Skift Take
Travel is an emotional journey full of ups-and-downs. Our 2016 Experiential Traveler Survey exposed some compelling realities about traveler preferences and tolerances for technology usage, brand engagement, and product offering. How will you connect with your audience along that journey?
Our 2016 U.S. Experiential Traveler Survey is just one component to our ongoing exploration and investigation into the modern-day traveler mindset.
Our objective: To understand what travelers ultimately want from travel platforms and brands. We’ve already applied our survey findings on two big custom client projects; and the data that we’ve collected is helping power our research for our Premium Research subscription service.
The latest data clearly show that people are prioritizing their spend on experiences, rather than material goods. Health and wellness, culture and events, travel and tourism are more important than apparel, electronics, cars and homes. That’s good news for the travel industry, but there’s a lot more going on when it comes to changing consumer behavior and preference for travel experiences.
Today’s travel experience looks completely different than just years ago. Mobile computing, mapping apps, recommendation engines, user-generated content, hailing services, social media, digital payments, even dating apps are now transforming the traveler journey from start to finish.
Travelers want authenticity and personalized experiences – not commoditized, one-size-fits-all holidays. Technology gives them access to the world. Ironically, and if misused, that same technology can turn your customers away from your value proposition.
The data findings that we uncovered through our Experiential Traveler Survey were also incorporated into the Supertraveler Manifesto, a bigger editorial project that we worked on with Fathom cruise lines. The surveys that we conducted yielded many compelling findings about the modern traveler mindset. We distilled those findings into 10 topline Maxims of the Supertraveler mindset.
Skift’s research team also worked with International Hotel Group (IHG) and Cornell University to bring together a half day of content for their annual Global Leaders Summit in New York City. In addition to organizing panels and guest speakers for the event, Skift will be presenting select findings from our most recent consumer and industry surveys, including our 2016 Experiential Traveler Survey. Here are just a few of the top-line data points from the survey:
How can Skift help us?
Contact us at research@skift.com to talk to us about our latest research initiatives. We would love to hear about your latest exciting projects and initiatives.