Field notes · 30 June 2026

The U-Shaped Customer

The two travellers least likely to plan their own trip are the poorest and the richest.

The intuitive story is a straight line. You start with packages because you do not know better, and as you get richer you graduate to arranging your own trips. The first half is true. Then the line bends back. The wealthiest travellers do not plan their own trips either. They lean on operators as much as the middle class, often more. Plot package use against income and you do not get a slope. You get a U.

Both ends buy the same thing. They pay someone else to arrange the trip. Only the reason changes, and the reason is the whole story.

The bottom buys certainty

At the lower end, a holiday is rare and fully funded. It is saved for over months and sits in its own mental pocket, apart from the money that runs the house. A budget like that cannot absorb a surprise. If the transfer that was meant to be included costs extra, the overrun does not come out of slack. There is no slack. It comes out of the trip.

So the budget traveller buys the all-inclusive, and what they are buying is a single number known before they leave. The research is clear. Cost predictability drives package choice strongly for lower-income travellers and fades to insignificance as income climbs. The people with the least money care most about knowing the number in advance, because for them a mistake costs the most. Behavioural economics calls part of this flat-rate bias, the preference for one fixed price over a meter that runs as you go, even when itemising would be cheaper, because every metered decision carries a small tax of anxiety. The all-inclusive removes the meter. That absence is the product.

The top buys time

At the upper end, money is no longer the binding constraint. Time is. As income rises the value of an hour rises with it, until the hours needed to research and book a complex trip are worth more than the fee to hand it off. The wealthy traveller gives the trip to a bespoke operator for the same reason a busy executive does not file their own taxes. The work is doable. It is just not worth their time. They also buy service, and someone to call when a connection breaks at midnight in a language they do not speak. The mechanics differ from the budget end in everything except the part that matters. The richest, like the poorest, pays in order not to do it themselves.

The middle is the only place independence makes sense

Between them sits the traveller for whom the package solves a problem they do not have. They have enough money to absorb a surprise, enough time to plan, and enough past trips to feel competent. The budget package is an unnecessary constraint and the bespoke service an unnecessary cost. So they do it themselves. Independent travel is a band in the middle of the income range that thins on either side, and the industry keeps mistaking it for a summit.

The shape is not unique to travel. In personal finance the mass-affluent middle self-directs while the ultra-wealthy hand the same decisions to private banks. In tax the middle buys the software and the top retains a firm. Outsourcing is worth most when money is scarce, because certainty beats the saving, and worth most again when time is scarce, because the hours beat the fee. It sags in the middle, where neither presses hard. The U is the shape of the value of outsourcing in almost any category you pick.

One caveat, since this publication runs on honesty. Both ends are well evidenced. The depth of the trough is not, partly because the word "package" stops describing one product once you include dynamically bundled and tailor-made trips. Read the U as a shape that explains behaviour. The exact numbers are not there to be had.

What it leaves stranded

The industry segments by income and assumes the obvious slope: more package lower down, more bespoke higher up. Independence gets treated as a phase people pass through on the way. The U corrects it. Income tells you which package a traveller buys. It tells you almost nothing about whether they buy one.

That is who it leaves exposed. The two ends are well served, by a mature budget package and a mature luxury one. The middle is the trough that every dynamic-packaging engine and "you book, we plan" platform is now circling, because nobody has built the right thing for it. The middle does it alone for lack of a better option, even though it would happily hand parts off. It goes independent because the only way to buy confidence about a trip has been to buy the whole package, and it does not want the whole package. So it carries the risk alone. That makes the middle the most exposed of all to the asterisk, the gap between what a brochure says and what a trip delivers, because it has outsourced none of the risk.

What the middle wants is the confidence of a package without the package. A way to know what a trip will really cost and contain, without handing the planning to someone whose margin depends on you not checking.

That is where we built ScoreMyTrip. We take the trip you assembled, or the quote you were sent, and translate it into what you will actually spend and experience, before the money moves. The ends pay to stop worrying. The middle should be able to stop worrying without buying a package it never wanted.

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