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Around 30% of Abta travel convention delegates would invest in using ‘digital lifestyle’ sites like Twitter to further their businesses, according to a poll of audience members.
In a session featuring speakers from consultancy firm PwC, delegates were asked to vote on a number of issues affecting the travel industry.
Around 30% of delegates sitting in the session said they would invest in online travel agents like Opodo in their business, while roughly the same number of people would opt to put their money into ‘peer-to-peer’ digital sites like TripAdvisor.
On the subject of consumer confidence, 65% of delegates think next year will be at 2010 levels, while 35% feel it will be like 2012.
Concerning the Eurozone, 60% felt that the monetary union would ‘muddle through’, while 30% think a ‘Grexit’, or Greek exit, is on the cards, and 10% believe it will continue as a bloc of core countries, with the weaker economies leaving the euro. No one felt there would be a ‘doomsday’ scenario.
Scott Bauer, partner at PwC Digital Technology Group and one of the speakers, said that digital is even more important in travel than it is in retail, with 36% of holidays bought online, compared to 6% of total retail purchases.
Bauer said that you would think a lot of online retail purchases were coming from music downloads, “but it’s coming from travel”, adding that this was despite the fact that most travel website are not optimised to work on mobile phones.