Loving Travel Almost as Much as Family
It's a bit startling to learn that our passion for travel is second only to our passion for our families.
I learned this from travel trade sites which often have more interesting things to say than consumer travel publications or sites.
The content on Travel Weekly and, say, Hotelmarketing.com is more readable , more useful than many travel consumer sites and publications that stretch for hyperbole when describing blue Caribbean waters or some village in Spain.
So when Hotelmarketing ran its list of top stories for 2011, they were interesting because they were gritty choices: Why hotels shouldn’t sell a $200 room for fifty bucks, or Dysfunctional hotel websites.
But when Ypartners , a key analyst of travel trends, posted their snapshot of traveling Americans, I learned about American's love affair with travel.
The survey of 2,500 adults looked at the travel habits, preferences and intentions of American leisure travelers and found that we Americans have a deep commitment to travel.
In fact, Ypartners reported that Americans treasure their leisure and vacation time - citing travel as their number two passion behind family.
It’s also true that incentive programs find travel to be more “incentivizing” than money because, as one CEO said, money goes to pay the bills.
Travel builds memories and thus loyalty to the company handing out the incentive reward.
According to Y’s Portrait of American Travelers here's who we are :
• We are smarter consumers. More than three-quarters of U.S. consumers (77 percent) say they have become smarter shoppers thanks to today's economic situation
• Among leisure travelers who have used the Internet to obtain travel information or to make a reservation, more than eight in ten say the most desirable features in a travel-service supplier website are the ability to check the lowest fares/rates (84 percent) and the lowest price/rate guarantee (82 percent)
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