Generational Travel Observations

Different generations approach travel planning in different ways. Join Rob Levine, President of Marriner, and Shannon Gray, CEO of Gray Research Solutions, as they explore how travelers across various age demographics source travel information.

TRANSCRIPT:

ROB:

One of the things that we love about boomers who are great travelers right now, right, they have the time, they have the discretionary income, they tend to travel during shoulder periods, which is awesome. They tend to be pretty heavily reliant, or I should say maybe the most reliant from a generational perspective on DMOs for information when they're planning a visit. So I guess the question becomes, how are DMOs addressing the fact that Gen Z and Gen Y tend to be a little bit more, a little bit more fluid in how they develop their travel plans and where they source information?

SHANNON: Yes, one of the biggest differences between the generations is how they plan their travel. What resources they use to prepare for a trip or to choose a destination. And it's because technology has exploded, obviously in the past, however many years. Boomers are not digital natives. By digital native, we mean they weren't raised with digital assets and phones and computers. And everybody knows that. But what you grew up knowing in your childhood as a human being is very important to how you function for the rest of your life.

Boomers in their childhood and in their teen years and in their early 20s learned that there's there's no Google. There was no social media. There was no way internet obviously, which some of us remember those days, some of us don't. I definitely do. So they learned that if you want to get tourism information on a place, if you want to find out what there is to see and do, where to stay, you have to make a phone call. You have to request a hard copy visitor's guide or a brochure to be mailed to your house. You have to do that in plenty of time to be able to prepare for your trip. And that's really, besides AAA, which if everybody remembers Triptix, you could go to AAA and they'll print you a Triptix, you know. But that was the evolution of DMOs. They started as just brochure distributors. The younger generations are not really aware that DMOs exist because they didn't use them as a critical resource for travel, the way that boomers did. There's all kinds of information online. You don't really, they're not reliant on DMOs anymore, even though DMOs do really important work.

So if a DMO is still kind of relying just on their boomer audience, and they are really just kind of still printing brochures and guides, I worry about them because the younger generations that are coming up are, sending out a brochure or visitor's guide requires that somebody be proactive about searching for information. You have to do it a certain amount of time ahead. You have to know where you're going. That's a proactive type of information seeking. The younger generations are tending to be a lot more reactive because as a digital native, they have grown up with the algorithms that deliver them exactly the content that they want based on what they viewed in the past.

You have to be really digitally savvy right now. You've got to, you know, your SEO has got to be on point. Your social media posts have got to be, you know, really powerful. So the way that different generations are using sources, I mean, some DMOs are really shining with this new environment and some DMOs are not adapting.

And that worries me because the boomers, while they're great right now, because they're flexible and they rely on DMOs and they know how valuable of a resource you are. When the boomers are gone, unfortunately, because that's life, it's going to get scary for some of these guys, I'm afraid.

ROB: Yeah, it really feels like there's a tremendous opportunity, especially for some of the less digital savvy DMOs to kind of embark on an initiative to ensure that they're intersecting Gen Y and Gen Z, you know, where they live, right, which is, you know, through their phone, through the iPad, through the laptop. And to your point, a lot of that is, you know, understanding the algorithms, ensuring that your organic content is going to show up in search, you know, doing a good job from a targeting and profiling perspective.

Thanks for watching. Visit Marriner’s blog for the next video in our destination tourism series.