Aito tour operators and agents are being urged to focus current marketing efforts on ‘innovators’ – the first customers likely to travel first post-pandemic.
The Specialist Travel Association (Aito) said innovators were likely to be existing and past customers and will help to drive the recovery of travel in the short term.
Speaking at the results of the Aito Travel Insights Survey 2021, operator and agent members of the association were told they were “sitting on a mountain of value” and needed to tap into ‘innovators’ to capitalise on pent-up demand for travel.
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In the survey, which was conducted from January to March this year and had 28,500 respondents, all clients of Aito companies, around 16% of respondents said they would be “among the first to travel again”, in other words ‘innovators’. Around 64% aid they would travel once they felt the time was right. These were dubbed ‘early adopters’.
Roy Barker, data strategy consultant of Spike Insight, which analysed the survey results, said: “When travel restarts it will be driven by people you already know; customers you already have. The vast majority are still there and want to buy from you when they can.”
He added: “Innovators are people who said in the survey they will be amongst the first to travel; they are desperate to get out there. If you are going to invest anything in marketing, invest it in them, not in pay-per-click.”
Innovators are categorised as affluent, younger Aito clients, most likely to be in the 50-59 or 60-69 age groups, who see holidays as a necessity. They are likely to be customers who have booked recently and will book again.
Around 94% of ‘innovators’ segmented separately in the survey data ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that holidays were an essential part of their lifestyle while 36% said they planned to travel more than they did before the pandemic, and go longhaul if they could (almost 60%).
In terms of the concerns of ‘innovators’, in comparison with Aito’s other clients, they were less concerned about infection rates in destinations and more concerned about going into quarantine when they returned, said Barker.
Spike Insight said it could help Aito members find their local ‘innovators’ using data analytics to determine the most likely postcodes they lived in.
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