The reason people get in their cars has changed.
Speaking at the 2021 HSMAI Marketing Strategy Conference, Waze's director and head of sales, Andrew Kandel, noted that more people are driving today than even pre-pandemic, but their patterns are different.
"Commutes are way down, and leisure travel and weekend driving is way up," he said during the "Drive Leisure Demand and Engage the Leisure Traveler" session, noting he believes that trend will "hold in the near term."
At the same time, data shows people are dreaming more about travel than ever before, said Pinterest's global head of strategy and marketing, Ashish Arya.
"On our platform, we've seen travel searches increase this year by over 20%," he said. "We've seen a decrease in searches that have a city, state or country within them."
He said this represents a huge opportunity for travel marketers, as fewer people are looking to get on the road with a final destination or specific travel brands in mind.
"People are more undecided with their travel than they ever have been," Arya said. "They're more open-minded to trying something new, going somewhere new or having a new experience."
Arya said this change has spurred companies like his to come up with new "traveler personas" to do a better job of recognizing why and how people travel and how to better reach them and personalize messaging.
He said a lot of the things that people are passionate about with travel haven't changed, including "memory makers with family travel, pets, food, etc." But others are much more novel.
"Some things are new or heavily accelerated due to COVID," he said, citing "digital nomadic traveling while you're working for leisure, or rural tourists since people were stuck inside and they want to go outdoors and have an outdoor adventures," he said.
Red Roof Chief Marketing Officer Marina MacDonald said her company was poised for some of the behavior changes of leisure travelers over the course of the pandemic, which in some ways made things that were once passé suddenly chic.
"Exterior corridor hotels had their day in the sun, I would say, just like outdoor movie theaters," she said.
To take advantage of such shifts, hoteliers had to have the proper messaging around offerings, such as highlighting that guests could go straight to their rooms without navigating cramped hallways and that each room had its own dedicated heating, cooling and ventilation.
Because of that and continued strong business demand from construction workers and truck drivers, among other segments, Red Roof maintained 44% occupancy even during the depths of the pandemic.
Red Roof has also focused strongly on growing in extended stay, a segment that greatly outperformed the overall hotel industry in the past 18 months. MacDonald said she's been taking a close look at who Red Roof's travelers are and how they are changing.
"One thing that's been surprising recently is everybody knows Friday and Saturday are up [due to leisure travel], but we're seeing in our data [strong] Sundays and Mondays," she said. "Our guests are staying long. There's this whole notion that you can work from anywhere, and literally they're working from anywhere."
She doesn't see that as a short-term trend.
"That flexibility is never going away," she said. "In the way we work, the way we live, flexibility is going to stay, and we have to continue to be flexible with our guests. Our loyal guests are staying longer and staying more frequently. So we're doubling down on that loyalty. That's giving them specific offers that are important to them and really personalizing them. That's really important."
Amanda Szabo, founder and CEO of ResortPass, said her company has been in a position to make the most out of staycations and other short travel occasions by selling access to hotel amenities to people who aren't hotel guests. She said this will be even more important to fill in revenue gaps for hotels while business travel and corporate groups remain well below typical levels.
"It's the perfect time, and our hotels are really seeing a lot of value in opening up to those local drive markets and other types of guests to maximize what they now have, which is more underutilized and available amenities and services," she said.
Szabo agreed that travel and consumer behaviors have been shifting over the past year. That includes more people opting for home sharing or vacation rentals that might offer more space than a traditional hotel stay, which gives hoteliers the opportunity to sell them on hotel amenities while they're in the market.
"That's something that's strong and will only increase," she said.