6 Travelers We Should Know and Love

It’s the start of another busy week and you are getting out of the building and or picking up the phone to meet customers, leads and prospects. Obviously, you know the importance of hotel sales support and staying in contact with your end-users but are you learning about your customers? Are you gaining the insights you need to complement your amazing property and or you providing secure sales solutions?

Recently Amadeus has produced a Future Traveller Tribes 2030 report that features behaviors, values, and needs of the 6 travel groups that will travel in 2030, these groups include Simplicity Searchers, Reward Hunters, Social Capital Seekers, Cultural Purists, Ethical Travelers and Obligation Meeters. Let’s take an in-depth look at each group and the importance of your end-users behavior and preferences.

Simplicity Searchers are a travel group that prefers to do as little as possible when planning a holiday and chooses to pass on that responsibility to third-parties such as Hotwire, Expedia, and Triply Travel. They want options to be laid out before them in simple and transparent formats and will be happy to exchange personal data for simplicity benefits.

For this group, holidays are scarce and represent a time to accommodate oneself. Challenging oneself is not a priority. They will not insist on managing every detail of their break but will use systems and agencies to simplify their choices into traditional packages, ones which offer the ability to dip a toe in the waters with the assurance of their safety and enjoyment, as well as a structure for their experience in place.

Reward Hunters are a travel group that seeks an entertaining and gratifying experience and a return on their hard earned investment in the office or their day-to-day lives. Travel for this group will be seen as a well-deserved treat and will often mean a ‘retreat’ of some kind, something which will help reduce the stress of a frantic working week.

Even though this group’s activities are focused on personal indulgence, it is not to say that these retreats are anti-social. Instead, a motivation for Reward Hunters will mostly come from the connection to a closely-knit group of devotees to the higher purpose of self-improvement, where communities with equivalent goals assemble.

Social Capital Seekers will have harness the potential of digital media to complement and inform their offline life, destinations in their case, are mostly selected based on social media opportunities.

This travel group will structure their destinations and guide their behaviors with their online audiences ever in mind and we can foresee a market for boosting social engagement (That Won’t Break the Bank), filled with consciously feed-friendly moments designed to help users increase their network influence.

The Cultural Traveler wants to discover the ‘real’ side of the places they are visiting to have an authentic travel experience and submerge themselves in the local culture. This type of traveler wants nothing more than to break away from sight-seeing at tourist-traps and to look for places where they can eat what the locals are eating and do what a local would do rather than visit an over-hyped restaurant in their hotel.

Cultural Purists use their holidays as an opportunity to participate in an unfamiliar culture, looking to live something absolutely different from their home lives – even if this may be an awkward experience.

Ethical Travelers allow their conscience to be their guide when organizing and coordinating their travel. They may make exceptions to environmental concerns or let their political ideals shape their choices.

The main goal for Ethical Travelers is to bring individual impacts on the world, whether political or environmental, as close to neutral as possible. Ultimately this travel group will become the ‘trustworthy travel’ group.

Obligation Meeters have their travel choices restricted by the need to meet some certain objective. Their behaviors are influenced by their need to be in a certain place, at a certain time, without fail.

This groups’ traveling habits focuses around time-bound, ‘concrete’ objectives which have an impact on how group members behave. A ‘corporate traveler’ is what some may describe this group as. Obligation Meeters have objectives which place important limitations on how they travel.

In conclusion, this article points directly to great work done by Amadeus/Future Foundation which can be downloaded here. Those travel brands which are able to appreciate these changing motivations will be best placed to develop new innovative services. The six tribes outlined here will be the basis for further analysis taking a closer look at how the travel industry can cater to the needs of the six groups identified. Hotel sales solutions and contextual research coupled with customer development can produce valuable insights that will enhance your hotel’s offerings and support customer acquisition and retention.