Group Travel Transformations

When it comes to travel, sometimes it’s less about where you go and more about who you’re with. Group travel is transforming, from innovative tours to the rise of women’s trips. Join Rob Levine, President of Marriner, and Shannon Gray, CEO of Gray Research Solutions, as they explore how group travel trends are affecting the tourism industry.

TRANSCRIPT:

ROB: Well, today, all we want to do is just chat a little bit about the travel and tourism industry. So one of the things that isn't lost on me as I'm kind of in these mushy middle years as a parent of teenagers, one getting ready to go off to college, is so much of my travel is heading to basketball tournaments or swim meets for my kids. In fact, this summer, I'm lucky enough to have an upcoming unofficial college reunion trip to Montana with friends of mine. It just feels like there's a lot of group travel at this stage in life. And I wonder what you see from where you sit and the work that you do with DMOs, some of the trends impacting group travel today.

SHANNON: Yeah, well, I think it's fascinating that you brought up two huge trends right off the bat, which is traveling for sports tournaments, which wasn't around when I was young. I don't remember these so many travel tournaments. And you're lucky, Rob, that you can do the sports tournaments and do another type of travel, because most parents that are in that stage of life where they're traveling for sports tournaments, sometimes that's all they can manage. And that's their focus. And that's what they do. They travel for sports. And right now, well, the kids are that age. That's it. So anyway, a lot of my clients have benefited from this trend. The next, and that's been around for a while, the next trend that you mentioned is group travel, which, oh my gosh, after COVID, everybody was really worried that the entire group travel industry was going to just die. And a lot of suppliers. By suppliers, I mean the folks that create group tours and have itineraries and they take folks on these trips. A lot of them went out of business, a lot of them did. And we thought it was kind of dead, not coming back. And then recently it's really, really interesting. Group travel is not dead. It just changed pretty drastically. It used to be a lot of motor coaches, right? Now, one thing is that COVID decimated the motor coach industry. It really did. There's very few motor coach companies left. Unfortunately, that will do group tours. And also the demand just isn't there for motor coach tours. What has kind of cropped up in terms of demand is younger, especially single, like millennials, gen Zs, and especially women that travel together. It sounds like you guys are doing like a guys trip, which is also, you know, kind of a big deal, guys tend not to be guided. Or is your tour guided?

ROB: No, not at all.

SHANNON: Right. So that's kind of, there's a difference right between guided group travel, where you're using a supplier who puts together your itinerary and handles all the logistics and you're kind of joining up for this purpose of the group travel. And then there's kind of, we're going to go on ourselves as like a friend's trip. So we would not call your trip a group trip. We would call it a friend's trip. Um, mostly because you don't have a guide. And so those are really popular obviously for in strips and it used to be a lot of girlfriends' trips But we're seeing guy's trips come up. Are you guys going fishing? Gambling?

ROB: So fly fishing could be part of it. We are going to Montana So there is a great debate over how to spend our time and that is on the table for sure.

SHANNON: Yeah, that's that I'm not surprised guys trips are a lot about fishing coming together and fishing. You're probably staying in a big house together like an Airbnb or a VRBO. You probably each have your own bedroom?

ROB: Or maybe some of the college roommates bunk up together, but yeah.

SHANNON: Well, that's good. That's the other thing about group travel is that this wasn't really possible before Airbnb and VRBO came on the scene, which would have said not been that long ago. So yeah, group travel. One thing that I want to mention about group travel before we get off is this amazing trend that I'm seeing where women, young women are getting together, single, maybe they're not always single, but they want to travel to somewhere that is a little intimidating maybe for them to travel on their own or with just one girlfriend. And so there have been a lot of group tour suppliers that have popped up to bring women to, you know, kind of a destination they might not be comfortable with. They put together a group itinerary. There's some bonding element. There's some women power element, really cool experiences you wouldn't be able to curate on your own. And nobody really saw this coming. This is a trend that we see a lot. I really hope it grows. But I, you know, women are more likely to take the guided tours. Men are not very likely to take the guided tours, which is really interesting that this is becoming kind of gendered of a trend.