Understanding the Psyche of Tomorrow's Travellers | PATA

Young Australians may never visit a bricks and mortar travel agency because it is "not in their psyche", according to Scott Blume, Chief Executive of PATA member Zuji.

As reported by 'Travel Today', Mr Blume (pictured) told a travel technology conference that while online travel agents had captured 20% market share in Australia, they had yet to fully capitalise on the younger demographic, particularly when it comes to social networking sites such as Facebook.

Meanwhile, in the US, prospective college roommates have already checked each other out on social networking sites, where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world, according to the 11th annual Beloit College Mindset List.

Almost 2 million first-year students are now heading off to colleges around the US. Beloit College in Wisconsin says that these future travellers were "born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; the Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East."

It is a multicultural, politically correct and "green" generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact, nor known much about the Cold War (until, perhaps, this month).

They have grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, where landline telephones are considered a waste of space as they live on their cell phones and communicate via texting.