It’s time to stop categorising clients based on their date of birth, says Giles Hawke, chief executive of Cosmos and chairman of Atas
What’s this unhealthy obsession we seem to have with age? We have holidays for the over-50s, cruise lines aimed at younger customers and youth tour operators.
We have constant questions about the average age of holidaymakers and we fixate over communicating with customers based on how old they are.
As I get older I am very aware that this is an extremely skewed way of looking at people. Surely we should look at individuals by what they do, how they think, what they like, what they want and what they need. Of course there are probably some elements of any experience that may be more relevant to people at different stages of life, but this is just one of myriad influences affecting what people do on their holidays.
Age is just a number
I’m starting to get a bit fed up with the constant fixation over whether cruise passengers’ average age is coming down or whether a certain type of holiday is suitable only for people of a certain age. The answers are both yes and no to these. But the point is, it doesn’t matter what age you are – what matters is that the holiday you go on reflects the things you really enjoy.
That could be lying on a beach, raving in a nightclub, zip-lining above the trees or painting watercolours in Monet’s garden. What has the date on your birth certificate got to do with this? Nothing.
Millennials, generation X, generation K, baby boomers and all of these other titles used to describe people in different age groups are useful on some level, as they allow us to talk in very general terms about people in varying age brackets. But at a very fundamental human level they miss the point: I know 70-year-olds who are first on the ski slopes and last off, and I know 20-year-olds who are into culture and history.
Basing our thinking around age feels like a very blunt and misleading way of thinking about customers in such a data-rich era.
Change your way of thinking
I never wanted to travel with a youth operator when I was young and I have no desire to travel with a company for more mature travellers as I get older. I want to travel with a company that recognises me as an individual, that doesn’t have any interest in my age and that enables me to do all the things I want to do, regardless of the year I was born and the (patronising) title applied to me because of that.
We need to focus on customer needs and wants as opposed to media-driven messages trying to create a subset of age-related individuals.
So, I’ll leave you with this thought: let’s reconsider how we categorise our customer groups and change our ways of thinking about the holidays we provide and who we sell them to.