National study reveals habits of last minute travelers

Jul 22, 08 | 1:54 am

Fully one-third of leisure travelers embarked on a last minute trip last year, according to the 2008 Ypartnership/Yankelovich National Leisure Travel MONITOR, revealing a sizeable necessity for impulse vacations by today's traveling public. The newly released data also defines the average time frame of advanced planning for a last minute booking. On average, travelers planned late-breaking trips just 15 days in advance of their departure.

"This data is consistent with the lead times we've observed on our website," states Uri Argov, President and CEO of Travel Holdings, Inc., who owns and operates LastMinuteTravel.com, the premier online site dedicated to last minute trip bookings. "The last minute travel space online continues to be a beneficial model for us, especially for web users seeking vacation ideas, low rates, wide open availability and vast options with no time constraints."

Last minute travelers historically book most often to Las Vegas, New York, Orlando, Chicago, and Miami, according to data collected from LastMinuteTravel.com and New Horizons Systems, a proprietary technology that reports the bookings, sales, and trends of the website and other Travel Holdings, Inc., subsidiaries. Statistics also show that the majority of last-minute bookings are made for trips that begin on Friday, followed by Saturday as the second most popular date.



About LastMinuteTravel.com

Last Minute Travel (http://www.LastMinuteTravel.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Travel Holdings, Inc., is the premier online website for Last Minute Travel deals offering cheap travel packages, discounted airfare, bargains on hotel accommodations, car rentals, cruise specials and more to the top traveled destinations worldwide. A pioneer in selling and marketing online travel, LastMinuteTravel.com allows travelers to find the best deals at the last possible moment, as hotel rates can change every second.



About the Ypartnership/Yankelovich National Travel MONITOR

Ypartnership is a worldwide advertising and public relations agency that specializes in serving travel industry clients and co-author of the widely-quoted National Travel Monitor_^TM with Yankelovich, Inc. For more information, visit www.ypartnership.com.

Yankelovich Inc. delivers measurable breakthroughs in marketing productivity for its clients. For more than 30 years, The Yankelovich MONITOR has tracked and forecasted consumer value and lifestyle trends. Yankelovich's Insights Integration solutions, including MindBase, directly link the firm's key research findings on why people buy to databases of customers and prospects. Yankelovich is headquartered in Chapel Hill, NC, with offices in New York and Atlanta, Ga. For more information, visit www.yankelovich.com.


Source: Business Wire