QDaily Has 56 Findings on How Young People Travel Now, Starting With "Passive Travel"

For many people, "passive travel" — "tacking a look around onto a business trip," "going to another city to see a long-distance boyfriend or girlfriend," "teaching in a rural school and walking the villages nearby" — may be closer to how they actually travel.

Where travel is concerned, we have found that some things have gone out of fashion.

Travel agencies, for one. According to data from the National Tourism Administration, the combined profit of travel agencies nationwide fell 34.14% in 2015 from the year before. Domestic tours drew the most complaints: identical so-called local features, service with no thought behind it. The share of visitors who entered scenic areas through a travel agency fell from 60%-70% in 2010 to 20%-30% in 2015.

Online travel sellers such as Trip.com Group and Tuniu are one reason the agencies are losing money, but second-quarter 2016 results show those companies are losing money too. Ignored or burning cash, agencies and online sellers alike are looking for a direction.

At the same time, plenty of new things have appeared, or grown more popular.

People are no longer satisfied with travel alone, so there are now programs and services that let you work, take classes, volunteer or meditate while you travel. People want everything personal and local: a room in an Airbnb run by someone who lives there, dinner at the small restaurant the host says locals go to, a walk through a residential neighborhood dressed no differently from the neighbors. Startups of every kind want to build the app that handles the whole trip on one phone — planning, booking, writing it all up afterward.

But the assumptions made about how young people travel, and the supposedly appealing services built on them, are very often wrong:

Young people are all romantics who will pack up and go — quit on a whim and take a gap year.

Young people are all traveling as cheaply as they can, seeing the most places for the least money.

Young people are easily swayed by social networks, and trust them most when deciding where to go and looking for information?

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Social networks, rising spending and the taste for doing things your own way are, of course, the backdrop to young people's travel. But to understand this market, those stereotypes are of no real use.

So we went back over QDaily's reporting — from industry conferences and the companies in the business to young travelers of every sort, including people who have taken a gap year — and interviewed newer companies and projects such as Qyer Private Travel, Hive and Daydream Travel. To hear more from young people themselves, QDaily Research Lab ran several surveys on travel spending, personal travel experiences, what people think of tourist attractions, and how they travel.

Our main finding: young people get labeled as the ones who love to travel and know how to do it, and travel influencers aim campaigns squarely at them — "the world's happiest job, on an island," "a young person's first trek through the jungle" — but young travelers are not all footloose experts.

For many of them, trips like "tacking a look around onto a business trip," "going to another city to see a long-distance boyfriend or girlfriend," or "teaching in a rural school and walking the villages nearby" may be closer to how they normally travel. We gave this a name: passive travel.

One big reason for passive travel is that they're busy

In a report we covered earlier, millennials — born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s — come off as the harder-driving generation. A weak economy, the insecurity of a first job, and technology blurring the line between work and life have made 43% of them workaholics, against 29% across all age groups. They work harder than their parents did, feel less secure at work, and take a longer view of their careers.

In China, young people on the 996 schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) don't have much room to take their annual leave. A QDaily Research Lab survey of readers here found the two main reasons they never use it up: no one can pick up their work while they're gone, and they can't line their leave up with the people they'd travel with.

They also hate traveling during Golden Week, because anywhere you go in that week you drown in crowds.

Young people not long out of school still remember using their enviable vacations — and the odd skipped class — to travel off-peak. Once they start working they want to keep traveling that way, without packed trains or counting heads at the scenic spot. So many of them write Golden Week off entirely. The ideal holiday is a weekend stretched with annual leave into a few days off, with the cheap flights booked well ahead — though a perfectly planned trip can still collapse when the leave isn't approved.

Sometimes the only chance comes between two jobs: a break they've given themselves, or the empty stretch after quitting with nothing lined up.

Research abroad on how young people travel has a word for business trips: bleisure (business plus leisure). Young employees, eager and still finding it all new, treat a work trip as a chance to get out and see something, whether or not any actual sightseeing happens.

For young people still in school, studying abroad or on exchange, a long-distance relationship, and work trips all become occasions for passive travel. Students going overseas — a group that keeps growing — nearly always had some sightseeing in mind from the start. Young people in long-distance relationships hand a sizeable share of their income to the transport and travel industries.

So for many young people, passive trips outnumber the trips they choose to take. Packing up and going on a whim is more slogan than practice; what these frequent passive travelers need is reliable service that fits what they are actually doing. Here is some of what we observed.

What passive travel tends to look like

1. Not every gap year is planned, or even chosen. In real life a gap year often happens because someone didn't get into a school, hasn't found work yet, or can't find work — less a year off than a year spent thrashing around in a gap.

2. Some people simply want to get away, and drop themselves somewhere completely foreign. Others are idle against their will, after a job search or an application falls through.

3. Young people on working holidays sometimes grumble that they're "working the whole time and never traveling."

4. Living somewhere new can be disorienting, conditions can be rough, and the language can be impossible. But for young people who sign up for volunteer projects full of hope, the thing that nags at them most is: does any of this matter?

5. On a gap year, or while teaching in a rural school, there's no pressure and plenty of loose time, so the demand is for two- or three-day trips nearby.

6. Studying abroad, or applying for an exchange program at university, brings many chances to travel deeply with people your own age. It may turn out to be the longest stretch of travel in five or ten years.

7. Students abroad, on exchange or on study tours, have another travel headache: when parents or friends visit, they don't know where to take them, and often can't enjoy the same things.

8. New employees like work trips more than anyone else. However little time there is, they hope to fit in something fun, even if it doesn't always happen.

9. Travelers by temperament don't always get out on a work trip, but they put real effort into food and hotels, hunting down something local that costs them no extra time.

10. What people who travel constantly for work want most is for it to disturb their routine as little as possible. They may prefer the standard service of a chain hotel, and once they're treated as a regular they'll post about it on Moments with mock resignation and obvious pleasure.

Besides passive trips, we asked — and tried to answer — these questions about how young people travel.

How do young people pick a destination?

1. Vacations aren't just for the middle-aged. In our survey, "I've been a work drone for most of the year and want to be good to myself" beat both "go see the world" and the pack-up-and-go romance as the biggest reason young people travel.

2. What works is a recommendation that doesn't read like a destination recommendation. An official-account article or a popular Zhihu post that makes just one thing vivid — the food in Japan, how friendly people are in Taiwan, how far a mountain guesthouse is from everything — is enough to win a young reader over.

3. They tired of the standard attractions long ago. "Hardly anyone knows about it" is now among the highest compliments a place can get.

4. Mafengwo and Qyer used to be where you went for trip guides; now people prefer Zhihu, or even Moments, where it seems easier to find the places hardly anyone knows about and ways of visiting them that actually work.

5. Planning a trip means drowning in information. They want one reliable source that answers everything they need, at once.

6. That source might once have been Lonely Planet — which, after one trip, gets dropped without mercy because the information in it is too old.

7. The trouble with user-written travel diaries is how little useful detail they contain. QDaily Research Lab once asked, "What can't you stand when you're looking for a trip guide?" — 1,036 people couldn't stand mood-piece diaries with nothing practical in them, and 393 couldn't stand "you recommend a restaurant and don't even give the address."

8. For all the talk of the social-network era, when they settle on a destination the first thing they think of is still a place from a book or a film they love.

1. Many people have no particular destination in mind before they decide to go abroad; a ready-made package lowers the cost of planning, and that shapes the decision. (@Bai Yifan, head of Qyer's "Private Travel" business)

2. Once they know a place, the second and third visits are organized around an interest — cycling, diving, skiing — because by then they know where the best diving and the best slopes are. (@Jing Yu, travel designer at Daydream Travel)

What makes a trip appealing to them?

1. They want to get as close to local life as they can, and would rather not look like the loud, obvious tourist.

2. In a QDaily Research Lab survey on the subject, more than a fifth said they pay particular attention to the small places and dishes that locals love.

3. Between a spot that tourists from everywhere rave about on a review site and one that local old people queue for, they'll take the second without hesitating — cheaper, and more unusual.

4. Another way to eat like a local is to wander the vegetable market, the fish market, the wild-mushroom market, and buy an ingredient or a seasoning nobody has tried. Far better than the souvenirs sold on every corner.

5. One thing makes them break their own rules: traveling with their parents.

6. Stay in a fancy local guesthouse — otherwise a chain hotel makes the trip no different from a work trip.

7. Sometimes the point of a hostel or an Airbnb is simply to meet locals without resorting to an app like Tinder. But the service itself doesn't always satisfy: the bed, for instance, may be uncomfortable.

8. They can certainly be won over by design, good toiletries, a spa, a gym. Clean, though, is still the basic requirement.

9. If the hotel is beautiful enough they don't much mind what they do all day — they may not have planned the trip at all — but they care intensely about where they sleep.

10. They try the local buses and trains, including the ones whose signs and announcements they can't understand at all. They may take an Uber and ask the English-speaking driver how people here live and what the economy is like — not to save money, but to touch the ground.

11. On lodging, men care most about air conditioning (76%), a free minibar fridge (61%), a big television (52%), a balcony or terrace (34%) and daily housekeeping (27%). (@Data from Sunshine, a UK booking site)

12. Women care most about a sea view (85%), a bathtub or private bathroom (59%) and a comfortable bed (56%). The way women imagine using a hotel: ah, that view; ah, this easy living; ah, this lovely life. (@Data from Sunshine, a UK booking site)

13. Travel is personal and unhurried, and young people are indifferent to the "tourism festivals" put on by local governments — many have never heard of them.

14. They do care about getting more out of a trip: for the time and money they're spending, they'd like to work, take a class or volunteer along the way.

15. Custom trips are bought mainly for honeymoons and family travel — young couples who rarely go abroad, or parents taking grandparents and children along who would rather not do the organizing.

16. Students outside the biggest cities are the easiest to interest in an organized experience-based trip; it's new to them. (@Zhou Xingxing, former Hive employee)

Who do they want to travel with?

1. They don't much want a travel companion, but they do want company as a service. Young people want to be free on a trip, which doesn't mean they refuse to be looked after — especially those traveling alone, or with no time to plan.

2. When we asked, "What small thing can ruin a whole trip for you?", more than half the answers were about a travel companion.

3. The test of a good companion: they match you on what they want to see, how much shopping they want to do, and how far they can walk.

4. Young people also use a trip to find out whether a relationship is going to last.

5. They don't mind traveling alone; the internet solves most of it. But going alone brings its own troubles — no one to split the hotel bill with, a great view and only a selfie stick to shoot it with, and the problem of finding a bathroom at stations and attractions.

6. They look for places that suit solo travel. Searches for "solo travel ideas" are up 50%, and searches for "solo travel destinations" grow by more than 60% a year. (@Google data)

7. Chinese women actually travel alone more: at least 43% have taken a trip by themselves, slightly above the global average of 41%. (@TripAdvisor data)

8. Women are more interested in travel than men to begin with — including traveling alone, and including the pleasure of planning everything down to the detail.

9. On the trip itself, though, women care more about feeling safe.

10. They like independent travel, which doesn't mean they hate group tours. What they dislike about the traditional tour is the stale guide, the stale attractions and the shopping stops.

11. One reason to join a group is a sense of safety — reassurance for themselves, and for students, for their parents.

12. A tour that skips the places they hate, points them at the small places they like, and solves the problems of taking photographs and eating together gives them no reason to object.

13. Next to the crowd of companies after their money before the trip, what to eat and do during it, and who to ask when something small goes wrong, is a blank. The feeling is of suddenly having no one to turn to.

14. To get a young traveler to post about a service on Moments, giving them something they haven't seen before helps — but what works better is giving them something that announces "I'm having a wonderful time."

How do they spend money on a trip?

1. Budget travel in the strict sense is out of fashion. Young people travel with a "we came all this way" attitude, and spend freely on the road however carefully they live at home.

2. More than saving money, they care that the one or two things they value most aren't skimped on, and that the way they save fits how they like to do things.

3. They count every yuan. Even for a trip abroad, they'll get the visa and book services on Taobao, cheaper than buying on the spot — a duty-free membership card can be had there for a few yuan too.

4. When they don't know where to go, a cheap flight decides it. But having bought the cheap flight, "you have to be good to yourself somewhere else — eat better, for instance."

5. They don't hold back on food. In QDaily Research Lab's "How do you blow money when you travel" survey, the eating option — "we came all this way, so try everything from the Michelin place to the street stall" — came third.

6. They're sick of the standard souvenir, but keen on the local foods that keep turning up online as gifts to bring home.

As the travel market grows, so do young people's options. They are certainly not the old "we came all this way" stamp-collecting type, and the slogans of a few years ago — measure the land with your own feet, make friends on the road — now have younger, richer versions. Today's young travelers keep finding new needs and new choices in practice, unlocking travel personalities nobody had listed.

Young people love to go out and know how to do it; they want to see the world. They are also careful with money, quick to take what circumstances offer, and fond of comfort. Often enough, what they want is for the trip to look like a carefully arranged "life elsewhere."

QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for questions about the way we live. It may look at a shift or trend in how people live, or at a particular brand's service. You can vote here, complain, and say what you think.