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Despite the economic pressures putting a dampener the tourism market, all but the most ardent workaholics still need some time to relax and enjoy themselves.
For a large segment of the population, the need to balance work, budget and play has resulted in a shift in attitudes and expectations regarding how to achieve some satisfying time off – leading to shorter breaks, taken closer to home and even ‘staycations‘.
‘Daycations‘ could be the logical next step …
The Idea
Develop an online portal where people can learn about destinations for one-day vacations. The “daycation” is all about saving time and money, while exploring great nearby destinations right under our noses, but that may have escaped our notice.
This online portal would enable visitors to learn about day-tripping opportunities within a few hours of their homes. Such a site would be very different from the numerous travel websites devoted to far-off destinations.
Site visitors would type in their address or zip code and the distance they were willing to travel. Search results would be returned as a list of vacation-worthy destinations within the specified radius. Destinations that have websites (everything from museums to ski resorts) would return a link along with a useful description of the destination.
The site would enable users to search by criteria in addition to distance, including vacation categories such as family, adventure, romantic, outdoor and indoor. Making descriptions highly informative would be crucial to site popularity and they could include recommendations and advice-from expense estimates to appropriate dress to additional points of interest.
The business would require building a database of destinations, and might be regional in nature at first and then build incrementally by adding new areas over time. The site could also be interactive enabling users to submit destination ideas and rate their vacation experience. It might also include a forum where users could share experiences and recommendations with fellow users.
Tapping The Market
The daycation trend is on, creating a truly broad market of people who would be delighted to have a service that allowed them to explore and pinpoint nearby travel destinations.
The scale of the market might demand that the entrepreneur start in one city, state or region of the country and then building outward. Like a cell phone company, the owner could expand this network piece by piece.
Getting going: Advertising on travel-related websites, chatting up the site on travel blogs, news releases, pay-per-click advertising and other means could help build initial traffic. Sound SEO would, of course, be a prerequisite.
Message-wise, this site would be promoted as “daycation central,” where people could easily find budget-friendly alternatives to long vacations. Messages would also point to the ways visitors could share their experiences and interact with fellow users.
Once the site was underway, users themselves could become the business’s best marketing vehicle.
Revenue Streams
This business could generate several revenue streams, including:
Advertising: Destination organizations could place ads on the site. Ad placement could be dynamic, that is, ads could appear on a page only if geographically relevant to the user’s search. This could be highly attractive to advertisers from state tourism councils to individual businesses such as amusement parks.
Lead fees: The business could charge destinations a fee whenever a user clicks through to the destination website and books a trip (similar to the tripadvisor.com model).
ECommerce: Sales of souvenir items related to the results of a particular destination search.
Who Should Start This Biz
Entrepreneurs with experience developing and operating website-based businesses would have a leg up on this opportunity. The person should have or have access to great technical talent and research talent-absolutely critical for building a substantial database of destinations.
Why This Is A Powerful New Business Idea
People today have less time and money for vacations. But they still have a strong desire to take vacations. The answer to the constraints and the desire: one-day vacations, aka daycations.
And the answer to how to find daycation ideas is with a searchable, destination rich website that returns relevant daycation ideas to vacation-hungry users. Such a website would be unique and could be monetized with advertising and other revenue generators.
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