Millennials are called people born in the late eighties and nineties. Representatives of this generation grew already in the digital era, which seriously affected their worldview and preferences. Today it is millennials who play a leading role in the world economy, and many business branches are changing under their influence.
Today we will talk about millennials and tourism, or rather, their influence on the sphere of B2B travel.
Millennials in tourism and a new type of business trips
According to statistics, representatives of the generation of millennials love travel more than their parents. They always seek to study the new city, even if they arrived there at work. This desire gave a start to the new phenomenon of the so -called.
The word Bleisure is a combination from Business and Leisure (English rest). The essence of this phenomenon is that the employee is allowed to combine a business trip with a mini-vacation in the same city. Usually this means that the employee allows the employee to stay in the city for some time after completing an official task or take family members during the trip with him.
Millennials very much appreciate the opportunity to combine work with travel – it can even play a key role in choosing an employer. Including this direction, Bleisure grows extremely quickly – in the world the number of such trips increases by 20% annually.
The trend is actively developing in our country. For example, according to Onetwotrip for Business in January, with its holidays, 93% of all foreign business trips of domestic companies captured weekends. A similar situation is observed in the summer – 82% of all business trips in Russia capture weekends.
Digitalization of business trips
Millennials are very actively using online tools to solve personal problems. They are used to convenience that new technologies give. However, earlier there was often a gap between the level of development of “consumer” services and the level of digitalization that people have encountered at work.
Very often at work, employees had to use not at all such convenient tools as in their personal lives, but many processes that have long gone online turned out to be digitized. So it was with business trips.
A few years ago, the process of organizing a business trip was mainly “offline”, and implied interaction with various intermediaries. The chosen agency shutdown sent requests for booking tickets and accommodation, made up the list of options and after choosing one of them carried out the final reservation.
For a generation of millennials, all this looks strange, given that for many years they can organize a personal trip with the help of online services in a couple of clicks. The old way of organizing business trips was inconvenient, did not give any control over the trip parameters and reduced the choice.
However, in recent years, in many respects due to the growing influence of the generation of millennials in the field of business, the process of digitalization of business trips has gone at a faster pace. Today there are already tools for organizing B2B travels that work similarly to the well-known “consumer” products. As a result, according to the ADI study (Adobe Digital Insights), 41% of business trips are organized with the help of online tools.
Flexible settings of business trip parameters
It is extremely important for millennials to participate in decision -making and feel that their opinion is important. If we talk about the organization of a business trip, this means that they would like to be able to influence the parameters of the trip: for example, choose a hotel within the budget or type of transfer.
This will allow them to do what they can do so well – to collect information on the Internet (reviews), analyze it and choose the best option.
The work schedule is also important. Today, when remote work is extremely common, in many cities there are convenient coworking, mileful employees do not always want to constantly be in the local office during the trip. Much more effective for them can be remote work or hiking in coworking near the hotel so as not to waste time.
Conclusion
Today, a large number of specialists in their fields for natural reasons belong to the generation of millennials. Therefore, employers have to take into account the features of this group. It is important for them to have the right to choose, to be flexible and use truly convenient tools.
Therefore, we can safely assume that the trends, the main engine of which were millennials, will continue to develop. Therefore, soon we will see even more Bleisure trips organized taking into account the opinions of employees, as well as convenient online travel services for the B2B segment.
