Kids today. What are they like? No, seriously, what are they like? What do they watch on TV? What music do they listen to? And most importantly, where do they go on holiday and where do they buy their holidays from? If you were born between 1980 and 1990, if you’re between 20 and 30 years old, then you’re a member of Generation Y. You’ve got a laptop and a smartphone so you’re on the internet all the time whether you’re at home or out. You watch TV online, you download music, you read blogs and write blogs, you probably used to have a Myspace or Bebo and now you and all your friends are on Facebook or Twitter. You’re what they call a digital native or a technological resident; you live online, and when you’re going away that’s where you book your holiday. What else? Well, you’re into brands – Apple, BlackBerry, Nike, TopShop – but you don’t trust advertising. If a product’s good enough you’ll shout about it to everyone you know and you listen when your mates are doing the same thing. And the good news is that Generation Y love their holidays. The average 20 to 30-year-old takes two holidays a year, spending about £930 per holiday, and the holidays they take vary from fortnights in package resorts to weekend breaks in unusual cities. If they’ve enjoyed their holidays, they won’t just write a postcard home. They’ll be messaging and tweeting about it and they’ll have all the photos of their sunshine paradise up on Facebook. They’ll be the proverbial best advertisement: word of mouth. We’ve got plenty of Generation Y staff in our branches, in head office and in our Wholesale and Distribution businesses. The Co-operative Travel is a young company, but we don’t have young customers. More than eight out of ten of our branches’ customers are over 41.
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When young people think of high street travel agents, they think of package holidays, and they think they’re too cool for those. To book their own holidays they turn to the web, where they can research destinations, find out what’s going on when they get there, book cheap flights and hotels and plan their trip. So how can we turn the younger generation into our customers? Helen Bollington, customer insight manager at our head office who put together the research on Generation Y, says: “We’ve already tailored our website to appeal to the 20 to 30-year-old market. You can like us on Facebook, you can follow us on Twitter, you can check out customer reviews on TripAdvisor, and soon we’ll have blogs, a forum and more. We've also entered into a partnership with the National Union for Students, launching a new travel section on their website with our offers on. “But what Generation Y don’t realise is that the kind of complex, multi-centre holidays they want to take – for example, flying to Barcelona for a couple of nights, taking a train to the Benicàssim music festival, then heading back to the Costa del Azahar to chill for a few days – is exactly the kind of thing that you need a travel agent for. “Try booking it yourself online and you’ll have a nightmare co-ordinating all the different bits and you’ll probably end up paying loads. Our travel agents are experts at pulling together different suppliers and add-ons for a good price, which is important to young people on tight budgets.
“What we need to do is get Generation Y customers into our branches, which is why we’ve got a campaign targeting them planned for next year. Then once we’ve got them, we’ll show them that The Co-operative Travel isn’t all about packages to the sun. We can take you wherever you want to go.”