Kwon Ping Ho has come a long way since he opened his first resort in Phuket in 1994.
Ho’s luxury hotel chain, Banyan Group, now operates over 90 hotels worldwide, including in countries like Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The 72-year-old told Business Insider that it’s not just his company that’s changed. His customers look much different than they did three decades ago, and they want different things out of travel.
“When you talk about the people of my generation, when international travel just started, people were happy to go on group tours. They just go to a hotel and they eat in a hotel,” Ho said on the sidelines of the International Conference on Cohesive Societies held in Singapore last month.
“But young people today have long become jaded about international travel. They’ve been traveling with their parents,” he added. “Today, when they’re traveling on their own, they are looking much more for things that are out of the way.”
Ho said today’s more seasoned travelers are a vastly different breed from yesterday’s checklist sightseers.
“They are much more into experiences, and not just to see something beautiful because they’ve probably seen that, done that with their parents already. They are looking at experiences which are deeper and allow them to interact with the local community,” he continued.
Ho isn’t the only one who has noticed the generational shift taking place.
Last year, McKinsey surveyed 5,000 travelers from China, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the US. The consultancy said that 52% of Gen Zers surveyed said they are willing to splurge on travel experiences compared to 29% of baby boomers surveyed.
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“One-size-fits-all tourism offerings of the past have grown outdated” as travelers seek “creative experiences that are tailored to their priorities and personal narratives,” McKinsey wrote.
Another change Ho said he noticed was in the countries from which tourists tended to hail and the places that they chose to visit.
“When I first started in hospitality 30 years ago, the nature of tourism was one direction and one color,” Ho said. “It was basically white people from Europe, traveling in one direction, from west to east.”
“Over the years, what I call ‘rainbow tourism’ has come up because of increasing wealth in other developing countries,” he added.
Ho said this has led to a “multicolored, multifaceted, exciting tourism of people from all over the world traveling to all over the world.”
“You’ve got Indians, you’ve got Africans, you’ve got Arabs, you’ve got Chinese, and Japanese, and so on, and then of course you’ve got young people from within the region,” he continued. “That to me has been the biggest change.”
In January, UN Tourism’s World Tourism Barometer said an estimated 1.4 billion tourists traveled internationally in 2024, an 11% increase over 2023. UN Tourism said it expected international tourism arrival numbers to grow by 3% to 5% in 2025.
