The trend of individual travel is growing strongly.
Individual tourism should first be understood as a travel trend in which tourists will travel alone to different places, make their own decisions about the trip, and choose services and activities at the destination. Participants often have a need to aim for personal experiences. However, this does not mean that individual tourists only travel completely independently and completely ignore the use of tourism and travel services. The trend of individual tourism allows tourists to freely choose their itinerary and destination without being bound by long schedules or depending on the time of the accompanying person like traditional forms of tourism.
Recently, the solo travel community has increased significantly. In January 2018, “solo travel” and “travel alone” became the most searched keywords on Google. When searching for “Solo female travel blog”, Google returned more than 2.45 million results. According to Booking.com, up to 40% of Baby Boomers (50-64 years old) who used the Booking platform in 2018 had traveled solo in the previous year and 21% will tend to travel solo in the future.
According to a survey by Agoda and YouGov published in 2018, Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) is in the top 10 favorite destinations of the individual travel community. The sudden appearance of travel platforms specializing in serving the individual travel market such as Klook, Kkday in Vietnam in the past few years shows that the growth of the individual travel trend is well-founded. According to Klook - a destination travel booking platform with a total capital of up to 300 million USD, in the Asian market alone, the number of individual travelers on their platform increased from 31% to 38% in 2018.
Individual Travel Trends: Opportunities and Challenges
With a great advantage in understanding domestic destinations, Vietnamese businesses will have many advantages in optimizing service products towards personalizing local experiences for tourists, one of the important requirements of the individual tourist market.
However, in order to exploit the individual tourism market with highly specific requirements, Vietnamese businesses will also have to face many challenges; especially in the context of more and more international businesses starting to invest directly in Vietnam. One of the first challenges to mention is the ability to understand customers in order to flexibly offer different products suitable for each customer segment of domestic businesses; which are used to selling traditional products with little update and change. Next is the communication and management of the business brand on online platforms with individual tourists, who are assessed to highly value direct evaluation information in choosing suppliers, which will also be a big challenge for domestic businesses.
To get a comprehensive view of the current trends and potential of solo travel, as well as approaches and exploitation of this tourism market, Outbox Consulting and the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Tourism will bring a special one-day event “Solo Travelers Day” including Seminars, Workshops, Talk Shows within the framework of the 15th Ho Chi Minh City International Travel Fair (ITE HCMC 2019). This series of seminars is expected to attract more than 500 guests from businesses in the tourism industry to connect, exchange ideas and discuss the opportunities and challenges in the solo travel trend.
“Solo Traveler Day” will take place on September 6, 2019 from 9:00 to 17:00 at the Conference Room, 2nd Floor, Saigon Exhibition and Convention Center (SECC), 799 Nguyen Van Linh, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The event is open to all travel agencies, online travel agents (OTAs), accommodation establishments, airlines, government agencies, and destination management units.
