New Skift Research Points to Amazon Playing a Larger Role in the Travel Industry
Skift Take
It’s dangerous to give Amazon breathing room in any industry; better to think through its implications for travel today. Amazon is not simply a threat, it offers lessons and opportunities for travel executives as well.
Amazon started out selling books but has since moved on to become an "everything store." This shift contributed to a wave of retail bankruptcies over the past three years and nowadays, so much as a rumor of Amazon can move markets. Yet the company has been mostly absent from the travel industry.
Our latest research report, Amazon: Lessons, Threats, and Opportunities for Travel, seeks to take a comprehensive look at the many ways that this company could interact with the business of travel. In the first section of the report, we consider what it would take to build an “Amazon of travel” through a deep dive into the company’s business model. We distill four lessons from its model that we believe can apply to the travel companies large and small.
In the second half of the report, we look at what direct impact Amazon could have on the travel competitive landscape. Most obviously, Amazon could offer its own travel product and compete directly as an online travel agency or metasearch engine. We analyze what that scenario could look like but also examine other possibilities. For instance, Amazon could play an increasingly large role in direct marketing by virtue
