Gemma Greenwood, Director of Content Inc. panelled a discussion to gain insight into pivotal market trends and how the industry is going to evolve and move on from the Muslim millennial mindset we are witnessing today.
Nabeel Shariff, Founder of Serendipity Tailormade, highlights the findings found in a recent survey on how the industry can target Muslim millennials and generation-z going forward. One of the key findings was that younger millennials are very different to the older millennials, and there is a concept called the ‘travel hitch’ where Muslims that are married tend to travel more than Muslims who are not married.
Elena Nikolova, Chief Editor of muslimtravelgirl.com, added that for the younger millennials under the age of 25, they are young single women who are wanting to travel but don’t have a partner. In response to this, there has been an increase in women-only trips and Facebook communities designed for women to find travel buddies.
Ikbal Hussain, Founder of Islamic GPS, has developed an app especially for Muslim customers who want to travel the world. The app helps Muslims to explore nearby Islamic heritage places and mosques.
Dr. Mario Hardy, CEO of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) spoke about the emerging Asia pacific travel and technology trends and how that relates to the Halal travel space. One trend Dr. Mario is noticing at the moment is a preference in AR as opposed to VR because the hardware isn’t convenient at the moment. He also says his focus is on Fintech, artificial intelligence and Greentech as these are areas with a lot more innovation and new ideas.
The conversation moves to how Millennials are starting to dominate the behaviour of all other demographics, and whether this is also the case with Muslim travel. Nabeel agreed that younger Muslim travellers are having an influence on older Muslim travellers because they are sharing their experiences of travel and this has played a key part in how Muslim travel is evolving.
Watch the full session here:
To hear more about Muslim and halal tourism, make sure you register to attend this year’s ATM Dubai.