Millennials will become the largest spenders on hotels as early as 2017, claims Sabre.

Sabre’s vice president of marketing for hospitality solutions Sarah Kennedy Ellis presented at ITB a sneak preview of some research into millennial trends in hospitality.

Her comment about the spending tipping point is a projection from the company’s analysis of the 10,000 or so booking engines which it runs on various hotel dotcoms — that’s 20 million transactions.

“It’s known that millennials will become the largest spending travel demographic by 2020. But we’re seeing that, in hospitality, the trends are sharper, and we think that by 2017 or 2018 millennials will be the hotel industry’s most important market.”

Other insights from the report are that European millennials are currently converting more slowly than their North American peers.

In Europe, there is more shopping by millennials (between 30-40% of total), but this group only accounts for revenues of between 25% and 32% of the total — meaning that European millennials are converting with fewer shops than North Americans are, on average.

That implies European millennials may not be as price sensitive or they are simply more efficient at booking (assuming all other factors, such as site usability, are equal).

This data is in line with other statistics that Sabre has seen on how European millennials often have an efficient approach to mobile shopping and booking onmobile devices.

One trait that millennials on both sides of the Atlantic have in common is that they all generally spend less time on sites than other groups. “They know how to navigate a booking engine,” she said.

Source: tornos.gr