Travel Blog - Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique & Luxury Hotels

As I pointed out on the Smith Travel Blog not long ago, we’ve spent the past few weeks conducting a wee survey into what people plan to do about their holidays now that the banks have turned our gold into straw. Well, more than 500 entries and one lucky winner of £500 in Smith hotel vouchers later, the results are in. At the Future Forum we held with Ilse Crawford and Dopplr not long ago, Tamara stepped up to offer her run-down of the results and Smith’s travel trend predictions for 2009.

This is what we found:

THE ECONOMY

Yes, belts are tighter, wallets are lighter and purses have been fitted with combination locks – 79% of respondents agreed that their travel plans had been affected by the financial maelstrom and that they would be actively looking for better offers when it came to booking their trips. Perhaps surprisingly, Smith hasn’t seen a reduction in the number of bookings at all, just a drop in the total value of bookings of about 20% – suggesting that travellers are making compromises, but not sacrifices. In 2009, we expect to see people adopting more intelligent travel strategies (similar to those we outlined in our credit-crunch beating travel tips recently), such as:

•    Travelling out of season or midweek, and becoming more flexible about dates in order to find cheaper deals or take advantage of increasing last-minute availability

•    Combining holidays with business trips (which we Smith types have turned into an art form)

•    Joining travel clubs, and making use of air miles, etc

•    Choosing destinations with weak exchange rates (Zimbabwe, anyone?)

•    Maximising mini-breaks – stretching out that long weekend by another night, instead of taking the traditional two-weeker

•    Travelling with friends to share costs, leading to a boom in self-catering stays next year.

THE ENVIRONMENT

Although eco considerations are now playing second fiddle to economic ones, 80% said that a hotel’s green policies remained a significant influence on their travel habits, especially when it comes to return visits. A lot of people are irked by obvious wastage and hotels’ failure to make use of locally available ingredients. Hotels should take note if they want to ensure repeat business. Some cleary are – Shanghai’s Urbn hotel (pictured) is China’s first carbon-neutral retreat.

OTHER FINDINGS

Tamara also listed a few of the other trends unearthed by the survey:

•    Friends’ recommendations and user-fed review sites are the biggest factor when it comes to travel research

•    The quality and quantity of mobile travel content is improving, and more popular

•    80% of people don’t care what ‘type’ of hotel they stay in (boutique, luxury, b&b, etc), as long as it’s individual, unique and relevant to its environment (as Ilse also discussed at the Future Forum).

•    Outside financial considerations, the single biggest factor affecting travel plans is the arrival of children.

In addition, the Smith survey queried hotel guests’ most hair-tearing pet peeves, producing some extremely interesting and entertaining results, but this post is already gigantic and the subject merits its own limelight, so look forward to your top 10 hotel hates appearing on the Smith blog shortly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Eco travel, Events, News. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.