“Traveling is much more expensive today, but people are willing to pay for it.” When the CEO of Booking Holdings, Glenn Fogel, made this statement during an interview with Actualidad Económica, he ignored the generational distinction. The head of the world’s leading online travel sales company showed interest in this phenomenon, which is confirmed by the prospects of large companies in the sector for this year, but the truth is that not all population cohorts are in the same socioeconomic situation and When the pulse of the different generations is taken, important differences emerge about their intentions -or rather, their possibilities- to travel.
The Alliance for Tourism Excellence Exceltur has revised upwards its estimate of tourism GDP growth in nominal terms for 2023, up to 172,200 million euros, 9.4% more than in 2019 and more than two tenths above the forecast scenario in january. Behind this improvement are the optimistic expectations of businessmen for the coming months, especially in the face of the summer season, but also the sharp rise in prices, which they estimate at 7.7% compared to the 2022 level.
The desire to travel again after the hardest years of the pandemic outweighed the adverse effects of rising inflation on disposable income and allowed the tourism sector to break records in 2022 and fully recover pre-covid activity. And everything indicates that this 2023 the skyrocketing prices will not stop Spanish tourists either. According to the conclusions of a survey provided by Kantar to El Mundo, the population that expresses its intention to travel more than last year has grown by 10% in relation to the data for 2022.
But that average varies considerably when asking different age groups. The study prepared by the consultant divides the respondents into four generations: Z, which includes those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s; the Y, which includes those known as millennials, who are those who were born between the early 80s and the mid-90s; the generation of the baby boom phenomenon that occurred in Spain between the end of the 50s and the end of the 70s; and the previous one, known as the X, who are younger than baby boomers but older than millennials.
Well, the Kantar survey shows that the intention to travel more this year than last year is increasing as the age of the generational cohort increases. Thus, citizens of ages at which greater economic stability is assumed are the ones who are most predisposed to exceed the trips they made in 2022. Specifically, while in millennials the increase is 9.1%, in the Generation X rises to 9.9%. And among the baby boomers, who are the closest to retirement age and part of which has already begun to disembark in the pension system, it shoots up to 14.7%.
There is only one segment of the population that does not declare itself willing to travel more this year and it is precisely the younger generation. La Z, where the twenty-somethings who, in many cases, have finished their studies and have already joined the labor market, are located. Among this group, the intention to travel more decreases by 1.8% and from the consultancy they attribute this setback to the greater exposure that young people have to the current crisis.
“Young people are the losers in all crises, but in this particular case, many are suffering from the increase in the cost of housing, apart from the price of food and energy that impacts the entire population,” explains Marcel Jansen , professor of Economics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and associate researcher at Fedea, who also focuses on the consequences that the rise in interest rates and the increase in rents have on this generation that suffers greater job insecurity in terms of unemployment and temporality.
In the latest prospective study on employment and youth in Spain, Ayuda en Acción projected a worrying scenario for the end of this decade. The forecast is that the unemployment rate for the group between 15 and 29 years of age will fall in the coming years from the current 27%, although it will still stand at 20.3% in 2030. And paradoxically, this drop in youth unemployment does not It will translate into an improvement in access to housing, since the percentage of young people between 25 and 34 years of age who live with their parents will rise to 47.5% at the end of this decade, from the current 46.8%.
“Currently finding employment for youth is not a guarantee of escaping poverty or having access to basic goods such as housing,” the organization warned. And much less to enjoy other superior services such as tourist trips, as revealed by the Kantar data. The baby boomers will therefore be the ones driving demand this year, compared to a young population that does not have the capacity to face this type of expense in a context of inflation like the current one.
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