Rafat Ali

The younger mobile-first millennial generation and those younger than them may never know what it meant to hail or call a taxi or car service.

Travel builds businesses, helps in trade and capital investment, creates jobs and entrepreneurialism for the workforce, and helps protect heritage and cultural values, at least in theory. The WTTC data behind this shows how large the global travel industry really is.

New competition means hotels need to fight back and put hospitality and community first.

The British millennials value traditional travel agents more than American millennials, but still a large majority have moved away from it, which shows in the number of shuttered high street travel agent store fronts over the last decade or so.

The tech, data and platform changes enabling the daily travel and transport innovations we're all benefiting from now. The mobility era is the era of digital intermediation offered through digital platforms.

Your customers are here on mobile, that's given now, but a lot more work needs to be done on optimization and conversion to ease the process of buying. That's true in every sector, and even more so in rampantly promiscuous environment of travel.

This is a good indicator of how millennials could still be retained by the organized hotel sector, though of course catering to the specific needs of this demographic is still important.

Airbnb's growth in the market isn't just a concern for supposed direct competitor Homeway, but also bigger online travel booking players as well as established hospitality companies. While revenues are still much smaller than others, its growth rate is surely beating everyone else by magnitudes.

We are entering a new mobility era with new players emerging and disrupting travel from the “last mile” up to domestic and regional travel. Mobility providers and aggregators are starting to disrupt the industry by conquering cities, one by one, and aggregating all mode of transportations using digital platforms.

This series looks at the driving factors behind travel purchasing behavior, with the first report focusing on an issue looming over the online travel sector: shopping cart abandonment. Understand the reasons behind travel's high abandonment rate and strategies to win back customers. Download the report for free!