Following an alarming spike in selfie-related deaths and injuries, online travel agency Agoda has launched a campaign to get travellers off their phones, urging them to concentrate on surroundings rather than selfies.
The message is: “Get off your phone and pay attention!” It comes as Agoda releases findings from its global “Annoying Travel Habits” survey.
Action to combat phone addiction and recklessness is overdue. Just last week, a teenage Mormon missionary from the US slipped and fell to his death from a cliff as he took a selfie while whale watching with a group of friends in southern Sydney. Gavin Paul Zimmerman, 19, from Utah, became the second man to die in a photo-related cliff fall at Cape Solander in just six weeks. See: Whale-riding ‘fool’ and selfie death stir emotions
To encourage travellers to pay attention and experience new destinations without their faces in their screens, Agoda has launched a “Selfie Fail” campaign, fronted by Australian comedian Ozzyman narrating footage of real travellers getting into “silly accidents and situations” (some of which look painful) as a result of paying more attention to their devices than to their surroundings.
Meanwhile, Agoda has released results of its “Annoying Travel Habits” survey. “Overuse of devices” (meaning personal communication devices) ranks highly among its top travel bugs.
Noisy travelers (56%), insensitivity to cultural nuances (54%) and overuse of devices (52%) are the most annoying habits for Australian travellers.
Women (25%) are less offended by selfie-takers than men (37%), the survey found. Australians spend over an hour a day on their devices while travelling with family (68 minutes) and friends (80 minutes); they spend over an hour and a half (90 minutes) when travelling solo.
There’s a lot of variation among countries and cultures. Globally, noisy travellers (57%), travellers glued to their devices (47%), and those insensitive to cultural nuances (46%) topped the most annoying habits of fellow travellers, the survey revealed. Mass tour groups and selfie-takers, cited by 36% and 21% respectively, completed the top five irritants.
Road sign sums it up
Chinese travellers seemingly have the highest tolerance for selfie-takers (this may not come as a great surprise to anyone who has travelled recently) with only 12% of Chinese respondents irritated by selfie-takers compared to Australians who are on the other end of the tolerance spectrum with nearly a third (31%) citing holiday selfie-takers as annoying.
Insensitivity to local culture nuances is more than twice as irritating for Singaporeans, (63%) Filipinos (61%) and Malaysians (60%) as it is for Chinese (21%) and Thai (27%) Travellers. About half of British (54%) and two-fifths of American travellers (41%) are intolerant of this habit.
Mobile device addiction
Almost half (47%) of the global respondents cited travellers spending too much time on their mobile devices as a grievance. Compared to travellers from other countries, the Vietnamese find those glued to their devices the most annoying (59%). Thai travellers, on the other hand, have the most relaxed attitude (31%) towards constant device usage on holiday.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, solo travellers spend nearly two hours a day on their devices when on holiday (117 minutes) – which is 15% more time than when they are travelling with friends (100 minutes) and 26% more time than if they are with family (86 minutes).
Americans are the only exception to this trend and on average spend less time on their devices when travelling solo (62 minutes) than when they are with family (66 minutes) or friends (86 minutes).
Brits are the most engaged travellers when travelling together, limiting their screen time to just over an hour (63 minutes) a day; comparatively Thai travellers spend more than two hours a day (125 minutes) on the phone when they travel with friends or family.
Agoda’s “Annoying Travel Habits” research was conducted by independent market research firm YouGov between June 19th and 25th 2018. 10,384 respondents were interviewed online and are representative of those who have been on holiday at least once in the past year.
Written by Peter Needham
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