Luxury Travel & Lifestyle Trends

Impulse buying of extravagant commodities is out. Softer selling is now in. We’re seeing the use of more sophisticated, layered approaches. The best, strategic approaches combine sound reasoning with emotional lures to motivate indulging in “guilty” pleasures.
 
Looking through you: The intelligent consumer. We are now living in the age of what might be termed the “intelligent consumer.” He or she shops around while trying to learn more about a product’s value. “Both booking and dollar volume indicate that consumers are willing to spend money, just as long as they feel they’re spending it responsibly,” Jeff Anderson, a marketing manager for America’s Vacation Center/Avoya Travel, told Travel Weekly. Consumers – luxury or otherwise – are demanding value and fairness before cracking open their thinner wallets.

Successfully selling luxury in today’s tough environment requires communication. Consumers need answers to such key questions as, “What am I really buying? Why is it so expensive? What is it made of? What are the service specifics?”  Educate your consumer on your product’s material, attributes, its limited quantity, its inherent value. After they buy, they want to believe they’ve made an intelligent choice.

Apple Corp. demonstrates this formula daily in its retail and online storefronts, all designed to seem more about consumer education than hard selling. Simple, almost austere, they feature minimal signage and clear messaging. The atmosphere looks benign: Go on, try this gizmo out. Questions? Ask a nerdy clerk. No one, it seems, is there to sell you anything.

Shoppers, affluent or otherwise, are willing to search relentlessly for price. With corporate travel rebounding a bit, Orbitz for Business data shows business people are booking smarter these days. Some 70% say they feel personally obligated to save their company money on travel bookings. Even though their personal pocketbooks are unaffected, this penny-pinching mindset may be permanent after the past two years of cutbacks.

(….an excerpt from our recent Luxury Travel & Lifestyle Trends newsletter: “Tapping the Senses to Sell Luxury Travel“)

Slum tourism isn’t for everyone. Critics declare that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all – it’s voyeurism that’s more exploitative than supportive. Proponents of slum tourism argue that ignoring poverty won’t make it go away and its one of the few ways that tourists are ever going to understand what true poverty means – a reality check of sorts.