When generation Y is shopping around for holidays and places to go, Katrina Barry (pictured above), managing director of youth travel brand Contiki, said she was shocked millennials don’t buy travel online.

Acknowledging around 60 per cent of Contiki’s traffic comes from mobile, Barry said majority of the mobile interactions from its customers aren’t actually a completed transaction. The final transaction in booking a holiday tends to come through a travel agent, and often with mum and dad’s credit card.

“Quite often it’s our customers’ first trip overseas,” she said, “and having the support of a travel agent to put together the trip for them is very important to them.”

Barry’s comments came after indulging in a feast of both food and conversation at B&T’s Roundtable in May this year. B&T and tech publication Which-50 teamed up with mobile marketing experts AdNear and Amobee to host a roundtable packed with CMOs as part of the Daze of Disruption conference.

The topic of conversation was all about the impact of mobile on businesses in recent years. How the hell do you operate in a mobile first world where the customer expects nothing but the best?

Data is in abundance now, and the only way of really managing that data and making it useful is to start off with a hypothesis, said Emma Fraser (pictured left above), group director of marketing at TFE Hotels, during the roundtable. “Because the data never ends,” she said. “If you don’t have a question t answer they will just let the scope blow out until it’s completely unworkable.”

Speaking to B&T after the roundtable about insights from the discussion, Fraser added it was interesting to hear all the different viewpoints.

“It was really coming through the responsive element and the retargeting element, people don’t want that. It’s about behaviourally targeting the guests.”