Not every millennial wants to live like a local; not every family wants to live like a tourist.
Quote from Jeff Chow, vice president of product, consumer experience, at TripAdvisor, in an article on PhocusWire this week.
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A phrase crept in the travel industry vernacular in the late 2000s, around the time that a plethora of trip planning sites entered the market.
Their brief sojourn (that's another story) as wannabe players in the sector also coincided with the rise Airbnb (and relative demise of Couchsurfing) and the idea that travelers wanted more from a trip.
They wanted to "live like a local" whenever they had the chance the travel.
It became the buzz phrase for any brand (mostly startups, let's be fair here) that wanted to position itself as a provider of unique experiences and avoid the hordes of tourists.
Jokes aside about the wording ("Oh, you mean take the whining kids to school, get caught in rush hour traffic, queue in line at the post office?"), the idea that travelers wanted to do something different obviously had its merits.
After decades of mass tourism, not least since the mid-1990s when low cost carriers appeared on the scene and, some argue rightly, democratized air travel, people DID want to experience new things.
The supposed "local experience" is a useful catch-all term but, similar to food tourism or eco-trips, it remains a fairly niche perspective on why people choose to use their valuable leisure time away from work once or twice each year.
Sure, "not every family wants to live like a tourist", but the vast majority still do.
Do millions of package travelers, for example, temporarily migrate from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean every summer because of the food on offer. Probably not, in reality.
The urging of well-traveled and earnest scribes in The Guardian or the New York Times every weekend to get off the beaten track and not do the things that millions of people enjoy doing, ignores an often-missed dose of reality: people often just want to wind down, they want to get away from the grind of home and they want to have some fun.
They might take in a few sights and eat at local restaurants, but they might not.
Travel brands that ignore this silent majority (to pick up on an often-used political phrase) might be gliding along with a apparent zeitgeist, but they do so at their peril.
Data, as TripAdvisor knows with its AL-led strategy around reviews, can show what are where the real tourism trends are, and what travelers really want.
For the first time ever, technology allows brands to truly understand consumer expectations and, even better, perhaps cater for it through personalization and products that create value for customers.
That's when so-called experiences can really take shape.
So, perhaps brands should consider adopting their own phrase: "Operate like a realist."