Home  About Us From the Editor Family-Friends Front & Forward in Upscale Travel - A Conversation with Mary Gostelow
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Family-Friends Front & Forward in Upscale Travel - A Conversation with Mary Gostelow |
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We began our recent report on ‘Family Travel Rising’ with the following:
“All the evidence -- whether you are looking at the Amex-Harrison Group study we reviewed in our last issue, or the Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluence Report completed in September, -- shows Family First when it comes to disposable dollars.
We believe family focus is going to be front of mind for a long time to come, long after the punishing economic climate has subsided. Provider brands will be hard pressed to provide much more than kiddie or junior, or young adult activities. Smart travel agents will have to rise to higher levels of creativity and performance on the family front to sustain customer loyalty and earn the benefits of word of mouth in the neighborhood.”
And last week we caught our favorite global traveler-editor-writer-commentator during a quiet moment at home in England, the home of The Gostelow Report. She shared these thoughts:
• The hotel industry has been very slow to realize that this big expansion in family travel was going to happen. We’ve had “connecting rooms and you can put the kids next door”. They moved on to two swimming pools rather than one. One was kid friendly and one was not. But we really haven’t had anything more than that.
• We are seeing more and more bigger family groups. Operators are having a real challenge coping with such groups because it’s not a group per se, but they form their own groups. They want to be private. They want their own thing. .They tend to do their own excursions. They suddenly want a bus to take them all out. So it’s a real, real challenge. And so far the hotel industry has not realized this is happening. Now, it’s not only families. We’re also seeing more and more groups of friends traveling. And the hotel industry is not incentivizing enough – say a pair of DINKs come- Double-Income-No-Kids. There’s no incentive to them at the moment to bring along two other friends or even four other friends. And there’s big potential on the marketing side there.
• So families have always been taken in the past to mean just traveling with your children. Well, that’s not true any longer. Families are all kinds of different generations, and they also extend into friends rather than family. And this will continue for a myriad of reasons.
• Hershel, you used the term “family experience”, and it is about the experience. The word luxury is not being used at all, but it’s about maximizing life, maximizing time and experiences. Whether or not the experiences are great market shopping, whether or not they are soft or extreme adventures, or seeing something that you’ve never seen before. Experiences that you will be able to have lovely memories of for a long time afterwards. The travel experience is clearly the new collectible.
• So we’re seeing a big rise towards the experience factor. And it’s perfectly possible for travel agents to look for more and more experiences rather than just selling a destination. And it’s perfectly possible for hoteliers to come up with the most amazing experiences – even if they’re in the center of a city somewhere, there are lots of experiences.
More upcoming content and Gostelow – Sarbin commentary on Luxury no-no’s in the new marketing climate.
Read more conversations with Mary Gostelow
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