NYNY Solutions

Drive & stay vacations are grossly overlooked within the travel industry. 

It can’t be because the industry is too small or that there’s no money in it (because it’s huge and still has decent margins left even for aggregators) . It can’t be because there are no technological challenges or potential for building neat sites (it’s probably right up there with the average fly&stay holiday in terms of booking complexity and online proliferation).

No, my $0.02 is the reason drive&stay keeps flying below radar is the growth vector doesn’t look like that of an OTA, where you can just aggregate commoditized stuff and grab traffic from everywhere. This is in stark contrast to the drive&stay market, where inventory is completely fragmented, and aggregators need to go out and get inventory face to face with camp-sites, vacation facilities, mom-n-pop type operations.

Now the key aggregators already hoarding prime inventory like fierce dragons are mostly kind of old-school, but not stupid, so they’re adapting step by step to online operations, a ballpark estimate is about 50-50 online/call-center.

More importantly, my guess is the drive & stay market is going to be hit like everything else by the economic down-turn, but will gain market share on the shrinking market, as self-drive holidays can be easily adjusted to fit budget, and although gas for the car might be more expensive, cost of flying is being hit even harder.

Dohop.com has released a new version of their flight search engine - or flight planner as they call it. Graphic makeovers include an innovative map search and more information about each search result and booking options.

 But the cool thing about www.dohop.com is the search engine will combine results from hundreds of sources and create unique itineraries, specifically tailored for your trip. If you are flying London-Berlin, this won’t mean much, but if you’re intent on going from one less frequently served airport to another, really far away - dohop will potentially amaze you.

Not only do they come up with alternative routes and combine one way tickets from different carriers, they also find and include low-cost carrier flights in the equation. This is where savings on fares can be really interesting.

Google reports they now register at least 1 trillion unique URLs out there. Let’s celebrate it with a haiku:

Mountains of data
Growing with marvelous speed
Most of it still crap

A blog entry by Seth Godin about the inherently non-commercial nature of the Internet (here) points to some interesting characteristics that marketers need to consider.

But I think Godin oversimplifies things (gasp!). Perhaps he knows this and doesn’t care, which is quite alright, it’s still a very valid point he is making about why and how the Net has become what it is today, and what we expect from it.

However, Mr. Godin is comparing the Internet to a newspaper or a TV-station, and that just doesn’t make sense. I think it’s more valid to compare the Internet to the invention of the Printing Press, Radio or TV broadcasting. There are non-commercial radio stations, non-profit magazines and publications with no advertising in it. I don’t even have to mention books - when was the last time you bought a novel with ads in it? Get the point?

In fact, with giant webshops like Amazon, wonderfully fragmented marketplaces like eBay and über-commercial Swiss Army Knives of shopping like price comparison sites, there are definetly Internet real-estate that’s every bit as commercial as anything you can point your finger at offline. 

We really only have to look at the success of AdWords, to realize that it’s not even about targeting User A (would never buy a thing) or User B (Shopoholic), instead it’s about Momentary Mindsets. 

Yesterday User A might have been a Concerned Citizen researching additives in baby food;

Today User A has calmed down and morphed into User B - dead set on finding a home-delivery subscription service for baby food.

Yesterday no ad in the world would have converted, today, any half decent offer has a good chance.

Today is the day User A clicks on those AdWords ads from somerandombabyfoodname.com.

We all know that anything (really *anything*) posted online has the chance or risk of spreading like wildfire, once it gains momentum.

Some companies like ComCast and Southwest Airlines are now actively monitoring and responding to posts about them in blogs and sites like Twitter and YouTube. It sounds like thinking outside the box and embracing the brave new world, but it’s really something that should be included, if not given top priority in any business intelligence setup.

Thousands of companies are paying agencies to learn about what’s written about them in print, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to a mass media where things can get ugly really fast. That just doesn’t make sense.

My prediction - the rise of a new breed of social network consultants managing company-consumer relations in social networks.