Sure, the destination is important too but when it comes to making travel plans, it’s what you can do when you get that counts most.
Nothing new you might think. And you’d be right.
Many travelers have always veered toward experiences over destinations. Not interested in the ‘If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium’ form of touring around the European continent, they have actively searched for tours that offer local experiences, especially those related to food, wine, and culture.
So it should come as no surprise that the 2011 United States Tour Operators Association (USTOA) survey highlights experiential travel, or the ‘E’ factor, as potentially the biggest travel trends for tour operators in 2012.
85% of the tour operators who took part in the survey rated experiential travel as highly important to their overall growth and sales.
These results are related, in the most part, to the fact that nearly 60% of tour operator customers are the time-rich and travel-hungry Baby Boomer generation.
It was this baby boomer generation that popularized traveling on a shoestring through Europe, Asia, and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Now retired or nearing retirement, these baby boomers, with their ‘forever young’ attitude, are turning towards experiential travel.
But what is experiential travel?
As it’s most basic, experiential travel could be defined as act of simply heading off beyond the beaten tourist path and becoming immersed in authentic local culture.
PURE Life Experiences, a networking platform for the Experiential and Transformational Travel sector founded in 2009, offers a much more in-depth definition:
…a journey away from home, involving a truly memorable and powerful experience (active, cultural, natural, social, or spiritual) that will enrich a person’s life and improve the way that they connect with both loved ones and with the world.” (Pure Insights, November 2011, p.4)
Of course, in reality it all depends on the individual traveler and how much they want to immerse themselves in the experience.
What this means for travel industry?
If the baby boomer generation says it wants travel with the ‘E’ factor, then the travel industry needs to sit up and take notice.
Here’s why:
The boomer generation spans those born over an 18 year period – between 1946 and 1964 – and the older part of this segment is only just reaching retirement age. The boomers will therefore be a source market for the global tourism industry for several decades and will have most impact when the latter part of the group retires around 2024.” (Deloitte Hospitality 2015 Game changers or spectators?, p. 17)
Popular travel magazine Afar, whose mission is to “inspire and guide those who travel the world seeking to connect with its people, experience their culture, and understand their perspectives”, embraces these eight core values:
- Explore from the inside looking out
- Provide a sense of cultural immersion
- Offer the unexpected
- Touch on a range of emotions
- Be genuine, real, authentic
- Promote connection
- Feed the curious
- Celebrate global diversity
They might just be theoretical values but they’d make the perfect building blocks with which tour companies could create experiential travel itineraries.
The wider possibilities…
There is no escaping the fact that the baby boomer generation will have a profound affect in shaping the future of the travel industry.
So it’s really just a question of how effectively the travel industry responds to this growing travel market.
Logically, a thorough understanding of this customer base should be the first response. And there is probably no better resource for this than a study conducted by the Association of Travel Marketing Directors.
The resultant 13 Truths about baby boomer travel drafted by Kim Ross provides the perfect blueprint for travel companies planning on targeting this growing source market.
Chief among these truths is fact that boomers, who see themselves as ‘forever young’, are more active, desire unusual destinations and experiences, and demand immediate gratification.
They’ve got the money. They’ve got the time. And more importantly, they have clear travel expectations:
- To have more authentic, hands on experiences.
- To learn and do rather than just watch.
- To converse rather than just listen.
In other words, they want to be active participants in authentic experiences that blend with the natural and social environment of a destination.
Small theme-based itineraries that relate to learning new skills – languages, cooking, wine tasting, painting, photography, etc – are high on their list, as are itineraries that take allow them to experience wildlife and nature tours in sustainable and eco-friendly ways.
More over, they have an increased interest in traveling to not only emerging destinations such as Vietnam, India, Ecuador, and China but also to damaged destinations such as Egypt, Japan, and New Zealand who, in the past year, have been hard-hit by natural and man-made disasters.
Those in the travel industry who recognize this will, in the end, have the competitive edge when creating ‘E’ rich itineraries aimed at this target market.
Image: VisitFinland
Post Revisions:
- 8 August, 2012 @ 8:30 [Current Revision] by Liz Lewis
- 12 March, 2012 @ 10:25 by John O'Nolan
- 12 March, 2012 @ 10:21 by Alastair McKenzie
- 12 March, 2012 @ 10:19 by Alastair McKenzie
- 12 March, 2012 @ 10:13 by Alastair McKenzie
This really isn’t anything new. Many of the companies that promote “experiential travel” today were doing so back in the 1970s–and, in some cases, to the same travelers. When I was in my 20s, for example, I went volcano-climbing in Mexico with Mountain Travel, which is still around as Mountain Travel Sobek. And river-rafting trips were all the rage several decades ago.
The main difference between then and now is numbers: In the 1970s and 1980s, many Baby Boomers had house payments to meet, had kids to raise, and–especially in the U.S.–had limited vacation time (which meant that family travel had to take priority over “experiential” travel). Many of those Boomers are now free to indulge themselves in a way that they haven’t been able to do since they were backpacking around Europe with a copy of LET’S GO! or EUROPE ON $XX A DAY.
It will be interesting to see how the “experiential travel” market changes as the number of prospects becomes huge. For example, there must be scores of U.S. companies (if not more) that offer bicycle tours in far-off places. Mainstream cruise lines are starting to move into “soft adventure” cruising. And it sometimes seems that Tuscany has nearly as many cooking schools as it does gas stations. Will the appeal of “experiential travel” wear off if it loses its whiff of exclusivity? What’s going to happen when Trafalgar Tours starts to offer “Tuscan culinary adventures” for the masses? Will the cool kids (now the cool oldsters) abandon voluntourism or soft adventure or ecotravel, don vintage bermuda shorts, and go on “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” nostalgia tours where the coach passengers kill time on the motorway by watching “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” on their iPads?
I am writer and travel blogger who specializes in writing about active travel for baby boomers. While experiential travel might not be a new idea, it is a changing concept for the group travel industry that specializes in the senior market. Unlike our parents, the previous senior travelers, boomers are not content to travel on sedentary group tours. Boomers expect small groups, a choice of active excursions and some amount of free time to explore on their own. When I spoke at Boomers in Groups (a marketing group focusing on connecting travel providers with boomers booking group travel), members of the travel sector who attended were grappling with the changes that they know the industry must make in order to attract boomer business.
Enjoyed the article. And, Donna, as a tour operator whose customer base has a high percentage of boomers, I can speak first hand that your comment, “Boomers expect small groups, a choice of active excursions and some amount of free time to explore on their own,” is exactly what they seek. We were very fortunate to build those features into our tour packages along with great hotels in the heart of the cities and behind-the-scenes elements that they couldn’t create on their own.
fine written article. only 1 question; how do you define “authentic local culture” nowdays? time of marco polo long gone and world is so small… even masaii jump with mobiles now – but i definitely agree travel should be about experiences, depending what one interest is.
I agree wholeheartedly which is why, as a baby boomer myself, I developed trips that are very experiential in nature and focus on connecting with the local people. They also contain another factor which I think is becoming increasingly important to baby boomer travelers: making a difference in the places they visit. This can be done in so many ways, such as including a volunteer component, shopping locally and purchasing items made from disadvantaged groups, being environmentally sensitive from what is purchased, to how one travels, to where one stays.