The Hero’s Journey: A Human Framework for Building Modern Travel Brands
Skift Take
Travel is in our DNA. It's an emotional journey and story that has played out since the dawn of humankind. Getting to the root of this travel instinct can help us build better brands and lasting relationships with our customers. Luckily there's a framework for that.
Editor's Note: Last week we released a big editorial package called "The Supertraveler Manifesto." In it we proposed a new framework at looking at the traveler's journey and below is that part of it.
After years of work in travel behavior research I've come to understand at least two things well.
First and foremost, try to avoid using the word 'consumer' whenever possible. It's dehumanizing and it kills our understanding of the individual inside all of us. Secondly, conceptualizing an archetypical, one-size-fits-all model of the traveler is difficult, if not impossible. So many different personas and personalities live among us and even within us. We are chameleons; very different people when traveling alone or with significant others, on bachelor parties, or on honeymoons.
Some in the industry have tried, but most have largely failed to capture the full complexity and spectrum of traveler emotion. Formulaic concepts like the booking funnel, search-shop-buy, traveler personas,
