Sometimes a picture may be worth a thousand words, but to many millennials, it could be worth a thousand likes.
A new survey revealed that many millennials are driven to travel to a destination based on its photogenic appearance. Research from JetCost surveyed more than 4,000 Americans between the ages of 22 and 37 and found that getting great pictures for social media is a big driver of how millennials choose a destination, with one in five saying they traveled for the snap.
Still, the top five reasons for taking a vacation remain fairly typical.
Survey results found that 78 percent travel to take a break from work, 74 percent want to chill out, 68 percent want to explore new places, 63 percent want to get a tan and 56 percent want to spend time with family and friends.
However, one-fifth, 21 percent, said that the main reason they go on vacation is to "get pictures for social media," and one in nine millennials said that this was their top reason for going away.
This is a big win for Instagram as 73 percent said that was where they were uploading their holiday photos. Fifty-six percent said that they also upload to Facebook. Two-thirds of respondents (63 percent) said that they upload pictures to social media whilst they are on holiday.
Destinations looking to attract millennial travelers need to be photogenic, too. Approximately two-thirds of millennials (61 percent) revealed that they would not go on vacation to a destination where they would not be able to take good pictures. Twenty-four percent said that a destination's photogenic appeal was the main criteria for choosing a destination.
The survey also calculated how much time travelers spend taking pictures while on vacation and concluded that it was an average of 40 minutes per day, totaling 4 hours and 40 minutes in a week's holiday.
The most popular places to take pictures were "by a pool" (27 percent), "by a landmark" (23 percent) and "at the beach'"(21 percent).
"In the digital age that we currently live in, it is somewhat inevitable that people on vacation will take lots of pictures and upload them to social media, and there really isn't a problem with that at all," said a JetCost spokesperson. "However, if the focus of the vacation becomes taking pictures to show off on social media, then you sort of lose the point of going away."
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