Published December 2014

The third New Horizons survey of global youth travel organised by the World Youth Student and Educational Travel Confederation (WYSE Travel Confederation) aims to provide an overview of the global youth & student travel market, which was estimated to include over 200 million international trips in 2012.The New Horizons research is the only consistent global survey of this important market. Since 2002 the survey has expanded in both scale and scope, and now represents responses from over 34,000 travellers in late 2012 and early 2013, drawn from 137 different countries.

WYSE Travel Confederation’s New Horizons III survey, conducted in the second half of 2012, indicated that language travel was a major motivation for over 20% of young travellers. This is a considerable increase when compared with only 3% in the 2007 New Horizons II study.This specialised extract of data from the New Horizons III 2013 survey of youth travellers contains unweighted data from 2,108 young travellers from all world regions who travelled in 2012.

Key takeaways

For the purpose of providing more customised reports relating to specific youth travel industry sectors, this report provides an analysis of the data collected from young travellers that participated in the New Horizons III survey and indicated that learning a language was a very important motivation for their trip. Language travel has become a major market for a number of youth travel destinations around the world, particularly as the effects of the economic downturn cause more young people to think about developing their skills through travel.