Traveller Personas

Hey Everyone,

I'm working on a little project to surface content more easily on Travellerspoint. As part of that, I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a list of travel personas. Now obviously I can go googling around and there are lots of lists out the, but I thought I'd put it out to the community to see what you think we can break it down to. It doesn't have to be a particularly short list. Of course people can generally be categorised as multiple personas, but in order to keep the list somewhat short, the less overlap the better.

Some easy ones to start off (and to save you the time of adding them)

The Luxury Traveller

Money is no obstacle. Fancy hotels, the best restaurants, helicopter rides at a whim. Always a cocktail in hand.

The Shoestring Explorer

Keeping track of every penny allows the shoestring explorer to stay on the road longer. Cheap hostels, self-prepped meals and a distinct lack of splurging.

Family Travellers

Adding in the extra needs of kids into the mix, family travellers tend to need more spacious accommodation, seek out a destinations with activities for the kids and don't move as rapidly between locations.

.. I can think of more, but I want to hand it over to you all.

The Occasional Splurger

Keeps to a budget for many things so that they can splurge on luxuries occasionally.

The Serial Spammer

Quoting zzlangerhans

The Serial Spammer

Is this an actual traveller or one of the specific Travellerspoint personas ?

Another big one I think..

The Unwinder - looking for relaxation and nothing else. Happy to read a book all day and catch up on sleep in a relaxing setting.

The Serial Moaner

The weather is too hot / cold / wet.
The food is too foreign.
They all speak a funny language.
The buses /trains are never on time.
The hotels aren't like they are at home.
They use different money.
Etc etc.

The History Lover..... and Art ,Food , Nature, Beach, Mountain, Lover

The Cruise Enthusiast.

Quoting Peter

I'm working on a little project to surface content more easily on Travellerspoint. As part of that, I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a list of travel personas. Now obviously I can go googling around and there are lots of lists out the, but I thought I'd put it out to the community to see what you think we can break it down to. It doesn't have to be a particularly short list. Of course people can generally be categorised as multiple personas, but in order to keep the list somewhat short, the less overlap the better.

Are you looking for personas for internal use, so you can track customer journeys and check if each type of persona is sufficiently capable of discovering content here? Or are these personas you want to expose to visitors, so they can say "this is me" and then get pointers?

For the former, you want pretty complex / fully-featured persona descriptions, but there doesn't need to be a comprehensive set of them, just as long as each type of characteristic that travellers can have, will be featured for at least one persona. On the other hand, for the latter, you probably want to identify the two of three most impactful characteristics, and set up a matrix of choices so that each combination is covered, even the rare/unlikely ones.

I think interesting axes to include (more than the obvious "budget" and "interest in nature/culture/history/activities/partying") might be "independence" (desire for having someone else take care of things - expressed through accommodation choices, guided tours, etc) and "pace". (E.g. I'm a slow traveller, lingering everywhere and including many rest days, and I want to take care of everything myself, researching (some) things extensively beforehand, but also being very okay with "missing out" on sights due to spontaneous choices.)

Primarily to expose to visitors.

So let's say I work out what kinds of personas would enjoy visiting Melbourne. More than one persona would be a good fit in that scenario. I'd show this on a page about Melbourne. This page would also show relevant blog posts, photos, forum entries and other Melbourne content on Travellerspoint.

You could then get a quick idea what kind of city Melbourne is.

If you identify as a Foodie, you could also go to a page that shows destination suggestions for that persona. Maybe "top places in Australia for foodies", or something similar.

Finally, I thought it would just be a bit of fun to see what everyone else thinks are the travel archetypes out there

I think Melbourne might be a bad example to start from, since it's an international airport gateway, so nearly everyone could end up there.

I think the risk with categories like Foodie is that no one is "just" a foodie. Yes, they'll go more out of their way for a top-notch restaurant than you average traveller, but they also have desires during the rest of the day - while regular travellers will also still want to know about restaurants (at least when not staying in their all-inclusive resort).

Still, got it. Let's see if my approach holds up with usefully mapping to content...

pace: slow; expose: smaller towns, national parks e.a. within half a day's travel (grampians, great ocean road, phillip island, wilsons promontory) - but also "next" destinations (adelaide, sydney, canberra, tasmania); not: darwin, perth, brisbane, cairns
pace: fast; expose: famous X, other highlights in the same country; not: phillip island, wilsons promontory

independence: low; expose: cruises, all-inclusive resorts, hotels, holiday parks, guided tours
independence: high; expose: apartments/holiday homes, hostels, b&bs, (also hotels, probably), car rental, public transport

(I'll leave thinking of snappy descriptions of personas to a later stage. Though yeah, it's great fun to grouch about all those typical types and give them nicknames.)