Guys, Interview question last week - could you please estimate the size of the online travel sector today? I tried the usual breakdown into various components bits but stumped myself on it. How would some of you bright sparks have answered it...?

Answer matters less than the approach you took to identify the market size. Any number of ways to estimate this:- Number of people in the area in question (UK? Global?)- Number of people who travel per year- Avg trips per person per year- Avg value of trip- % internet utilisation- % of internet users who shop onlineIf region is "global", need to vary your estimates by region etc.Essentially, the interviewer is seeing whether you can break it down into sensible chunks...

In the real world, you could find the answer by buying this report:http://www.euromonitor.com/The_World_Market_for_Travel_And_TourismOr extrapolating from this statistic: http://www.internetworldstats.com/blog3.htmAs at May 2005, the global market for online travel sales was $1.12bn per week. You could then adjust this to match the overall growth of internet shopping as a whole to give a reasonable proxy.

Hi.. Thanks for the useful insights.. Infact I myself got stuck at a similar question during an interview with AT Kearney.. which talked about estimating annual demand for a telecom company entering the cellphone business in a completely nascent market (only landline devices present) using commonly known facts..I started off with the ~Overall population of the city~No. of Householdsin the city (Keeping an average of 4 family size)~No. of basic telephones present~Household Income (Say over XYZ$ per month)but after that it started getting all over the place... :(What is the best way to tackle such questions..