Executive Summary

The travel industry has been riding a tidal wave of starts and stops for the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it seems that with rising vaccination rates and borders reopening, individuals have a renewed confidence that they will be able to act on their pent-up desire for new travel experiences. Despite the Omicron variant, January 3rd was the busiest travel day of the pandemic thus far in the U.S. with more than 1.3 million travelers passing through airport security, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And as the industry recovers, one cohort that continues to lead the comeback are individuals who identify as luxury travelers. Our new research suggests that they’ll look to leverage savings that accumulated during COVID-19’s lockdown to create unforgettable experiences. Those experiences will also likely tend to last longer. According to Virtuoso, the average length of stay for a hotel booked in January 2022 is 63% longer than in January 2020. This is a trend that we validate in our recent survey. Another trend that luxury travelers are latching onto is getting assistance from travel agents, or travel advisors, who are as popular as ever as travelers factor health and safety and cancellation policies into their travel decisions. Luxury travelers are increasingly confident that only travel agents and advisors can provide the high-end experiences they seek —which now must also be COVID-19 safe and convenient. Our research shows travelers looking to agents and advisors to ease their many concerns related to luxury travel in a post-COVID-19 world. More than half of the 648 surveyed will use a travel advisor in 2022, because, as one traveler summed it up, “One call does it all.” With a boom in luxury travel highly anticipated, the question remains - what criteria will inform how they make their decisions? How have their travel preferences changed during the COVID-19 era? And how should travel companies who rely on them for business adapt?

To better understand these questions, Flywire commissioned independent research of more than 600+ frequent luxury travelers from the U.S. These key insights will help travel companies adapt.