Numi Research
After conducting our secondary research to familiarize ourselves with the travel industry, our team identified six key research questions to guide our process:
What information will post-pandemic travelers need to know to travel comfortably?
What do people need to feel safe traveling (including people with pre-existing conditions)?
What are users’ attitudes about current and future travel?
What are users’ motivations for current and future travel?
To answer these questions, our team deployed a 15 question survey and conducted 13 traveler interviews.
Surveys
Our survey was composed of a screening section, a quantitative section, and a qualitative section. Through disseminating our survey across all our social platforms, Facebook groups, and Reddit, 171 travelers responded to our survey, 120 of who fell into our age range. To analyze this data, we created an affinity diagram to uncover the main themes
Travelers would like to be more informed surrounding vaccination rates, social distancing policies, airline policies, and country statistics to feel safe when traveling.
Travelers are feeling hesitant to travel and are postponing/cancelling travel plans
Family is a large factor in traveling/ not traveling
Traveler’s perception of others’ behavior plays a large role in how they think about travel at large
View our survey here
Interviews
Informed by our survey insights, we took a deeper dive into people’s motivations and attitudes towards travel. Within these interviews, we asked about traveler’s previous travel habits, current travel attitudes, and visions for future travel. Due to the speculative nature of our project, we leveraged a participatory design approach in combination with a semi-structured interview format. The final section of our interview prompted travelers to draw what they hoped the future of travel would look like.
After qualitative coding and thematic analysis, it became clear that travelers are
Concerned about personal Health and Safety
Getting Vaccinated
Hesitant to be in close proximity to others
Excited by the possibilities of future travel
Interview
Speculative Travel Audit
Market Research
To supplement our traveler research, our team took a deep dive into the industry response to Covid-19 and the implications for future travel innovation. Covid-19 has introduced novel pain points in almost every aspect of the travel industry. The constant uncertainty of the pandemic has prompted people to rebook and cancel travel more than ever before. Travel companies have created flexible booking policies and pandemic insurance to rein-still people’s confidence in travel. A movement towards transparency and travel alerts allows travelers to be prepared for longer lines, and wait times during their travel journey. Even once travelers make it to the airport, train station or travel space, social distancing recommendations have left people wary of existing in public spaces. In response, these spaces have been reconfigured to allow pod based distancing, and increased cleaning protocols. Newer airport terminals are being built with more windows for natural lighting and a more spacious feel.
This research allowed our team to identify and support how the travel industry has adapted to meet the needs of a pandemic traveler, and inspired us to push our solutions for post pandemic travelers.