Economic hurricanes, eco-disasters, local wars and global terrorism should scary the hell out of everybody, and much more those who want to visit unstable regions or unknown destinations. Remember, less about you know about something, more it seems dangerous to you. But is that true?
The stats prove just the opposite. What will continue to fall down are the brainless 3 weeks vacations on a polluted beach or overpriced ski package in top rated resorts. But those who travel the world to enjoy the diversities of other cultures are more and more, and they spend more and more.
Here are my predictions:
The geographies of tourism are moving definitely to the East and to destination with cultural values rather than pure vacation only. In the first 5 months, the travel to Middle East from the USA increased 50%, while the overall international US travel increased only 3%. Travel to Eastern Europe increased in 2007 with 6%. And, as OTTI says: “If travel to the PRC was combined with Hong Kong, China would have been third.” (Understand after the UK and Italy).
The new comers on the market will continue to experience double digit outbound tourism growth. For 2 consecutive years, Russia increased his outbound tourists with 13-14%. Only for the first half of this year almost reached the number of international travel of the USA – almost 16 million people. (Don’t forget that the population of Russia is some 50 million less than the one of the USA.)
Cultural activities during business and short vacation/city-escape travel will continue to grow, thus increasing the value of the cultural tourism within business or recreational frame.
Quoting the OTTI again, in their analysis for 2007 international traveler profile: Top leisure activities for U.S. travelers other than dining in restaurants and shopping were: visiting historical places, sightseeing in cities, visiting small towns and villages, touring the countryside and visiting cultural heritage sites.
Social networks and Web 2.0. websites will continue to contribute to the information, decision making and ultimately, result in booking action. Flickr.com offers 2.9 million geotaged photos, and more than 7 million photos tagged with “Travel”. Dopplr.com, tripadvisor.com, tripwolf.com and others are creating facebook.com apps to serve the millions on the social networks. National tourism offices offer advertising on youtube.com, which boosts with 300,000+ videos tagged with “travel”.
Note: social networks marketing had proven inefficient for large-scale buying promotions, but very useful for niche advertising. Therefore we will see specific targeting such as archeology tourism, ceramics making tours, wine tours, etc. out of the mainstream cultural heritage tourism.
To be continued…
