Where Do You Find Your Travel Inspiration?
By Robert McGarvey
Booking.com wants to know and it has developed research that aims to identify where you and I come up with our ideas about our future travels.
There’s also the question: have new information modalities rewritten the results? Is TikTok the beginning and end of travel inspiration?
Speaking for myself. I can say I have never looked at TikTok for anything. I’m not dissing it, just yawning at its mention. I know others think differently, so be it.
So what do the Booking.com numbers have to tell us?
The show stopping chart result is that in the lead is what has always been in the lead. That’s because 45% of us say we get travel ideas from friends/family.
Of course we do, we always have and that “we” is the broad word meaning people, all of us. A friend comes back from walking the Camino de Santiago and talks your ears off about that pilgrimage and soon you are planning your own walk across Spain because that is how inspiration works. We take it from trusted sources and the key word is trusted.
Of course not everybody we know is a reliable source. But we know who among our relatives and exaggerates, who lies, who always is in full bore Panglossian mode.
we also know, because we know the people, whose tastes are utterly dissimilar from our own.
We also know who we’ve listened to in the past and it’s been worthwhile.
But we also pay attention to other sources.
For instance: What’s in second place with 39% of us tabbing it: social media. Personally, tho, I see this as a subset of friends and family. Those are the people whose posts I glance at and might believe. There is no way I am reading and certainly I’m not believing some stray influencer’s insistence that I really ought to vacation in Albania because it’s like Greece but cheaper (and, yeah, there are such posts). Now there is a good reason to be interested in Albania – it was the planet’s most isolated and poorest nation for many decades after WW II. In this century it has taken steps to join the rest of us and that’s probably an intriguing course to witness. And the location, above Greece and across from southern Italy, is spectacular.
But what I see in social media that’s posted by paid influencers is dross. I skip it. But I do look at travel posts by friends and family and they look at mine.
Quite probably the top two on the Booking list surprise no one.
Where the Booking.com numbers get genuinely interesting are at the bottom of the list. Travel agents and tour operators come in at third from the bottom with 17% of us giving a hoot about what they say. That means roughly five of six us don’t listen to them. Sure, I see the headlines in travel trade publications that tout the resurgence in use of travel agents. But the Booking numbers throw shade on that thesis.
And then the results really sting.
That’s because in next to last place – with 14% paying attention – are newspaper and magazine articles. 86% don’t look at such stories and if they do they don’t heed the suggestions. Ouch. That number makes me glad that although I have written thousands of magazine and newspaper articles I’d guess that under 5% dealt with travel destinations. Sure, I did write some but mainly I wrote about business and tech and credit unions and real things, not where you should go on vacation this summer because, honestly, I have no idea what you should do.
In that vein, by the way, I’ll tell you I am going to Spain which has emerged as my go to place to get out of the US. But I won’t tell you much more about it because apparently you don’t care what I have to say.
Speaking of which is that last place – with just 10% of us saying they get good travel advice from this source- are podcasts. Whew. I do a podcast – the CU 2.0 Podcast – but it is not about travel, but credit unions. There are maybe 400 shows in the library and I don’t believe I have ever offered travel commentary.
Which is good because you wouldn’t pay any attention.