Entering Southeast Asia: Who Is Really Booking the Trip?

Until fairly recently, multi-generational travel wasn't something I thought of as its own category. It was just how trips sometimes happened: my parents joining, maybe extended family or cousins along too, everyone trying to coordinate one itinerary that works for a grandchild and a grandparent at once. I had never named it as a pattern.

That changed while I was working on a project for an international hotel brand entering Southeast Asia. Multi-generational travel kept surfacing in the research as something central to how people travel here, common across several markets. It wasn't something the brand had needed to design for in its home market, and it made me realise I had been living inside this pattern myself without ever noticing it clearly.

Once I started paying attention, I saw it everywhere. A traveller deciding for a whole group, one that could run from an eight year old grandchild to a seventy year old patriarch, all on one itinerary, all expecting one place to hold them. In my own family, the grandfather usually ends up on the trip too, one more person the itinerary has to work for.

Booking.com's Gen.Voyage! research, based on a survey of more than 8,000 travellers across 11 Asia Pacific markets, found that multigenerational households are 43% more common across the region than the global average. Bonding and creating lasting memories was the most cited benefit of these trips, at 47%, ahead of reconnecting with family members people don't see often, at 39%. Yet planning these trips isn't simple. The same study found that 30% of families cited conflicting interests between generations as a challenge, another 30% pointed to health or safety concerns, and 28% struggled to accommodate everyone's dietary needs.

I think about this now less as a hospitality industry insight and more as something I simply hadn't looked at directly until work forced me to. A brand designing only for two adults and their kids is designing for one traveller among several, and often misses the one actually making the booking decision.

Here is the objection worth taking seriously: redesigning products for multi-generational travel is a product decision, outside the remit of brand or communications teams. True, as far as it goes. But recognising this traveller in the first place requires no redesigned rooms. It starts with what gets said, and to whom. Most travel marketing in the region still tells a "family" story that means two adults and their children, even though multigenerational households are far more common here than the global average. Loyalty programmes, offers and campaign language are frequently aimed at young parents, when the person weighing the booking, and sometimes funding the trip, is a generation older.

There is also a cost to waiting. If bonding and reconnecting with family are the real reasons people take these trips, that is emotional territory brands can speak to immediately: in how a trip is described, in what a booking flow assumes about who is travelling, in the imagery chosen, long before any product actually changes.

For anyone working on a brand entering this region, my practical suggestion is simple: start with the person who books. Ask who is actually weighing the decision, and whether your campaign imagery, loyalty structure and messaging include them, or quietly write them out. Surface level localisation translates the words. It rarely questions who the words were written for in the first place. Communications can start the conversation, but product still has to deliver on it; otherwise the message is just another claim the traveller has no reason to trust.

What stays with me most is how easy it is to live inside a pattern for years, plan trips around it, love it even, without ever stopping to notice it's a pattern. Sometimes it takes someone else's blind spot to show you your own.