It’s an exciting time to be in travel industry marketing. In our current affluent UK market a larger and more diverse demographic is looking to spend an increased budget on treating themselves to a break. This increase in spending is reflected by consumers’ increased need for holidays tailored to their own tastes, and a need for holiday providers to provide a ‘longer tail’ of alternative itineraries to suit every taste. In a recent article for Travolution, Nishma Robb argues that the a lá carte model of holiday choosing is not going to satisfy those mass market holiday seekers for much longer and travel companies need to start taking advantage of the long tail to stay profitable.

The long tail theory works like this: Any product (be it music, films, books – whatever) will have its bestseller. Right at the top of the charts, this product will sell vast amounts. Let’s say the best seller sells 100 units a day. There are then thousands of competing products that may sell 3 or 4 a day. Tiny numbers, but when added together, these alternatives sell more than the top 3 best sellers combined. Before the internet became mainstream, it would be impossible to sell all these long tail products but now many online businesses are flourishing through following the business model. Amazon is the big success story here – stocking a huge variety of books, from the far end of the long tail to the best sellers, they cater for everyone’s needs and tastes. By having all the options described and visible online, and stored in a warehouse, it is possible for them to cater to niche tastes as well as main stream.

As many of LeadGenerators clients aim their holidays at the niche market, we have long been aware of the demand for holidays at every point of the long tail. Now we are seeing that the concept is on many travel marketers’ lips. In the Travolution article, Nishma argues that this is evidenced by the recent high profile mergers of Thomson and First Choice as well as Thomas Cook and MyTravel – there just isn’t enough demand for non-tailored holidays anymore, and the time for niche markets is here. Small businesses that could not hope to compete with the aforementioned giants of travel can quite reasonably carve their own niche with custom tailor made holidays for the near infinite long tail of travel.

With holiday makers increasingly looking for niche holidays to cater to their tastes, simply typing “holiday” into Google is not sufficient. Typing “Africa holidays” into the Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) keyword suggestion tool brings up 100 variations on the theme typed into search engines every day from the generic (“Africa holidays”) to the niche (“romantic honeymoons in South Africa”). The demand is there, and as the long tail of people’s holiday tastes seems to go on indefinitely, there is still room in the market.

By combining both the long tail of travel and the long tail of search, even small start up holiday providers can make their mark and gain customers who’s tastes are too specific to approach the ‘one size fits all’ holiday services.