Why is Travel Retail forgetting about Baby Boomers?
If you have attended any Travel Retail conference or paid any attention to the duty free trade press in recent years, you will have surely heard all the in-depth discussions about Millennials. Such close attention to this key customer group is perfectly understandable – after all, the generation aged from around 19 to 35 is one of the largest in human history, accounting for some 27% of the global population.
Yet I’d argue there is another important customer group which is served very poorly by travel retailers and largely ignored by brand marketers – the Baby Boomers, a generation popularly defined as those aged between 53 to 71. With older consumers living and working longer, this silver-haired demographic has the money to spend and a love of travel. Seniors over 50 account for half of all spending in the US, control over 70% of the country’s disposable income and have an annual travel spending power of US$ 120 billion.
The ageing of the the international traveller mix is not a Western phenomenon either. In Japan over a quarter of the population is aged over 65 and this is set to rise to 40% by 2055. And let’s not forget China, either, where there are more than 220 million people aged 60 and over. That’s more than the populations of France, the UK and Germany combined By 2050 that number is set to rise to 480 million – around 25% of the world’s elderly!
