The traveler - millions of individual transitions create one collective transformation
In this article, contributing editor Martin Cowen explores how the collective story of the modern traveler is shaped by countless individual transitions—across life stages, cultures, and generations—resulting in a travel industry that is constantly transforming on a global scale.
As individuals, we are all transitioning from one life stage to the next and our travel preferences reflect the life stage we are at. Our preferences today will have changed from what they were fifteen years ago and will have changed in fifteen years’ time.
Most of us (see caveat to follow) experience leisure travel properly for the first time in our late teens/early twenties when – as per our life stage – we start to have some degree of autonomy over our lives with the ability to make our own decisions (and our own mistakes). It’s not long until we transition to traveling with partners, with young children, with teenagers. As we mature, we travel intergenerationally with our own children and their offspring, maybe even with our own parents as well.
The caveat is that this is typical for someone with a western European/First World Boomer and Gen X background. Clearly there are variations within this demographic – the human experience is a rich tapestry - but travel is a global phenomenon.
According to UN Tourism (formerly UNWTO), 1.4 billion people travelled internationally (with an overnight stay) in 2024. China was the biggest outbound spender, and there’s a strong indication that India will take the top slot in the next couple of years. Looking ahead, the travel market is – on a global scale - set to transform to one dominated by travelers from APAC rather than from northern Europe and the US.
Different generations from different source markets have different expectations about life in general and travel in particular. So, while individual travelers are transitioning between life stages appropriate to their own socio-economic context, ‘the traveler’ as a collective is an aggregation of 1.4 billion individual transition narratives. The net result is that, in a truly globalized industry, ‘the traveler’ is constantly transforming.
Reframing travelers to drive transformation
Keeping with a global perspective, the traditional segmentation of travelers by age, income, and location is struggling to remain relevant in today’s world. In marketing-speak, there’s been a transition from demographic to psychographic segmentation, from “who” to “why”. It has been useful to change the lens through which travelers are looked at - because categorizing travelers based on the why of travel can offer sellers and suppliers deeper insights into their motivations and preferences.
Amadeus launched Traveler Tribes in 2015, identifying six types of travelers which it suggested would be the dominant segments in 2030. It issued another set of psychographic research a few years ago which distilled 2033’s travelers into four tribes. Both studies were unapologetically global in their outlook.
Travelers do not necessarily transition between tribes in the same way that they would transition through life stages. Looking at 2015’s tribes, “ethical travelers” are likely to remain committed to traveling sustainability whatever life stage they are at. “Reward hunters” will not give up their bespoke, one-of-a-kind experiences for mass-market bucket-list options as they mature.
The 2033 tribes also cross demographics and geographies. The paper used the experiences of a 27-year-old from Thailand and a 47-year-old from France to illustrate the type of traveler falling into its “memory maker” tribe. Elsewhere, the commitment of “travel tech-fluencers” as early adopters and passionate advocates of the latest hardware and software innovations will last a lifetime.
The travel tech ecosystem has a foot in both segmentation camps. There is a role for identifying and targeting cohorts of similar travelers, but the emphasis has shifted towards developing systems which can identify traveler’s individual needs. Big data was the driving force behind the transition to personalization; today, artificial intelligence is driving a transformation to personalization at scale.
Hyper-personalization, context and situations
Personalization came to the fore when big data was the buzzword of choice. Type “personalization” into Phocuswire’s search bar and you get more than 5,000 results. But it has been blipping the travel tech radar since the earliest days of online travel.
Recent research into the hotel sector showed that 85% of hoteliers think personalization can deliver more than 5% in incremental revenues because travelers – in this case, hotel guests - respond positively to businesses which offer recommendations appropriate to their needs.
At least that’s the theory. In practice it’s more nuanced, because one aspect of personalization that is often overlooked is that each individual traveler is themselves comprised of contextual or situational personas. My own travel preferences when I’m attending Phocuswire Europe in Barcelona are different from the trip I’m planning to the same city with my partner for an imminent significant birthday. In context of life stages, this celebratory trip is different from the one we took ten years ago, unrecognizable from the one twenty years ago.
But if we’re also looking at this example psychographically rather than demographically, then we are still the same tribe, give or take. We’re still “obligation meeters” (albeit with a different set of obligations to meet…).
So, the travel industry is at a point where travelers expect personalized options, but the technology to provide true 1:1 personalization, even before we even think about contextual and situational personas, is still under development. However, the smart money is on this changing and the transformation to hyper-personalization is coming soon, thanks to agentic AI.
The digital concierge, at last
Agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems, such as planning, booking and servicing a trip. An agentic AI tool will – with permission – know an individual traveler’s preferences based on signals from previous purchases, previous searches and a range of other data points which inform the decision-making process. It will be able to layer these data points with a situational and contextual understanding to bring up options appropriate for the trip being considered. It will learn the traveler’s response to its suggestions and get better with every interaction, every time.
Transformation at scale, at speed
As travelers we transition in synch with our life stages – generally speaking we don’t transform from a backpacking hostel-hopper to a suite-dwelling cruise-a-holic. If we do take that path, there are many transitions on the way.
Tech has come a long way during the first thirty years of the internet in allowing sellers and suppliers to put their inventory online and give travelers the tools to search, shop, book and pay for the many options available. But today we are at the very beginning of a new paradigm, where agentic AI is starting to do the curation on our behalf by understanding our preferences and knowing which signals to send out and which responses align most closely with our preferences for the trip we are taking.
Agentic AI has been framed as a disruptor with its potential to redefine touchpoints along travel’s path to purchase. My take is that, to coin a phrase, we are not there yet, but there is a growing inevitability that agentic AI will transform the travel industry because it can address the traveler on an individual basis, even on the contextual and situational level, by managing the complexity that characterizes our traveler preferences.
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are solely of contributing editor, Martin Cowen, and do not necessarily express the views of Amadeus.
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