites, Expedia states: 6 key travel trends for 2016 | TripAdvisor Insights. 6 Charts That Show Mobile Booking's Gain on Desktop Around the World – Skift. The growing number of travelers picking up their mobile devices rather than sitting at their desktop computers to book air travel or a hotel is a reality becoming more common each and every day.
The percentage of mobile travel bookings have grown for the past six consecutive quarters while desktop bookings continue on a downward slope. The pace of mobile’s rise, of course, varies region by region and new data show travelers from the U.S. and countries in the Asia-Pacific region are converting on mobile more than those in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. From online travel agencies versus hotels’ mobile websites to mobile app versus mobile web, Criteo, an ad tech company, pulled data from more than 500 travel companies around the world what their growth rates look like for these cases and more. The data span from early 2014 to the present and includes analysis from more than one billion travel bookings worldwide. Chart 5: Smartphone bookings seem to be higher for one-night stays.
Online Travel. The History of Tourism: Structures on the Path to Modernity. Tourism as a Globalised System Tourism is often seen as a global phenomenon with an almost incomprehensibly massive infrastructure. Its importance is evident from the fact that its influence thoroughly penetrates society, politics, culture and, above all, the economy. Indeed, this is the branch of the global economy with the most vigorous growth: the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) estimates that in 2007 it encompassed 904 million tourists who spent 855 billion US dollars.1 They thereby supported a global system with roughly 100 million employees in the modern leisure and experience industry. There exists a complex, interwoven world-wide structure dedicated to satisfying the specific touristic needs of mobile individuals, groups and masses.
At first, the fields of business studies and economics dominated a study of tourism that was grounded in an institutional approach;3 general accounts,4 analyses from the cultural sciences and historical surveys5 came conspicuously late. Digital transformation in the tourism and travel sector: the challenge of mobile devices. For a while we have been hearing about the digital transformation in companies and industries, especially in the tourism and travel sector, where digital adaptation is not optional but rather an indispensable condition to continue being competitive and responding to new consumer demands.
According to the Fundación Orange study on Digital transformation in the tourism and hospitality sector, “the tourism and travel sector makes extensive use of both information and transactions in all stages of the value chain.” Consumers search for information before a trip, they compare and check opinions of other travelers, and then they reserve tickets, hotels, and even tickets for shows and museums. During the trip, from online check-in to looking up information about restaurants and leisure activities. After traveling, they add their review to the information that other travelers will consult.
All of this is done on a mobile device in more than 50% of cases. 5 digital marketing trends transforming the travel industry. 20 years ago the US was still home to 34,000 travel retail locations, now the number is 13,000 according to CNN. Today, 60% of leisure and 41% of business travellers are making travel arrangements via the internet, and the travel industry has completely transformed itself into a digital-first sector. On balance the travel industry has coped well with these changes. There have been big winners and big losers, but overall the industry is bigger than ever. Globally, it is expected to grow at an annual rate of 3.8% over the next 10 years to $11.4 trillion - that's over four times the total size of the UK economy!
There are global mega-trends driving this growth which are not going to go away anytime soon. This is great news for the travel industry and companies within the industry need to understand these trends to be able to capitalise on them. Mega-trend 1: The Rise of the experience economy Consumer spending habits are changing rapidly.
Mega-trend 3: Recommendations are king. Startup pitch: SlingShot helps travellers to pimp their points - Tnooz. There’s a lot of interest in loyalty and frequent flier schemes at the moment, and rewards points in general are a big part of how we shop. The airline industry was one of if not the first to reward its passengers with a virtual currency – United is thought to have been the first to do so, way back in 1972. Fast forward more than 40 years and airline rewards schemes are as sophisticated as they are significant. This week saw the release of the latest IdeaWorks/CarTrawler ancillary revenue report which outlined the billions of dollars of revenues airlines pull in from their frequent flyer programmes.
One of the highlights it pulled for the 100+page study was that “United disclosed mileage sales of $2.999 billion for 2015 with the majority of miles sold to Chase Bank for the MileagePlus co-branded credit card.” So reward points are important to airlines, and consumers are big fans too. Before the Q&A from CEO Dan Pierson, here’s an introductory video: What problem does your business solve? 012. The Authentic Tourist | By Ian Yeoman. By Ian Yeoman, Associate Professor at Victoria University School of Management As the experience economy matures, it evolves into authenticity because consumers search for real experiences rather than ‘products’ which are manufactured. There is a growing desire to find experiences and products that are original and real, not contaminated by being fake or impure. Dr Ian Yeoman, travel futurologist explains how this trend away from impurity, the virtual, the spun, manufactured and the mass-produced in a world seemingly full of falseness is evolving.
Michael Wilmott in his book, Complicated Lives has identified the complexity of consumerism, with consumers seeking new meaning, consistent with Maslow’s self-actualisation concept. Initially, people are concerned about wider issues such as the environment, animal rights or Third World hunger. Today, people no longer live to work, but rather work to live. Why Is Authenticity an Important Tourism Concept? Figure 1: Avoiding tourists on holiday. How the Travel Industry Can Thrive Through Authenticity. When it came time to plan this year’s summer vacation, my sister and I decided to go all-American and plan a road trip. For two weeks, we solicited recommendations from locals on what to see and eat when we stopped each day. The best tip came from the front desk attendant at the Hampton Inn in Salt Lake City. She volunteered the name of a great local restaurant that we probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise.
Those interactions crystallized for me exactly what we need more of in the hotel industry: authenticity. More Than a Fly-by-Night Fad Authenticity has become a buzzword in the travel industry in recent years, as travelers are eschewing traditional agencies and tour packages in favor of personally designed, experience-driven travel. The advent of Airbnb, HomeAway, Expedia, trivago, HotelTonight, and other online travel services and apps enables travelers to book vacations on their own terms, piecing together different elements to create custom experiences without hiring agencies.
The Myth of Authentic Travel | Huffington Post. When I first stepped onto Khao San Road, the main backpacker drag in Bangkok, I was a little overwhelmed. I had arrived after weeks spent cycling alone in the Thai countryside, winding through rolling hills, beside acres of fields filled with rice and corn, passing by bustling towns and cities without a single tourist.
Now, I was suddenly surrounded by white people sporting colorful pants and big cameras. I could read all the signs. Shops sold t-shirts with comically mangled “Engrish” phrases. Night market stalls advertised braids and dreadlocks. Was this really Thailand? “Ah, there are too many tourists here,” a tourist explained to me, “You need to go back to the countryside for the authentic Thailand.” I’m uncomfortable with the term “authentic”. We want to believe that the tribal dance in the village we hiked for two days to see is more “real” than the one performed in the restaurant at the Hilton hotel. But what is “authenticity” exactly? Singapore’s Merlion. So, what then? 'Authenticity' and the travel industry: Travel Weekly. For most of Travel Weekly's readers, "independent travel" means prearranged, nongroup travel that is, in fact, dependent on arrangements made by a travel counselor (who in turn makes arrangements with hoteliers or tour operators who handle FIT business).
But there are millions of true independent travelers out there who don't intersect very often with the travel industry, except, perhaps, to buy an airline ticket at the cheapest rate they can find on the web. They may stay in local inns, a B&B or a vacation rental home. They'll eat in no-name restaurants or perhaps grab a meal at a street kiosk, shoulder to shoulder with locals. It could be argued that true independents spend less and get more of what some industry-assisted travelers pay a premium for: authenticity. Before "experiential travel" became an industry buzz phrase, it could be said, fairly, that the more one spent, the more likely one was to move further from an authentic experience. "You're not selling glitz," he said. Waynabox atterrit bientôt en France! - Waynabox Blog. Waynabox pose ses valises dès cet été en France! Après plus d’un an et demi de vie et plus de 15 000 voyageurs satisfaits, la start-up barcelonaise qui s’est imposée en Espagne comme la nouvelle référence en matière de week-end surprises en Europe arrive en France pour faire voyager de nouveaux wayners.
Après avoir commencé avec les villes de Barcelone et de Madrid, puis de Málaga, Waynabox avide de nouvelles aventures posera ses valises en France en ouvrant Paris comme nouveau point de départ! Waynabox est devenue en peu de temps la nouvelle manière de voyager en proposant plus de spontanéité et d’aventures. C’est son concept innovateur et révolutionnaire qui a séduit un large public en Espagne. En quoi Waynabox va révolutionner ma manière de voyager? Il vous est désormais possible de voyager dans une ville d’Europe pour un prix fixe avec vols et deux nuits d’hôtels inclus. Waynabox révolutionne votre voyage en vous faisant découvrir votre destination deux jours avant votre départ!
Porto. Future of Travel Industry, Tourism, Hotels, Hospitality and Business Travel. The Future of Travel | Skyscanner. Travel trends and predictions. Debate on the future of sustainable tourism; a vision for sustainable tourism in 2020. Tourism Mega Trends2.