Breaking the myth of a global millennial travel generation

Webinars

Manchester, United Kingdom — 22-25 September 2009

Breaking the millennial travel myth

Speaker: Prof. Greg Richards, WYSE Travel Confederation

Recorded on 12 February 2020

The travel industry continues to add adjectives to its list of purposeful travel themes: transformative, eco, wellness, immersive, local, solo, and so on. At the same time, the media enjoy portraying millennials as one of the first unified, global generations with a common set of characteristics, habits, and bucket lists when it comes to travel. How true can that be? Are millennials a truly global generation of travellers? Hardly!

This presentation shares the results of an analysis of two global surveys of travellers aged 35 and younger, WYSE Travel Confederation’s Millennial Traveller and New Horizons surveys. The analysis uncovered four dimensions of motivation that suggest travel motivations are not just individual, but context related – and that there is not a global generation of or singular truth when it comes to ‘millennial travellers’.

During this session we will uncover the regional differences in the travel motivations of millennials and highlight some of the unique combinations of factors (age, origin and destination) and their influence on travel. You’ll also learn more about WYSE Travel Confederation’s research on other aspects of international travel and the youth and student segment.

Speaker

Greg Richards is Professor of Placemaking and Events at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and Research Advisor to WYSE Travel Confederation. He has extensive experience in tourism research and education and has worked on a variety of projects with WYSE Travel Confederation, UNWTO, OECD, and with numerous national governments, national tourism organisations and municipalities. Professor Richards has held previous posts at London Metropolitan University (UK), University of Tilburg (NL), Universitat Roviria I Virgili, Tarragona (ES) and the University of the West of England (UK).