Over the past 2 years, I have tuned into numerous promotional webinars geared for travel agents and have attended several travel-related events that discuss innovation in the future of travel and guess what…
Things are still being done the exact same way as before.
Answer me this: If an industry was flipped upside down and a whole new set of values and pain points exist for its consumers over a 2-year span, should we be marketing and serving those consumers in the same exact way as before?
Let me help you… the answer is no.
This is why I don’t understand why tourism and hospitality companies are “training” travel agents or providing promotional and educational resources to help with their sales strategies in the same manner as before.
As if the reasons why people travel, where they go, how long they go for, what they look for, what they value, what they need, what kind of experiences they desire, how they spend their money, and how they spend the time, haven’t changed.
Because it all has.
For an industry like tourism and hospitality that has billions of dollars dumped into innovation and marketing every year to be so far behind in giving people what they truly want AND for an industry that has the foundation of people (human beings) to not touch on people’s emotions and motivating factors for a travel experience, is beyond me.
In today’s world of travel agent portals and webinars, I hear and see cruise lines, hotels, and destinations spend the majority of their time touching on things like pools, amenities, spas, gyms, comfy beds, room size, square footage, types of restaurants available, transportation logistics, and generic tourism attractions like museums and amusement parks.
When instead, they should be training travel agents on how to touch on potential client’s human emotions and their underlying desire for wanting (or needing) to go on a trip based on what that brand has to offer.
People make purchasing decisions based on their emotions. How they feel. People seek a feeling, a result, an outcome, or a transformation of some sort.
This is what the industry is lacking.
Travelers don’t go somewhere because they want an experience. They go somewhere because they seek fulfillment, human connection, soul-searching, answers, inspiration, quality time building bonds with loved ones, a change of routine, to find their passions or purpose in life, to get a mental break from work, to feel better, and far more meaningful reasons for traveling.
This is all based on research that I have conducted for over a decade.
The problem is that tourism and hospitality brands haven’t identified what it is that they are actually selling and providing people with because it is NOT an experience. That’s the overall process from point A to point Z, pre and post trip.
Until companies can figure that out, travel agents will continue to struggle to sell their destination, property, or “experience” as they sink deeper into the hole of the overly-saturated and surface-leveled approach to selling travel.
It’s 2022. It’s time to reshape how and why people travel.
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