Millennials will soon surpass aging baby boomers in population and are in the eye of many marketers. They are free with money, though perhaps not flush with it and are a prime travel market. So given that they have more or less spawned the “sharing” economy” you’d think that they’d be prime customers for such services like airbnb. Not so.
The Resonance Consultancy recently published this blurb on their website.
“With 74 million adults age 18-34 in the United States alone, Millennials represent nearly a quarter of the entire U.S. population and will soon surpass the ageing Baby Boomers in size.
This enigmatic group has been identified, stereotyped and analyzed in myriad and often contradictory ways. They’re selfish and they’re sharing; they’re lazy and they’re entrepreneurial. They’re labelled “boomerang” kids, yet some are just barely old enough to have left their parents’ home in the first place. Across the board, though, we discovered that Millennial travelers don’t easily fit any single stereotype we’ve heard about. In fact, Millennials who travel are quite different than Millennials as a whole.
To better understand the tastes and preferences of the U.S. Millennial traveler, Resonance Consultancy conducted an online survey with 1,189 recent travelers aged 18 to 34 in November 2014″
In an article from tnooz we learned the rest.
” The biggest difference from common wisdom is that shared accommodation listing services such as Airbnb were the least popular choice for accommodation. And that’s despite the fact that 40% of the surveyed Millennials used the service often or regularly yet only 11% said that it was a preferred option, eclipsed by hotels (54%), friends and family (37%) or camping (24%).
For hotels, this heartening result must be backed up with a complete understanding of what this specific demographic expects from the hotel experience. Of course, different surveys feature different results, but one commonality is now the full expectation of free internet access.”
To me the takeaway from this is if you want to attract this group, if you are a campground, a lodge, a motel, hostel, even a bed and breakfast, make sure that you offer free wifi and let it be known. If you can enhance the wifi with extra speed or bandwidth, so much the better.
Other useful tidbits from the article are,
“Another common theme in the “targeting Millennials” rulebook is that this demographic covets large social spaces over large rooms. This means that the rooms can get smaller while the social areas grow. While “privacy” is a broad term that also could mean a desire to simply escape, there is still nonetheless an innate desire for privacy within this demographic.”
“The popularity of “all-inclusive packages” should also be noted, given that this hotel package has traditionally been seen as less desirable by the in-the-know generation. Perhaps there is now a time for design-forward hotels to reconsider how food and beverage play into the wider picture for guests of a certain age.”
Read the full story at