The New Summer Break - target marketing children's activities during summer vacations; United States - Statistical Data Included

American Demographics, August 1, 2001

WHERE THE KIDS ARE

America's children are found not just in the nation's largest metros, where the population is growing in family-filled suburban neighborhoods. They're also concentrated in markets with disproportionate numbers of racial and ethnic minority groups, whose families tend to be larger than non-Hispanic whites, and in markets of large geographic size - such as Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Albuquerque-Santa Fe - which include most of the residents of their states.

GOING SOLO

More and more American kids name individual rather than team sports among their favorite athletic activities - a trend that's helped to popularize extreme sports. Some experts explain the growth in solo sports as a reaction to kids participating in too many structured activities.

TAPPING THE KID TRAVEL MARKET

When it comes to summer travel, kids rule. Estimates vary, but several researchers calculate that children in the U.S. spend as much as $200 billion a year directly on products and services, and influence an estimated $600 billion on total household spending, including summer travel. What's more, that sway on spending begins at increasingly younger ages: The NPD Group reports that 90 percent of mothers with children ages 6 to 10 say their kids influence their buying decisions. James McNeal, an expert in marketing to children says that kids as young as 2 years old influence their parents' choices in everything from hotels to restaurants to theme parks.

The travel industry is taking notice. The number of young people who travel each year is growing at a 21 percent clip, thanks to hotel chains like Days Inn, Days Hotel and Days Suites offering "Kids Stay and Eat Free" programs to children under 12. A host of travel companies now offer summer tours for teens to hike the national parks in this country and take language classes abroad. "When you look at the growing kids' market, businesses have a lot of impetus to come out with a product or service that they'll like," says Michael Wood, vice president for Teenage Research Unlimited. "Kids are always looking to be entertained."

Thanks to summer travel becoming a lot more kid-friendly, nearly two-thirds of all K-12 students traveled in 2000, according to the Student & Youth Travel Association of North America (SYTA). And despite the economic downturn and high gas prices, Michael Palmer, SYTA's executive director, foresees the touring horde continuing this summer. "Kids are traveling farther and farther distances at younger and younger ages," he says. Observers like Palmer attribute this spike to the fact that the Internet has made students more aware, and able to discover foreign sites worth visiting online.

But Lalia Rach, dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University, believes that a more "fundamental shift" is at work in the way Americans view youth travel. "Travel is no longer a benefit but has become a right of American children," she says. "We now have children at every age and at every economic level traveling."