The long tail

Why are people suddenly travelling to 'off the beaten track' destinations like the monasteries of Serbia and the unseen tribes of north east India?

It’s all because of the ‘long tail’. (Swoosh, swish, slap.)

The long tail is about statistics. (Stay with me here.) The tail theory works on the basis that more people are in the ‘tail’ of a probability distribution than you’d see under a normal distribution (a bell curve).

So, in retail, the long tail describes the niche strategy of selling lots of unique items in relatively small quantities (usually as well as selling fewer popular items in large quantities). Examples include Amazon and Netflix. (Only two people in the history of the world have bought The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War - Volume XV - Statistics - Part 2 - Medical and Casualty Statistics in hardcover and no one has bought the movie.*)

The total number of sales of this large number of ‘non-hit items’, is called the long tail.

It’s not just the book and movie markets that have been slapped, swished and swooshed by the long tail. Wired invites us to consider the changing shape of travel.

Low-cost carriers, online travel information and social-media driven word of mouth have democratised the industry. These things together take tourists beyond the usual top 10 destinations.

You see more diversity and demand spreads over more products. In the case of travel, this is driven by:
• lowered flight costs = more travel, more risk-taking
• lower search costs = broader vistas, more willingness to go off the beaten track
• better word-of-mouth tools = ‘bottoms-up hits’
• peer ratings, reviews reinforce authentic success and punish ‘manufactured experience’.

Did all this happen? It did.

Top 10 destinations have decreased in popularity and there’s a growing spread of travellers visiting the coffee plantations of Columbia and the ancient heritage of Jordan.

And now you know why.

Swoosh.

*Just kidding - about the movie, that is.