Know The Endemic Traveller: Longer Stays, Hyper Focused, Higher Spending
WITH the rapid rollout of vaccination in Asia Pacific (APAC), many countries are preparing to live in an endemic phase, and opening their borders to their people to travel abroad.
This development has given rise to the endemic traveller who is prioritising leisure travel because they have been in lockdowns for months and are vacation-deprived.
Hermione Joye, sector lead, travel & vertical search APAC at Google, reveals this when sharing insights on changing traveller demands in APAC culled from research done by Google based on apps and consumer-based data at last week’s WiT Experience Singapore 2021.
According to the study, people are booking multiple trips as they fear going back to lockdown, which means they are spending more. Over 80% of consumers in India and Indonesia are showing a strong preference for luxury travel, while in Australia and Japan it is around 60%, which Joye described as a “phenomenon”.
Average length of stay has extended dramatically since 2019, from three-and-half days to five days (85% of the respondents), with one in four travellers planning to spend over two weeks.
Post-Covid travellers are also hyper focused and do not want to travel through multiple countries across South-east Asia like before the pandemic. “What we’re seeing is a strong preference, particularly out of Australia and very heavily out of Japan, for very focused travel to just one to two countries,” Joye says.
Covid has also brought complexity in travel planning, and it now takes around almost 20% longer to book a trip due to requirements like vaccination and taking PRC (polymerase chain reaction) tests.
Joye lists two reasons why travel suppliers have to heed these trends.
