The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, a well-informed and socially responsible group of people born between the years 1980 and 2000, are transforming the travel industry, which is currently striving to respond to the changing market conditions.
The new trend among this social segment, whose members constitute the spearhead of economic activity and thus can afford to travel to foreign countries, is “reaching out to local communities, learning the local customs, and fully experiencing with all senses what each place has to offer.”
Of course, realizing how some of our supposedly innocent personal decisions may affect other people’s lives and our planet in general has also played a key role in shaping new attitudes and creating new perspectives in vacation planning, especially when travelling abroad.
As early as 1990, a number of joint initiatives aiming to strategically promote ecotourism were launched by government agencies and organizations active in tourism, and have been supported since by companies and individuals around the world.
For example, the International Ecotourism Society has been providing for decades the guidelines, setting the standards and advancing the principles of ecotourism in more than 120 countries. However, ecotourism does not always