The Millennial Traveller: By a Millennial.

Millennial Traveller | Mesut Kaya | Unsplash

When we’re not wasting away our life savings on Smashed Avo on toast when brunchin’ with the girls or making unreasonable demands from those around us, Millennials are traveling. In fact, we’re travelling more than any other generation before us. With travelling cheaper and easier than ever before, Millennials are taking to the cobbled streets and popping up in hostels all around the world.

However, some of our older friends have a few things to say about this. There is a stereotype shoved onto Millennial travellers by older generations (we’re looking at you Boomers!). They claim we are a bunch of lazy narcissists, who are more interested in getting the perfect selfie than a memorable experience, more obsessed with our Instagram likes than our real-world desires and too focused on our phones to appreciate the sights around us. 

I’ve seen Millennials type-casted like this both online and offline, with even mainstream media sometimes getting in their dig at Millennials; with the phrase ‘ego travel’ being coined to describe people who plan their holidays around getting that perfect snap. 

This is not true of all Millennial travellers, and I’m going to tell you why. 

Friends Traveling |Tobias Tullius | Unsplash

The Millennial traveller wants to have an authentically local, immersive experience. We want to explore places and do things that people we know haven’t done (as well as the places and things they have! FOMO anyone?).

If we had a great time, are we wanting to share our experiences with the people we know? Heck yes! Are we going to take to social media and shout it to the world? Probably! This is how my generation communicates. How is sharing a story or image on social media different from sitting the family down for a slideshow of all your holiday snaps or calling up your friends to fill them in on all the details from your trip? At least my generation has the option to scroll on past if we don’t want to see someone’s photos – how’s it going sitting through ALL of Uncle Brian’s shirtless photos from his beach holiday? 

Millennial travellers are also extremely environmentally and socially aware, which is reflected in youth travel companies’ marketing efforts and tour itineraries. We are a generation who have grown up highly aware of social justice issues. We want to minimise the negative impact we have on the world around us. We want to take it all in; the local culture, food, and people. 

Henna – Experiencing local traditions | Vitaliy Lyubezhanin | Unsplash

As such, we are shifting from the booze-fuelled youth tours to immersive culture and adventure experiences. That’s not to say we don’t drink while we travel, trust me – that’s definitely not the case, but our focus is more on gaining that authentic experience. In order to benefit the local communities to whom we travel, Millennials are adapting away from large bus tours and cruise ships, to travelling in smaller groups, via public transport to ensure our way of traveling is sustainable for these countries we visit. 

We may have our phones on us at all times, but we’re not just consistently texting our friends back home. We’re researching, documenting and consuming information, in order to curate the perfect experience for us. We can choose the option that suits our style of traveling best and add a new element of personalisation into youth travel.  

Planning Travel via iPhone — Keep up to date with latest news | Annie Spratt | Unsplash

We don’t need to the gimmicks hotels and companies are throwing at us to try to attract Millennial business – seriously, why are there iPads EVERYWHERE in the lobby? This is an aging concept that Millennials want a fancy tech-filled hotel experience. Most of us wouldn’t care if we’re crashing on a friend of a friend’s couch, however something we do want is choice.  We’re flexible in where we stay, what we do, but we want these options so we can make the choice. We want to curate our own journey, because we don’t fit into these moulds anymore. 

So, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to utilise this platform to biasedly break the stereotype placed onto Millennials by older generations. We are the generation who care and are ultimately changing the way youths travel. So, if you know someone who could use a little bit of a Millennial kick up the arse, please do all of us a solid and send this blog post to them. 

PostScript:

Remember; I am a Millennial writing about Millennials (Okay, maybe I’m starting to see the egotistical traits the older generations mentioned…). My thoughts and opinions are my own, agree with them if you want to, but remember; you can’t judge every person by the stereotyped traits of their generation.