Family Travel Survey
Meredith Corporation is a leading media and marketing company serving American women, and is behind well-known brands like Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle. The company recently collaborated with Ypartnership to conduct a national survey of “family travelers” — U.S. leisure travelers that took at least one vacation that included children.
A brief piece in Adweek says that the survey found that “just 9 percent reported making a travel decision ‘based primarily on research or feedback received on a social-networking Web site.'”
Additional notes of interest to Hawaii geeks:
Where would family travelers like to travel?
Domestically, family travelers are most interested in vacationing in Florida (53%), California (50%), Hawaii (44%), New York (31%), and Washington D.C. (28%). More specifically, they are interested in visiting the Hawaiian Neighbor Islands (73%) and national parks (71%) during the next two years, followed by Honolulu (69%) and Orlando (59%).
What sources of information do family travelers use to plan vacations?
Almost all (99%) family travelers have access to the Internet at home, and nine out of ten (89%) used the Internet to obtain information about a travel service supplier last year. The same proportion (87%) used the Internet to make a reservation. Among those who have used the Internet to obtain travel information for one or more leisure trips during the past 12 months, fully one out of four (23%) visited a blog to obtain information about a destination or travel service supplier, of which half (53%) visited TripAdvisor and one third (32%) visited YouTube. Among those who maintain a profile on social networking site, fully 90% now have a personal page posted on Facebook.
When planning vacations, family travelers have the greatest confidence in the information and/or referrals they receive from a friend or family member (82%), travel guidebooks (57%), online travel agencies (57%) and reviews read on advisory sites like TripAdvisor (55%).
