Around this time last year, we started hearing about a potentially dangerous virus in Asia that could potentially alter our clients’ travel plans.
I don’t need to recap for you what happened after that.
For many of us, it has been more than a year since we’ve been able to travel freely, as we had been accustomed to.
The travel trade is still going through its reckoning as a result of taking a year off, and there are plenty of pundits out there offering people like me advice on how to survive and reinvent ourselves as the situation drags on.
In reality, we’ve spent most of the past year re-booking our clients’ cancelled travel plans. The downside of this is we only get paid after a client completes their trip (ouch!).
The upside has been that working with clients on their vacation plans is the truly fun part of this business. So, when the pundits started telling us that we needed to reach out to Millennials because they were more willing the travel in the past year, we briefly considered the idea… before soundly rejecting it.
Here’s why:
We feel a particular association with our clients.
It’s true that YOU – our clients – come from all over the country with a wide variety of opinions and world views, but there are a few common threads that join all of you together:
- You mostly fall in the 55 – 75+ year-old age group. Bob and I are both part of this cohort, so perhaps that’s why we were resistant to dealing with Millennials (although I’m sure many of them are delightful).
- You like to do a lot of your own research, and navigate the internet well in order to do so. We are often very impressed by the questions we receive.
- Many of you have done independent travel in the past, but now prefer to have many of the frictions of independent travel taken out. This is what makes you gravitate to cruising and packaged tours. Sleeping in a train station in Europe provides great stories to tell after the trip, but most of our clients are well past such heroics (and so are we!)
- You have an urgency to travel. Some people express this is “we need to go while we can”. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that we really DO need to do the things we want while they are still available.
- You are not necessarily looking for the cheapest product out there, but you do want to understand that you’re receiving good value. River cruises (about half our business), and small ship ocean cruises (the next 40%) are not cheap, but they do offer additional value for the additional cost. The story we often hear is from our clients who end up taking their grandchildren on one of the mega-sized floating amusement parks out of Florida. While there’s no doubt these cruises are incredibly cheap, our clients can hardly wait to get back on board a river ship or small ocean vessel where they’ll be “treated like a lady” (as Bob likes to say).
So, what’s next?
- You – our clients – are optimistic about returning to travel, but also pragmatic. In some cases, that will mean waiting a few more months.
- Many of you have European River cruises planned for this summer and fall. All the indications we have now are that those ships will sail as scheduled.
- You have also used the pandemic to expand your horizons. While many of our clients have been avid cruisers for years, many are now also exploring packaged land tour options as well.
- We’re seeing particular interest in rail trips – both in North America, and in Europe.
- Domestic travel continues to drive the “immediate-travel” market. We get daily phone calls asking what’s available in the next month or two. Sometimes the answer is a Mississippi river cruise, other times a National Parks Tour, sometimes it’s a week at a Ranch or Spa. Cruisers are mixing things up!
As bad as it can be here at home, we must never forget that there are many people living less fortunate lives in other countries.
We need to remember that besides being responsible for 1 in 10 jobs in the US, the travel industry does a very effective job of redistributing some level of wealth from rich countries to those still developing economically. It is vitally important for us to get back out there as soon as it is safe to do so.
Thank you for sticking with us this past year. We’d love to help you with your next trip whenever you’re ready.
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I look forward to hearing from you.
Sue Bradley
Sue Bradley
