How COVID has changed the way we travel: Insights from our user research

People are still traveling during the pandemic — but the virus is the biggest factor in deciding when, where, and how.

With the lockdowns, border closures, economic troubles, and other disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, you might expect that the travel industry would be under a lot of pressure.

And… you’d be absolutely right.

Even so, accommodation bookings — not just hotels, but also resorts, rental cabins, apartment rentals, and other places — have seen some recovery since the lockdowns earlier this year. So, people are still traveling. But how has traveling changed? How do travelers decide when, where, and how to travel nowadays? And once they figure out where they’re going, how do they decide where to stay?

These are all valid questions, so earlier this year, we decided to try answering them (remotely, naturally).

The interviews

We were starting from scratch here, without the benefit of previous research. First, we needed to generate hypotheses which we did by conducting in-depth interviews. We interviewed 25 travelers from US, the UK, Germany, and Italy in a remote setup. Multiple researchers transcribed the interviews and categorized common themes with an affinity diagram on a collaborative whiteboard (see below).

The results

Interviews:

First, we identified 5 common trigger themes for people deciding that it’s safe to travel again:

1. Eased restrictions.

• Obviously, open borders, open accommodations and permission to travel are crucial before planning any kind of trip. Beyond that, people would like to see official guidelines from the government and/or media saying that travel is safe and allowed. Ideally, businesses should be open too — airlines, restaurants, shops and museums need to be operating normally again.

2. Control over the virus.

• Our interviewees thought that a widely available vaccine would be the clearest cue that it’s safe to travel again. Failing that, infection rates should at least be lower, both overall and at the destination (participants were willing to do their homework here — some compared it to looking up malaria rates at a tropical destination).

3. A really good deal (and free cancellation, just in case).

• High-quality promotional offers on hotels, flights, and other travel businesses are triggers for booking a trip — as long as it’s possible to cancel the trip without losing too much money.

4. Transparency about anti-virus measures.

• Participants indicated they would consider traveling if hotels and airlines provided transparent information about what they were doing to control the spread of the virus — for example, cleaning procedures or other sanitary precautions.

5. The bandwagon effect.

• Particularly in the US and UK, participants indicated they’d consider traveling to be safe when they saw friends, influencers, or others doing it — often on social media.

Still, even when travel is possible and (relatively) safe again, it might not feel quite the same. Our interviewees told us they’d be concerned about the following:

Risk avoidance.

• Our participants had some concerns about unpredictable hygiene standards and possible crowds, both at the destination and on the way there.

Getting the virus — or passing it on.

• Contracting COVID was obviously a concern, but it’s not just the initial infection that our participants were worried about. Probably related: people were also concerned about the healthcare system at the destination — hospital standards, language barriers, and insurance coverage were all flagged as important.

That vacation feeling.

• Vacations are supposed to be lighthearted and enjoyable, and some of our interviewees expected that they’d be less so now due to mandatory mask wearing, closed restaurants, sights and attractions, or tourists not being welcome.

General travel uncertainty.

• Everything is unpredictable during the pandemic, and participants were worried about that too — particularly about the risks of unexpected lockdowns or quarantines, among other things. Is there a risk of being stuck at the destination? Would their accommodation booking get cancelled? How would hotel employees treat them? What about job loss? Is taking time off going to backfire in the form of lost wages?

Financial concerns.

• There were more general financial concerns as well. Airfare and accommodations may be more expensive in the future, so some participants were concerned about even being able to afford to travel at all. Others were more concerned about customer support.

From all this, we can see some distinct changes in people’s travel habits, but also in what people will expect when they’re planning a trip: new information.

• Restrictions and anti-virus measures at different destinations, for example, when and where is mask wearing mandatory? What’s open, what’s closed, and what’s legal?
• Recommendations for destinations based on the above.
• Hygiene and other measures taken by accommodations or airlines.
• Local healthcare and nearby hospitals.
• Customer reviews are a good source of information for what accommodations are doing, so they will probably be fairly important.

So, people will travel to different places, for different reasons — they will probably shift toward nature and beach trips, given the importance of staying outdoors to staying safe against the virus. The closer, more developed, and more familiar the destination is, the better. In line with that, private transportation is likely to be more popular — we should see less usage of mass transit like planes and trains, and more road trips.

How will they act when they get there? Responsibly, according to the interviews! People will wear masks, pay more attention to personal and general hygiene, avoid crowds, limit meeting people, and stay outdoors or in open spaces.

Finally, where will they stay — hotels, or non-hotel accommodations, like B&Bs, or renting whole houses or apartments? Some of our interviewees mentioned that they’d be more willing to stay in a rented private house or apartment than in a regular hotel, given that they’re more private and less busy. Wherever travelers stay, they’ll want the place to be well-organized and clean, with the evidence to prove it: accurate information on cleaning procedures, and ideally some cleaning supplies available for guests’ own use. Above all, accommodations shouldn’t be too busy, especially when there’s food involved — maybe meals can be served in shifts, or delivered right to the rooms. No overcrowded hotel breakfast buffets, please!

The survey:

We rolled the results of the interviews into a series of survey questions that we could administer to a lot of people — in our case, 5 350 people recruited through Facebook and email in the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, Mexico, and Turkey. Here’s one of the questions, based on what people flagged as important in the interviews:

General patterns

To start with, we kept our analyses pretty simple, looking at the general distribution of responses to each question. Some of the more interesting results include:

• Most people in our sample were interested in traveling — over 60% either had already booked something, or at least knew exactly where they wanted to go. Only 18% of our survey sample wasn’t thinking of traveling at all.
• People were mostly pretty eager to get away — most of our sample planned to travel during the summer of 2020, and only about a quarter wanted to wait until 2021 or later.
• Even though big cities have a reputation for being COVID hotspots, a lot more people were looking forward to spending time exploring cities than going off on outdoor wilderness retreats. Unsurprisingly, event and business travel were not particularly popular.
• Respondents based their decisions about where to travel on local COVID-19 infection rates, government advice, and local anti-virus measures. The big pre-2020 concerns — price, local attractions, friends and family to visit — were further down the list.
• The two most important factors in their choice of accommodation, by a considerable margin, were hygiene and cancellation policy.

Quantifying virus concern

You may have noticed a pattern in those last two points — on average, COVID-19 concerns tend to outweigh other issues, like prices and things to do. But that wasn’t true of everyone in our study! There were definitely people who were less concerned about the virus. So, what separates concerned people from relatively unconcerned people?

We decided to look into this using factor analysis — a statistical technique that identifies patterns in complex data sets. This showed that the reasons for people’s travel decisions formed two clusters: virus-related (infection rates, local healthcare, hotel hygiene, cancellation policy, etc.), and -unrelated (prices, hotel amenities, food options, etc.). Let’s call these “2020 problems” and “normal problems,” respectively. If someone rates 2020 problems as more important than normal problems, they’re more concerned about the virus, and the bigger the gap, the more concerned they are. So, we subtracted each person’s average “normal problem” rating from their average “2020 problem” rating. This gave us a number for each person that we called their CCC, or “Composite Coronavirus Concern.”

So, what does the CCC tell us?

• Older people are more concerned about the virus, which makes total sense.

• Likewise, the most concerned people are less likely to think about traveling at all. Makes sense, right?
• When more concerned people travel, they tend to visit family and friends, and avoid the beach (this remains true when we control by age).
• There were substantial differences between countries in terms of their virus concern — people seem to be more careful in some places than others.

• People with a strong preference for hotels tend to be somewhat less concerned about the virus than people who are more interested in non-hotel accommodations.
• Virus-concerned travelers are okay with planes, somewhat surprisingly, but trains and buses are substantially more popular among less concerned users. (The “Other” category was pretty uncommon compared to the rest, so the margin of error for it is quite a bit larger.)

What does it all mean?

We started this project with pretty general ideas about how the virus might affect travel, and the interviews gave us a thorough list of candidate issues to investigate. From there, the survey let us narrow things down further and figure out what the most relevant factors were in a large group of people. We were even able to figure out how different levels of concern about the virus predict how people intend to travel.

The major theme that came out of both the interviews and the survey phases of this project was clear, unambiguous and totally unsurprising: the virus is important, and people will generally only travel if they feel safe. For us, that means a whole lot of new information needs to be made available — where possible, at least. For example, information on hygiene and cleaning practices and cancellation policies are likely the most important things to show in accommodation listings. On the other hand, if someone’s trying to figure out where to travel, the most attractive places are very likely to be the ones with the lowest infection rates.

We’ve been moving fast to make this information available on our website. This will involve developing new features, so our job as user researchers isn’t done yet — we’ve got a long road ahead of us to make sure that they address these user needs, and to keep an eye out for anything else that we’ve missed. Still, despite the work that’s gone into this, we’re hoping pretty hard that we won’t need it for very long.

Our User Research team is currently looking for a Senior User Researcher to design and execute user research studies combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies. If you’re interested in working with us, we’d love to hear from you: Join us!

Authors: Jana Wachtmeister, Mike Wood and Elizabeth Kwan from our User Research team.