2009 Trends In Adventure Offerings
Jan 10, 2010 | Filed Under Industry Research
We recently conducted an analysis of some top adventure travel companies as rated by National Geographic ADVENTURE magazine. Our purpose was to spot important trends in adventure company offerings for 2009.
Trends Overview
In terms of the types of trips, family-oriented adventures and custom and/or private trips are clearly growing quickly. In addition, there seem to be quite a few more operators offering multi-sports vacations, cutting across types of activities such as a combination of hiking, kayaking, biking and/or rafting. It also appears that quite a few of the “specialty” niche operators (e.g., ones that focus exclusively on one activity such as paddling or biking or on one geography such as the U.S.) are diversifying.
Several biking specialists that once were exclusively biking in the U.S. now offer some combo trips of hiking and biking and have expanded geography-wise. However, we also observed that geographic diversification in many cases did not seem well-thought-out; it seemed as if someone in the company liked a country and simply set up a tour there, rather than it being done for strategic, systematic reasons.
Itinerary Similarities
Another trend leapt out as we began to analyze the details of trips in certain areas of the world. There is significant tourism-trip overlap, most particularly in certain countries, and we would be hard put to explain why one trip was any better than the other since they were described in exactly the same way! We would be very surprised if 2009 did not bring about some serious shakeout in terms of the trips offered in certain areas of the world by a wide range of companies. For example, it seems as if there are hundreds of trips to the Galapagos Islands, offered by many different organizations in many different types of boats and ships at different times of year and for different lengths of time; we simply gave up trying to count them.
Bandwagon Destinations
Another interesting phenomenon is the intensity in the number of tour packages in certain areas, while others appear almost completely neglected. For example, in South America, while Brazil is not completely neglected, it is considerably overlooked given its beauty, range of attractions, size, diversity, etc. in the region. On the other hand, Peru is dominant, with many operators offering a wide range of types of trips across the whole country.
Volunteering
We were a bit surprised with the results of our analysis of these tour companies’ charitable activities and volunteer programs offered. Given the level of publicity that voluntourism is getting in the press, we thought that we would find many more volunteer offerings than we did from this core group of adventure travel companies. Of the 194 NGA-rated adventure travel companies, only 8 of them offered volunteer programs, with 29 involved with charitable activities. Of these 8, three, not unexpectedly, dominate: Earthwatch, Sierra Club and ProWorld Services Corp. There were only four companies that were involved in both volunteer programs and charitable activities.
The volunteer programs are more oriented toward certain parts of the world, most particularly Africa. It may be that African destinations have been much more proactive in working with tour operators to develop such programs. Some of the more established, luxury-oriented adventure travel companies do not appear to be involved with volunteer trips. In fact, there has been recent coverage that has not been all positive about how the programs are run and whether they in fact contribute at all economically to the community in which the volunteer program takes place.
This may be one of the reasons that the adventure travel companies in the NGA database appear to be more involved in charitable activities locally than in volunteer programs. There are 29 adventure travel companies that are involved in charitable activities, mostly through foundations, with the vast majority focused on conservation projects (which is not surprising, given they are in the adventure travel business).
Although National Geographic ADVENTURE magazine’s print publication has been closed, we hope to see this company roundup continue in the coming years.
-Henrietta deVeer
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