Booking.com reveals what your nationality says about your travel preferences

Everyone has their own favourite way to travel. For some, it’s a time for adventure and adrenaline, whereas for others it is an opportunity to relax and unwind. New research commissioned by Booking.com,^[1] the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay, reveals how your nationality is likely to impact your travel style.

So with the festive season on the horizon and you may be thinking of your next vacation, ask yourself this: do your travel preferences lump you with your nation’s stereotype, or do you break the mold?

Thrilling and chilling: top travel motivations

For most nationalities, the top motivation to travel is straightforward: to get some downtime. Unsurprisingly, 85% of travellers says that “giving myself time to relax” is an important motivation to travel. This makes it the top travel motivation to all nationalities, including Singaporean travellers, with the exception of the Danish and the French, who cite “being free to act how I feel” as their top motivation to travel.

However, when comparing top travel motivations between nationalities, it is clear that travellers from different corners of the world have different preferences.

Chinese and Taiwanese travellers attach relatively high importance to “experiencing a simpler lifestyle (respectively 83% and 76%) and Japanese and Hong Kong travellers are most likely travelling to “get away from the demands at home” (respectively 66%, 72% and 80%).

For some travellers, travel is a question of social status: particularly Indonesian (75%), Indian (75%) and Filipino travellers (80%) say their motivation to travel is to “go to places my friends have not been”.

For both Singaporeans (74%) and Malaysians (78%), it’s no wonder that “trying new food” ranks highly.

Most global disagreement, however, exists on the subject of adventure tourism: Russian travellers say they like to spend their off-time “finding thrills and excitement”, while Dutch and German travellers rate this on average the lowest.

This is how Singaporean travellers compare to the global top 5:

 Destination

Apart from motivation to travel, the actual destination can also vary by nationality. Most global Travellers select destinations based on categories such as “personal safety” and “cleanliness”, but there are plenty of nationalities that prioritize “natural beauty” or “tasty local food”.

Of course, travel behaviour is also heavily influenced by what is easy to reach. This may be why Indian travellers make up the majority of Bhutan bookers, Argentinian travellers are the most seen customers in Paraguay and the South Koreans are Booking.com’s biggest fans of Guam. If you look at the countries that Singaporeans travel to relatively often, it is clear that we know how to appreciate our neighbours:

^[1] Research commissioned by Booking.com and independently conducted among a sample of 53,492 respondents across 31 markets. The results in this article focus on Singaporean travellers only, which consisted of 1950 respondents. In order to participate in this survey, respondents had to be 18 years of age or older, had to have travelled at least once in the past 12 months and be either the primary decision maker or involved in the decision making of their travel. The survey was taken online and took place between October 16th and November 12th, 2018.

^[2]For each nationality, the analysts at Booking.com selected the top 50 countries that were most often booked for leisure travel during 2018. These destinations were then ordered by share of global bookings to find the destinations that each nationality travelled to relatively often when compared to global travel patterns.