What are the new consumer trends in tourism?
It’s a fact that tourism is constantly evolving with the times. If mass tourism was the last great evolution, an event as important as Covid could not leave tourism static. So, since 2022, we have seen tourism habits continue to reinvent themselves and adapt to the times and the opportunities.
The first change in tourism consumption patterns could be technological. All in all, this is quite logical given the period of major digital upheaval we are experiencing and the successive periods of confinement that have profoundly marked the era. Armelle Solelhac, CEO of the marketing strategy agency Switch, sees this change as moving from mass tourism to space tourism. The aim is quite simple: to visit the world without leaving home, thanks to the technological innovations that are flooding the world. Augmented reality headsets in particular are enabling this new kind of tourism. Soon you’ll be able to visit the world from the comfort of your own living room. It’s already possible to climb Mont Blanc virtually.
Even though Booking.com revealed that 72% of those surveyed still wanted to travel in 2023, 43% of travellers wanted to use virtual reality to choose their destination and immerse themselves in what could be their future trip. So innovation is meeting the challenges of tourism by providing an answer to a well-known problem facing future travellers: where to go? In addition to immersion, more than a third of those questioned expressed the desire to experience a “virtual reality trip lasting several days”.
This is a good way of saving money in the face of rising travel prices, and also of reducing your carbon footprint and therefore your impact on the environment. When virtual travel becomes green travel, we can talk about “virtuous” travel. While tourists are certainly more open to virtual tourism, the physical link is an important factor, particularly for business travel. Team-building and cohesion may be achieved in the metaverse in the near future, but for the time being, the physical aspect and the ‘real’ meeting are still too deeply rooted in our culture.
Another trend in the evolution of tourism is its ubiquity. Tourism is everywhere, or nowhere, it’s up to you. Above all, it’s the idea of enjoying the passing of time and admiring our surroundings, where the desire to take one’s time and be contemplative is important. A number of concepts have been developed in this direction.
This is particularly true of “slow tourism” and “micro tourism”, two concepts that are very similar in nature. Quite simply, taking your time, without going very far and without necessarily going away for a long time. It’s another way of reducing your impact on the environment, because by travelling close to home you avoid excessive carbon emissions. It’s also a way of enjoying the destination more than the journey, by avoiding spending hours in transport to get there.
Bleisure’ is also an increasingly popular form of tourism, encouraged by the democratisation of teleworking. Bleisure is a blend of ‘business’ and ‘leisure’, deconstructing the boundary between work and holidays. It is presented as the future of business travel and can take the form of extending a business trip to enjoy the destination with friends and family. The advantage is quite simply that the trip and part of the stay are paid for by the company. Turn a business trip into a holiday, or combine business with pleasure.
Staycation, another newcomer to the world of tourism, appeared in 2017. It’s another contraction of two English words, “stay” and “vacation”, which could be translated as staying on holiday… In short, it’s about finding accommodation in your own city. Staycation is close to the philosophy of slow tourism and micro-tourism. Spend less, pay less, don’t spend hours in transport… and enjoy your city, which you can sometimes forget about out of habit. The idea is, of course, to go away for a short period, a weekend for example, and take advantage of a special rate when a nearby hotel is not fully booked. The advantage is, of course, that you’ll have plenty of flexibility when it comes to getting to your destination.
