Engaging New Travel Audiences: Understanding the UK BAME Travellers’ Decision-making Process

This report aims to provide an insight to the UK Black, Asian and other Minority Ethnic (BAME) travellers, their experiences, preferences, behaviour, opportunities, and constraints in making destination choices. It is a collaborative endeavour between SHTM Surrey and Women in Travel (WiT) CIC. BAME groups in the UK are a powerful emerging travel market with very similar travel characteristics to the wider population of White travellers. Despite the segment’s potential and presence in both domestic and international travel markets, there is a serious dearth of research on how these travellers make decisions, perceive challenges to travel choices and find mitigating strategies to overcome barriers to travel.

The proposed project was challenge-led and multidisciplinary and aimed to achieve the following four interlinked objectives:

• Evaluate the size and value of the UK BAME Travel Market
• Determine the travel propensity and patterns of BAME travel consumers
• Understand the travel decision-making behaviour of this market segment
• Develop evidence-based recommendations for research, practice and industry