Understanding today's travellers

Who are the tourists of today? What are they looking for when they travel? How do they book their holidays? How do they prefer travelling? How important is pricing for them?

Answering these basic questions correctly is essential for all leading tourism destinations wherever they are based - Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. Countries that manage to deliver travelling experiences that today's tourists want both in terms of quality and price are doing well. In less than a month's time, in Berlin, the main conference of the world's leading travel trade show, the ITB Fair, will be addressing these questions.

Recently the Pisa Forum tackled the same issues and came up with these conclusions: "More and more people are 'cash-rich' and 'time-poor'. They have less time to travel for leisure purposes, but they want to ensure that their trips create a memorable experience - one they can savour for a long time. While today's consumers increasingly demand better quality tourism products, it is paradoxical that the majority are still constantly on the lookout for 'price deals'. Pricing clearly remains crucial."

This is an important consideration that local tourism policymakers must keep in mind as they have the illusion that today what counts is competing on quality and not on price. They have come to the dangerous conclusion that Malta can no longer compete on price and must now compete on quality. We have to compete on both quality and price, which means that while we innovate and improve our product and services we must also ensure that the price is right. Government has contributed to make our tourism product more expensive and less competitive by piling up taxes and other government-induced costs that are threatening the viability of most of our tourism operators.

The Pisa Forum also concluded: "Today's leisure travellers, who comprise more singles, more female travellers, more grandparents travelling with their grandchildren, and more large family units (several generations) are much less concerned about which they destination they visit, which means they tend to be less loyal to destinations than they ever were in the past."

This is the profile of many of today's tourists coming from the main source world markets: "In this age of environmental changes and the increasingly widespread awareness of the need to be more 'green', authenticity is also of growing importance to holidaymakers than ever before. They want more interaction with local people and a more emotional and cultural link to the people and communities they visit."

We must give today's tourists an encounter with an authentic Malta and Gozo in terms of food, culture and landscape. Imitating blindly what other countries do and burying more of our islands under more ugly concrete does not create the memorable destination that today's tourists are looking for.

Today's tourists are less influenced by marketing and PR hype. The spread of the internet and the growth of broadband and mobile devices are also stimulating new consumer interaction and enable travellers to share their experiences of destinations and suppliers with other Internet users.

This trend should make our tourism policymakers and operators believe less in the automatic power of traditional marketing to deliver clients and focus more on the actual product that we offer. We should monitor well the travellers' virtual fora that provide feedback on destinations and take the necessary steps to address any shortcomings and negative criticism.

Giving them what they want

Today's travellers want more control in organizing their trips, especially when they travel for leisure. Online booking and low-cost airlines are empowering travellers to customise their travel plans and be more flexible in their demands instead of ready-made, organised package holidays. According to the Pisa Forum this trend is even apparent in China, where young educated Chinese demand more flexibility instead of organised package holidays.

Two of our main markets are Britain and Germany. Both the British and the Germans are increasingly using the Internet to make their travel bookings. The share of actual Internet-booked trips of total trip volume is 27 per cent for Germans and 50 per cent for British tourists. Even tour operators are waking up to this new reality and are now creating new dynamic packaging capabilities as they know that booking online is easy, quick and often a lot cheaper than buying traditional tour packages.

More German and British tourists are taking low-fare flights for their holidays. In 2005 the share of low-fare trips in total air travel volume reached 27 per cent. In Britain alone, more than half of outgoing tourists are using low-cost flights. We need to understand today's tourists and design the appropriate products and services for them and provide them with the booking facilities and affordable air links that they want.

A glance at the statistics of world tourism in 2006 published by the World Tourism Organisation (UN-WTO) a fortnight ago shows how we are lagging behind while the rest of the world moves ahead. France emerged as the world's top tourism destination in 2006, receiving nearly 80 million visitors. Spain came in second with 58.4 million tourist arrivals, while Europe welcomed 457 million tourists. The US and China followed France and Spain; however, many experts agree that China is expected to become the main competitor of the French from this year onwards.

Last year Morocco and Tunisia registered a six per cent increase in the tourism sector in the Mediterranean region, but Turkey reported a seven per cent drop, and Malta and Israel went down four per cent.

The UN-WTO report revealed that 842 million tourists travelled all over the world in 2006, 4.5 per cent more than in 2005. The total number of tourists visiting Malta and Gozo last year was down 46,377 over 2005, which was already a poor year. The islands welcomed 1,124,233 tourists in 2006 compared to 1,170,610 in 2005. This decrease mainly reflected fewer tourists from the country's core markets - the United Kingdom, Germany and France, while the number of tourists from Italy, Russia and Denmark rose during the year.

What is worrying for this year and more so for next year is the impact that the Schengen visa regime is going to have on our tourism flows from non-EU countries like Russia, as visa on arrival is being phased out before the end of this year and Malta will have to build an expensive network of visa offices at the point of departure if we do not want a drastic drop in tourists from growing markets like Russia.

evaristbartolo@hotmail.com