HOTELMARKETING.COM

Last minute travel: Are you ready to roll?

February 12, 2004 |

According to a 2002 study by the Travel Industry Association of America, 64 percent of leisure travelers planned at least one trip within just two weeks of departure.

According to a 2002 study by the Travel Industry Association of America, 64 percent of leisure travelers planned at least one trip within just two weeks of departure. The same study also found that one in five travelers used the Web to book. At first blush, those two facts seem only loosely related.

But, in fact, it’s the Internet that made the last-minute boom happen so quickly. A generation ago, 11th-hour deals were usually the by-product of a time-consuming series of phone and fax negotiations between travel agents, and there were few methods for getting the word out to vacationers. Even in the late ’90s, as online reservations gathered steam, shoppers had to cobble together their last-minute getaways from a welter of sellers, plugging in dates and praying for decent prices.

Today, the most successful sellers employ technology that provides instant gratification. Airlines, for example, routinely scan for half-empty flights and instantaneously put the vacant seats on sale. Other companies are even more sophisticated: Site59 invented its own technology (using what it calls “intelligent algorithms�) to contact various travel sellers across the world, cherry-pick their inventories, and put the results on sale—one-stop shopping, no more paperwork.

Get the full story at MSNBC

Visit our sponsors: