Developed by business research and consulting firm, Frost & Sullivan, the study surveyed 1,531 business and leisure travellers across seven key markets – Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore – as well as conducted 13 indepth interviews with industry leaders in the region.

The report points to the geopolitical, social and technological changes that will have a fundamental effect on Asia Pacific, and details the implications for travellers, travel service providers and the industry at large.

The four key themes driving change in APAC travel:

• Me Effect: This will see the fragmentation of the travel market into niches. Travellers across the region will travel for a much wider and more specific range of reasons, and with different aspirations and requirements for the travel experience. New traveller segments will emerge, such as the female business traveller, small business traveller, VFR (visiting friends and family) traveller and Generation S (senior) traveller. Travellers will increasingly turn to self-manage their travel, bypassing traditional sources of information and transactional channels in favour of a do-it-yourself approach. This trend will be particularly strong in China, Korea and Japan.

• Red Tape Effect: This will see the breaking down of barriers to travel within APAC. Economic convergence/integration and liberalisation of regulation impeding trade and travel will see the easing of visa requirements and more liberal air travel agreement. This will lead to growth in outbound travel. There will also be shifts in inbound travel markets, especially for business travel in China. Markets with natural resources such as Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and Myanmar will become the new hot spots for travel.

• Leapfrog Effect: Asia will start to leapfrog in adopting newer technologies and infrastructure, giving the traveller new ways of managing the travel experience and creating new behaviours. Widespread use of mobile devices and reliance on social media as a key tool in the travel experience will force changes in the way providers interact with their customers. Beyond information technologies, massive rollouts of transport technologies and infrastructure developments in the region such as 4G, high speed rail (HSR) and port upgrading/building will enable Asia to leapfrog existing global behaviours.

• Barbell Effect: Growth will occur particularly at the upper and lower ends of the travel market. While the numbers of travellers to Asia Pacific destinations will more than double over the period to 2030, traveller requirements will become more extreme at the upper and lower ends of the economic spectrum. The growing number of travellers from emerging countries will generally travel on a budget, stimulating rapid growth at the lower end of the travel scale like budget airlines and hotels. At the same time there will be enormous growth in the numbers of the very wealthy in the region, particularly in emerging economies such as China, India and Indonesia. For them travel is often the preferred form of leisure expenditure, thus stimulating significantly the luxury end of the travel market.

David Brett, president, Amadeus Asia Pacific said the report was commissioned to further understand the future of traveller behaviour in APAC ,and provide a roadmap for the travel industry to shape itself.

Download a copy of the report here.