The "long tail" is a buzzword that's gaining a lot of, well, buzz thanks to the bestselling book of the same name by Chris Anderson.

But what is it and how does it apply to the travel distribution business?

The long tail is another way of envisioning the 80/20 Rule. You know, 80 percent of your business will come from 20 percent of your customers. 80 percent of the work done in an office is done by 20 percent of the employees. That sort of thing. It's not an exact rule but it works 80 percent of the time and the other 20 percent, it doesn't work, which just tends to prove the rule.

Now if you plot this phenomenon on a graph, you will wind up with something that looks like this:

That section trailing off to the right, representing the 80 percent, looks like a "long tail" and is the source of the term.

The 80/20 rule is useful because it tells a business to concentrate its efforts on the 20 percent of whatever that is producing the results. For a travel agent, that would mean spending more time cultivating the 20 percent of your client list that produces the most income. For a travel supplier, it would mean paying attention to the 20 percent of travel agencies that produce the most bookings.

The downside of this approach is that it completely ignores the source of 80 percent of your business, the long tail. But that was okay because that 80 percent came in dribs and drabs from many, many different sources. The cost of addressing this large group was cost-prohibitive. Put another way, it would cost more to market to that 80 percent than you'd make back in additional income.

The Internet changed that. Now it is increasingly easy and relatively inexpensive to reach the long tail. The classic example cited is Amazon.com, which derives a huge percentage of its income from onesy-twosy sales of obscure books, not from the best-sellers that sell thousands of copies.

In the travel distribution system, home-based travel agents (and other small storefront agencies) are the long tail. Each agent may make only a handful of bookings a year compared to the mega-agencies, but together they can account for a big chunk of travel booked.

And that is why travel suppliers should (and increasingly are) paying attention to home-based travel agents.

My personal feeling (based on fragmentary data, I'll admit) is that the home-based travel agent channel is under-appreciated by the supplier community, with some honorable exceptions. Much more can be done to unleash the potential of this large and growing reservoir of agents and I hope to have more to say on that score in the weeks to come.