Hospitality Industry News

Whether in terms of sheer size or volume of trips taken, hospitality industry news, and the most frequent leisure travel segments represent the obvious targets for travel providers. The frequent air purchase has long been the coveted segment of the industry, and this year, they again, represent one of the largest (58%) and most frequent (mean: 4.56 trips) groups of leisure travelers to target. However, as the market evolves to include more self-employed, novice, 2.0- influenced and bundled product travelers, other frequent and important traveling segments have surfaced.

HOTEL: With more online travelers purchasing hospitality industry news – and purchasing it more frequently – than in 2006, hotel stays have become the top component purchased in 2007. However, as with air, online purchase incidence declined as online travelers more aggressively incorporated hotel into a vacation package or combination purchase or sought alternative accommodations such as timeshares or vacation rentals.

This “trade-off ” dynamic resulted in a decline in the percentage of usual supplier and online travel agency buyers purchasing just hotel in 2007. Therefore, industry growth came from frequent travelers, who raised online hotel purchase frequency across both segments of usual buyers (supplier: 8.04; online agency: 5.63). But it was the online travel agencies’ breadth and depth of hotel inventory for comparison shopping, their ability to woo usual supplier buyers to purchase from them after shopping, their increased overall and search advertising spend and their elimination of booking fees by intermediaries like Hotels.com that resulted in the channel’s capturing a disproportionately greater share of online hospitality industry news purchases in 2007.