Are you a sucker for these UK travel trends?

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By Hannah Edensor


Keen to see how you fit into the ‘trendy’ UK travellers? Although by trend, we mean pattern not particularly stylish.

Well, at ExploreGB, Richard Nicholls, Head of Research and Forecasting at VisitBritain, shared some of the travel trends they’ve seen boom in the UK of late.

You can view the whole report on the website if you fancy, but here’s a sweet little snippet of the key traveller types.

Filter Bubble

Do you ever wonder why all the news and ads you see on social media seems totally tailored to you and your interests? Well, it’s not by chance, in fact, it’s well known that social media, search history, and targeted advertising all create algorithms to serve you exactly what you want to see.

What this means, is that consumers are seeing less of the ‘outside the box’ or new travel products, and more of what they already look at.

Tourism products and brands, as a result, now have to work harder to stay on the radar of travellers, and breakthrough to give travellers more diversity in experience.

Locational Living

Location-based technology in travel is helping to raise awareness of, and increase engagement with, tourism products by pushing content based on an individual traveller’s whereabouts.

Increasingly, more consumers are happy for devices to detect their location, and suggest area-specific experiences to them, aiding them in exploring more of the place they’re in with prompts from apps and new technology.

Performative Perfection

Everyone wants to show off when they travel now, thanks largely to social media, so creating ‘braggable’ tourism products has become more important than ever.

Think ‘aspirational’ experiences, great backdrops for Instagram photos, and other avenues that allow travellers to boost social capital by sharing on social media.

Nicholls gave an example of W Hotel in both the US and Great Britain, which has created a branded Snapchat geofilter, with the ability to turn this into a postcard to share with followers.

Pursuit of Real

Touted as the top of all the travel trends was the search for authenticity when travelling, and getting under the skin of a place.

Nicholls explained that people aren’t always interested in doing the stereotypical tourist traps, however, travellers want products that aren’t totally exclusive of these typical attractions. What they’re increasingly looking for are products that integrate authenticity with the big tourist attractions.

“So it’s not just living like a local, it’s having dinner where the locals eat then snapping a selfie at the big landmarks,” Nicholls said.

“But the most important thing is to experience the authentic culture of a place.”

The Leisure Upgrade

Accoridng to this burgeoning trend, travel should be about learning new things as much as simply having fun, something 60 per cent of those surveyed by VisitBritain agree with.

This means travellers want to combine fun with a sense of self-improvement as well.

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