What should the group travel industry be doing over the next five years to burnish its reputation and make itself attractive to new travelers?
Dale: We started this year what we call the Innovation Lab. It’s a partnership with the MBA school at Cornell University, and we had MBA students tackle the question of whether millennials should matter to our members today. We learned that what millennials are looking for is very consistent to what baby boomers are looking for.
As an industry, we should stop marketing to demographics and start marketing and focusing on psychographics. Millennials are very open to working with tour operators. They want to be able to customize and individualize their experiences. We shouldn’t be turning our backs on the millennials because they have the potential to be a customer today. But we need to rethink how we go out and communicate based on psychographics.
Assante: Statistically speaking, all of the demographics are showing that future travelers are going to be coming from urban, diverse populations. This year’s kindergarten class, when they graduate high school, will be the first class where white students are in the minority, so we have to start today building an affinity for travel in these communities.
That’s where the SYTA Youth Foundation is dedicating its efforts to build travel experiences for these diverse students. The National Parks Promotion Council and SYTA are working on a program to connect urban, diverse populations with the National Park Service, which will be celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2016. That’s how dedicated we are to building travel in the future.
Prather: It goes back to delivering unique experiences. We need to look at different markets. What experiences are people wanting to get involved with? Active adventure? Voluntourism? Sports tourism? Culinary? It’s looking at what’s trending and what’s hot and offering that.
We have to make that product available so that people see group travel as something that’s attractive to them. They’ll focus less on the fact that they’re with other people and more on the fact that they’re doing something that they love. Even people who see themselves as independent thinkers and doers love to travel with others of similar interests.
Pantuso: I’m always awestruck by the number of new travelers coming to motorcoaches who have never come here before, and they’re doing it in different ways. They’re doing it on scheduled, point-to-point service, and the average age is probably 30-ish. We need to give them experiences that fit their lifestyles; it might be a weekend at the beach or a trip to the mountains.
We also need to work to dispel the perception that you’re going to be herded with 50 other people. Everyone wants their own identity on that trip, and they want to find some individual time. We have to create that individuality within a group experience. The cruise lines figured it out 50 years ago: Giving people choices moves them away from being in a group and makes them feel like they’re having an individual experience. The more we can do that, the more likely we are to capture an entirely new market that maybe has avoided us before.
What does meaningful change look like for tourism? How is your organization hoping to have an impact on the industry over the next five years?
Prather: Travel and tourism has such an amazingly positive impact throughout the world. It creates jobs, makes a significant economic impact, reduces local tax impact and has this tremendous value of connecting cultures and opening minds. So to ensure that our industry can have its ultimate impact, we need to advocate on behalf of this industry and encourage our members to get involved at a local and federal level.
We want to make sure that we see the reauthorization of Brand USA; that’s one of our top legislative issues. Brand USA yielded about 1.1 million visitors last year that we can attribute directly to their efforts. Without that, we wouldn’t have had the additional $3.4 billion in visitor spending that was generated.
Pantuso: First is the tremendous number of new travelers coming into the country. Brand USA is looking to get 100 million coming to the United States, which would break all kinds of records and would be beneficial to everyone in the travel and tour industry.
We also want to find those new niches that fit different lifestyles, whether it’s for younger people, older people or different communities. Find the kind of experience that give people of two or three generations the opportunity to have a great time, but do so in their own way. And there are a whole lot of new folks coming into this country who live here who have never had an opportunity to see the vastness of it. So we can create tour products for new arrivals and tap into every demographic group and ethnic group. There can be a lot more of that, and it can spread very far.
Dale: We believe we’re making a difference in two areas. One is the Innovation Lab. We’ve made a commitment to this for the next five years. We want to create intelligence that our members don’t have access to on their own so that they can strengthen their business propositions.
The other thing is that everything we do goes through the Department of Transportation, and they have a rulemaking process to help consumer protection. But we want to make sure they understand any potential ramifications that their regulations may have on our members’ ability to conduct business. In the future, this is going to be a pretty significant factor.
Assante: The No. 1 priority for us is to work with the education community, teachers, school boards and administrators to make travel and experiential learning a key part of the educational experience. We’re focusing on providing research and data, and partnering with education to align those experiences.
U.S. Travel did a study and found that the travel impact on students helped them later in life. So SYTA has launched a major research study to help gauge the travel impact for students. This fall, we’ll be partnering with over 20 education associations and international and domestic tour operator associations to measure the scope and impact of student travel. It’s all in support of the alignment of education and travel; we’re trying to make travel sustainable for the future.
