Cath Urquhart, the travel editor of The Times, had an article in the Saturday edition about the importance of the 50+. You can read it for free for the next 7 days (search on her name).
The main examples used in the article were:
Holiday companies have for years railroaded travellers into artificial groups based solely on age. Thomson Holidays only this week abandoned its Young at Heart brochure, aimed at the 55-plus group, after research showed that its customers did not like to be thus labelled (or indeed patronised).
Surprisingly, it was only this year that Saga, the over-50s specialist, launched its Go For It programme of activities — such as scuba diving in Borneo — which tacitly acknowledges that interest, rather than age, is more likely to be the rationale people use when booking a trip.
Smart companies such as Inntravel know this. Some 75 per cent of its customers are aged 45 to 70, and love its emphasis on active breaks without the hassle — such as walking tours with luggage transported between hotels. But there is no mention of age in its brochures.
Coach holiday specialist Wallace Arnold has caught on. Tours of China are among new offerings for 2005, and a 16-day trip around Russia is one of its bestsellers. The new sales supremo Karen Gee admits that they had to change: “It’s as if we were offering the kind of holidays we thought older people should be taking, rather than the ones they want to take. Older people are more active and adventurous — now retirement is not about closing down, but going to all the places you have wanted to visit.”
I will be speaking at the World Travel Market in a couple of weeks time and will post links to my presetation on this blog. Dick Stroud:www.20plus30.com
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