As the pace of change continues to accelerate, understanding the world around us can pose new challenges. Nowhere is this truer than in the travel sector, which has been significantly reshaped over the past three years and continues to evolve quickly.
What was true yesterday may no longer be the case tomorrow.
Over the coming decade we can only expect this process to continue, as new technologies, a growing desire for sustainability, evolving personal priorities and a multitude of other factors impact the industry.
How, then, will we travel in ten years’ time?
Traveler Tribes 2033, the latest research study from travel technology leader Amadeus, endeavors to find out, to look into the future and see what the traveler of tomorrow might look like. It does so by examining the future forces of change transforming travel, alongside emerging traveler traits, behaviors and preferences, in order to understand exactly what travelers might want a decade from now.
The research
Northstar Research Partners was commissioned to lead the study. We surveyed 10,345 travelers in 15 key markets - including the UK, USA, India and China - asking a total of 248,323 questions to compile nearly six million data points in all. This information formed the basis of the research and was combined with input from 22 experts in different fields to create solid foundations for our findings.
We used research techniques inspired by the Institute for the Future as we carried out our survey. These included asking travelers about what they expect their age, income and family status will be in 2033, written exercises to open their mind up about what life could be like in a decade from now and priming them with a written description of what will impact travel in 2033. All of this was aimed to get people in a future-facing mindset to think about travel in 10 years’ time.
Asking travelers how they think other people will behave in 2033, rather than how they will behave, was also important. Research from the Centre for Decision Research at the University of Chicago has shown this to be a more accurate way of understanding peoples’ behavior.
With these results we outlined four Traveler Tribes we expect to see emerge as we move toward 2033 – using a segmentation process we believe to be the first of its kind.
Segmenting based on behavior biases and future behavior
As we have seen, travel continues to change, but the way we understand the traveler is not keeping pace. Distinctions which appear easy to apply, like ‘business’ and ‘leisure’ are no longer totally sufficient to capture the motivations of a traveler – and we believe the segmentation of travelers needs to capture the new reality.
Historical methods of traveler segmentations have lacked nuance. For example, they did not leave room for changes in attitudes over time, lacking future-proofing, while they also relied on outdated identifiers such as gender, age and location.
For Traveler Tribes 2033 we thought the time was right to try a new, unique segmentation: one based on behavioral traits.
In a process of ‘recombinant innovation,’ we sought to take the best thinking from two relevant fields – future forecasting and behavioral science – to create a new way of segmenting travelers. We hoped to create a balanced view, using the credibility of behavioral science with the less predictable understanding of future behavior. I mentioned earlier that things such as technology and attitudes towards sustainability will change over time. But one thing that’s unlikely to change is the way we make decisions. We know this because psychological experiments first conducted over 100 years ago have been repeated in the last few years – in new surroundings, in modern environments – and returned similar results.
This is the first-time segmentation based on behavioral attitudes and future behavior has been done – certainly in the travel industry and potentially in any sector. We were delighted with the results and the impact Traveler Tribes 2033 has had.
The work has allowed us to take a longer-term view of how travelers may behave in the coming decade. While attitudes are transient over time, the behavioral attitudes which impact the way travelers think and take decisions can be longer-lasting, allowing for a more accurate understanding of the future.
Traveler Tribes 2033
Using these methods, we identified the four Traveler Tribes Amadeus has been exploring over the past few weeks –
Travel Tech-fluencers ,Memory Makers ,Excited Experientialists andPathfinding Pioneers .
These groups move beyond simple, traditional classifications of age, gender, location and socioeconomic position. Traveler Tribes 2033, for the first time, was able to identify individuals based on their psychological traits, their willingness to travel, explore and seek adventure and how such things will be impacted by new technologies as they emerge.
With this information, Amadeus is in a position to work with its partners to respond to the changing needs of travelers in the coming decade, to create the solutions that will offer better journeys.
As the world changes, so must we.
Which Traveler Tribe are you?
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