Predicting travel patterns of senior citizens: How the past may provide a key to the future

Given the projected growth of the senior citizens market, designing specific marketing strategies to meet the prospective needs of elderly tourists will become increasingly important. There has been an implicit assumption that there will be a close relationship between the travel behaviour of today’s seniors and those of future ones. This paper reports on a re-analysis of results of the German annual travel survey (Reiseanalyse), and suggests that such an assumption might be misleading. Tourist demand and travel behaviour are not necessarily determined by age, but by generation. For the last third of the life cycle, the travel behaviour of a particular generation seems to be quite rigid, and does not change significantly because of factors such as retirement. The results of this analysis show that travel propensity, or patterns of tourist behaviour, remain the same up to 20 years for a given generation. Therefore, understanding the future travel behaviour of senior citizens is perhaps not as difficult as it might first appear. In conclusion, the actual travel behaviour (including expectations, motivations and aspirations) of people aged between 55 and 65 years in 2000 allows a prediction of prospective travellers aged 65 to 75 years in the year 2010. Such an approach supplies reliable data for the design of future marketing strategies and suitable products.