Travel Industry Predictions for 2009
December 23rd, 2008
I had planned to post this yesterday and ran out of time and I have now been pipped to the post by Travolution. Here it is anyway:
- sunshine.co.uk will become the largest, purely online travel agent selling cheap holidays to the masses.
- Despite the state of the economy people will still go on holiday, however they will spend less, resulting in good volumes but lower turnover when based on, year on year sales.
- Non web based travel companies will launched websites in a bid to widen their reach and web savvy companies will spend more time and money investing in Search Engine Optimisation and online bookable websites and they will spend less on PPC.
- Agents will look at widening their product range selling more ancillaries and destinations they wouldn’t normally deal with.
- A swathe of travel agents not willing to adapt to the changing market will close. This includes high street agents who still think the Internet is a fad! Yes they do exist.
- Ryanair to go bust – well we can hope can’t we!
2009 is going to be a challenging year for everybody in travel regardless of how ‘good’ you are but even more so for those are slow to respond to the ever price conscious consumer.
Nice one, you are google number one for travel industry 2009 predictions.
Here are mine,
http://travel-affiliate.blogspot.com/2008/12/2009-travel-industry-affiliate.html
Very true. People will still go on holidays and will go for cheaper options. Might see increase in UK holidays if the UK holiday industry looses the rip-off attitude.
Err won’t airlines like Ryanair going bus not have a massive impact on Sunshine.co.uk and dynamically packaged agencies?
Nope, Ryanair have banned scraping of their website (Our supplier scraped it, not us, honest guv), therefore we do not and will not in the future sell Ryanair flights.
I think in the first couple of months of Mr O’leary enforcing this, his profits were down 40+%. Woo. I don’t think it was coinencidence.