The Wooing of Generation X

My Dad is a man full of thoughts and ideas. He churns them out (some entirely random, some stunningly prescient) at a remarkable pace. They’re sometimes brilliant, sometimes less than half-baked, but almost all of them are at least interesting. He runs a fraction of them by me, as well as a lot of oddball community and tourism articles (he’s an Egg Harbor innkeeper), and some of them lead to columns or articles of my own. Many more pile up on my desk or in my inbox.

While organizing the other day, I came across an editorial he sent me in January written by Jay Karen in Innkeeping Quarterly. Karen wrote about the rapidly changing tourism market. Just a couple of years ago, Door County hosted a handful of industry experts touting the Baby Boomer generation as the primary (if not only) demographic worth pursuing. Then the economy tanked, and millions of boomers saw their artificial wealth (built largely on debt and inflated real estate values) disintegrate. That bottomless vacation reservoir drained faster than most imagined.

Karen points out that, while boomers are still the “bread and butter” of the tourism industry, it’s high time marketers and businesses start turning to members of Generation X, some of whom are now turning 50. They have different tastes, want different activities, and expect a different experience.

Karen was writing for innkeepers, but his is a message that should be ringing loudly in tourism businesses everywhere. As he writes, “This is your burgeoning customer base now!

Read the column here, then flip the pdf to page 5>>