Women Travelers Are Not a Segment. Treating Them as One Is a Strategic Mistake

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Here’s a Skift Research stat the travel industry has been citing for years: 82% of travel decisions are influenced by women. And the industry’s response has been largely the same: more female-forward imagery, a few wellness add-ons, and a campaign brief that says “women 35-54.”

But that is not strategy. It is lazy demographics with a marketing budget.

The core problem is that gender is being treated as a proxy for preference when it explains almost nothing about what a traveler values, how she makes decisions, or what she is worth to a business over time.

Skift’s 2025 Intrepid Traveler research, a large-scale attitudinal and behavioral study spanning tens of thousands of respondents across multiple