Tucked away in our news pages a few weeks
ago was a report about a new advertising venture called e-Miles
["Suppliers to consumers: View our ads, earn
miles," Nov. 6, 2006]. The whole point of e-Miles
is to offer advertisers a reassuring answer to that age-old
question: "How do I know people will pay attention to my ad?"
E-Miles came up
with a disarmingly simple solution: it decided to pay people to pay
attention. If consumers pay attention and prove it by answering a
few questions about the ad, e-Miles will compensate
them.
E-Miles could have
chosen to pay people in cash, in Starbucks coupons, iTunes credits,
Girl Scout cookies or any of various other currencies.
Alert readers will
have guessed from the company name, however, that e-Miles chose to
pay consumers with airline miles. Not magazine subscriptions, movie
tickets or chocolate. Airline miles.
We think that says
something about how travel compares with other goods and
services.
In an age when
people lunge for the remote control when commercials come on their
TV, when Web browsers are rated on how well they block
advertisements, when XM radio takes the nation by storm because
it's "commercial free," at a time, in short, when people simply
don't want to sit still for advertising, e-Miles is betting that
they will sit still for the chance to earn free travel.
We could easily
conclude from this that travel must be a pretty desirable thing,
better than chocolate. We could pat ourselves on the back because
we're in a business whose products and services have tremendous
appeal.
But maybe there's
more to it than that. Have you ever wondered why travel is so often
awarded as an incentive? Is it only because travel is alluring, or
is it because shopping for travel and making choices about dates,
itineraries, destinations, hotels, resorts and ships is such a
daunting task that people shy away from it?
Why did travel
become the hottest e-commerce market on the Web, hotter than books
and music, hotter than stocks, bonds, soap? Was it only about
"cheap seats," or did marketers sense that people wanted a simpler
way to research and buy travel?
It is true that
Internet travel shoppers go to the Web for bargains, but they also
go for simplicity; they go in the hope of finding the choices
broken out and explained; they go in search of easy comparisons,
easy decisions.
Travel may never be
as easy to buy as chocolate or Starbucks coupons, but maybe the
next challenge for travel sellers, online and off, is to overcome
whatever it is that makes people postpone their dreams.
Travel people are
accustomed to hearing consumers say, "I've always wanted to do
this."
We should ask
ourselves: What's been stopping them?
The final
frontier
It
would be nice if we could perfect travel on Earth before we start
exporting it to space, but that's not how progress works. If the
Europeans had waited to perfect their cultures before they
colonized the Americas, Abraham Lincoln's log cabin would be in
Lincolnshire.
So we're off to
space, our next hot destination. So far, it's the province of
billionaire entrepreneurs and millionaire clients, but that will
change. Before long, the Travel Institute will have a course
leading to the designation of Master Space Counselor.
Count on
it.