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.