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Anatomy of the new ‘micro-tripper’ in travel

July 19, 2011 | Online Travel

Flash sale, group buying, and private-travel sale travel companies are not intruding upon the OTA’s business but are, in essence, capturing an undiscovered new segment of the travel market - the “spontaneous micro-tripper”.

The spontaneous micro-tripper, created via the convergence of social networking and sharing, new ecommerce technology, an extended recession, our insatiable desire to buy deals, and email marketing, is the primary delivery path of the new “travel deal” product.

The woman in the family leads the spontaneous micro-tripper. Micro-trippers take between three and five trips per year, on one- or two-night stays. Micro-trippers are staying at lodging properties and destinations that 75% of the trippers are unfamiliar with, and/or have never visited before, and did not plan on traveling to.

The trips purchased were never consciously planned or pre-planned and an overwhelming number of the purchases by micro-trippers occurred within twenty-four hours of hearing about the trip from their friends and family, or through the email marketing that comes into their email box.

The spontaneous micro-tripper is not an OTA buyer (the pre-planned travel market). The micro-tripper market is unlike any mature travel market. I believe this new market is being driven not by the 50%-off deal, like most people think, but by the power of the spontaneous purchase and the opportunity it creates for the lodging industry as a new online distribution channel.

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