Creating Loyalty in Youth Travel: How Travel Brands and Destinations Can Build Lifelong Relationships

By attracting young people, travel brands and destinations can create a lifetime of value, with young people often staying longer, spreading their spend across a destination, contributing to the local economy and returning again and again.

Creating Loyalty in Youth Travel explores the varying and unique needs of young tourists - from backpackers to youth mobility workers - and the challenges brands and destinations face in attracting and retaining them. While travel professionals often target certain sectors such as business or luxury travellers, this can be a short-sighted strategy. Youth travellers can be a more sustainable market as they frequently form an emotional tie to a destination or travel brand, driving them to return throughout their lives, sharing with family and friends and increasing their spend as they age.

This book looks at how successful brands and destinations prioritize developing long-term relationships with travellers early on, so that they can continue to cater to loyal customers throughout their lives with different offerings from within the same brand. Some countries and travel brands excel at this, building it into the heart of their strategy, while others have ignored this key market to their own detriment.

Through extended interviews from leaders in the sector such as Marriott and Tourism Australia, this book helps tourism and hospitality professionals to understand the needs of the youth traveler market and harness the potential of it to build a long-term strategy for the tourism industry.

Stephen Lowy is Chairman of the British Educational Travel Association (BETA) and CEO of Anglo Educational Services (AES), which manages foreign student apartments in Central London. He is serving as Interim CEO of the Mountbatten Program, and is a board member of the Tourism Alliance, Trustee of the Savoy Educational Trust and Chairman of Association of Serviced Apartment Providers (ASAP). In 2023, he was named by the International Hospitality Institute as one of the ’100 Most Inspirational People in Global Hospitality and Travel’. Stephen Lowy is based in London, UK.