The results are in from our 2020 NOMADasaurus Readers’ Survey, and boy, did we learn a lot about you guys!
We absolutely love doing these surveys, as it gives us such a unique insight into our audience, what their interests are, the way they travel, and what they would like to see more (and less) of from us.
As professional travel bloggers and content creators, this information is incredibly valuable to us, as it gives us a clearer direction into what to produce to help you, the reader, with your own travels!
This year we received over 1200 responses, which was amazing, and we can’t thank everyone who took the time to complete the survey enough!
Rather than keep the information to ourselves, we thought it’d be fun to share those results with you all.
Once again, thanks so much for following us on our journey and supporting our business. Just by commenting on social media or reading our blog, you help keep us motivated to stay on the road and create more epic content!
We also offered to give away $100 to one lucky person who completed the survey! We have now done the random draw and contacted the winner. Thanks again to everyone who took part!
Table of Contents
- The Results Are In!
- Who Are the Readers?
- 63.4% of the people that filled out the survey were female.
- The age groups were pretty diverse:
- Where are you guys from?
- How long is your typical vacation?
- Do you normally travel locally or internationally?
- Who do you travel with?
- Do you travel independently or as part of a group?
- What kind of traveller are you?
- What kind of accommodation do you primarily choose to stay in when you travel?
- How much would you typically spend on a holiday?
- Where is your dream travel destination?
- Questions about NOMADasaurus
- How long have you been reading or following NOMADasaurus?
- What platforms do you follow us on?
- Have you ever made travel plans or purchases based on information or posts you found on NOMADasaurus?
- Will you make travel plans or purchases in the future based on information or posts you found on NOMADasaurus?
- What do you want to see more of on NOMADasaurus?
- What do you like the most about NOMADasaurus?
- What do you like the least about NOMADasaurus?
- 82.3% of you guys are interested in potentially joining one of our NOMADasaurus tours in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Mongolia at some point.
- What would you like to watch on our YouTube channel?
- What questions do you have for us?
- Who Are the Readers?
The Results Are In!
Before we get started, we just wanted to share a little bit of information about the survey demographics.
The larger percentage of people who completed the survey were our newsletter subscribers.
This is important to note for two reasons. The first is that this may be what points to the high number of people aged over 45, as our subscribers have developed to be in this demographic.
When comparing this to our Google Analytics and social media, our audience is about 52% aged 25-44.
The second thing this shows is something that we’ve always believed, and that is that our newsletter subscribers are our most engaged by a huge margin.
We knew this already, because whenever we send out a newsletter, we receive anywhere from 50-200 replies.
Who Are the Readers?
That being said, let’s dive into what we learnt about you guys!
63.4% of the people that filled out the survey were female.
This is higher than our Google Analytics and social media insights, which places it about 55% female.
But cool to see so many female travellers here!
The age groups were pretty diverse:
- 0.8% are under 18
- 2.6% were 18-24
- 21.5% are 25-34
- 16.2% are 35-44
- 15.1% are 45-54
- 22.3% are 55-64
- 21.5% are over the age of 65!
Again the higher number of people aged 45 and over may reflect more on the newsletter subscriber database than total users, but it’s a very interesting insight nonetheless.
When we first started doing these surveys in 2015, we were getting primarily younger backpackers reading our blog and following us.
As we’ve grown and our personal travel style has changed (still as adventurous as ever, but definitely not budget backpackers anymore), it appears our audience has changed with us.
Where are you guys from?
The majority of those who filled out the survey are from Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the European Union.
This matches all of our other insights as well, and makes sense as we publish our content in English.
How long is your typical vacation?
- 5.3% travel for less than 1 week at a time
- 33.6% travel for 1-2 weeks
- 38.5% travel for 2-4 weeks
- 14.3% travel for 1-3 months
After that, it tapered off to be 3-6 months, longer than 6 months, and full-time travellers.
Do you normally travel locally or internationally?
- 59.2% travel both in their home country and internationally
- 37% choose to travel abroad only
- 3.8% choose to travel in their home country only
Who do you travel with?
For the next few questions, people could choose as many answers as were applicable to their situation.
- 52% travel with their partner (couple travellers, represent!)
- 42.6% travel solo
- 35.1% travel with their families
- 33.2% travel with friends
Do you travel independently or as part of a group?
- 95.1% travel independently!
- 30.2% join group tours
- 15.5% sign up for private tours
What kind of traveller are you?
- 67.9% consider themselves to be ‘Flashpackers’
- 47.9% are adventure and outdoor travellers
- 25.7% are backpackers
- 13.2% prefer luxury
We also had a very large percentage of people choose ‘other’ and write in that they travel by RV, campervan or go on road trips.
What kind of accommodation do you primarily choose to stay in when you travel?
- 63.8% choose Airbnbs or self-contained apartments
- 53.6% like mid-range hotels
- 40.8% prefer budget hotels
- 28.7% like camping
- 27.2% go for private rooms in hostels
- 16.2% opt for dorm beds in hostels
It dropped off from there for luxury hotels, resorts and cruise ships. But just like above, we had a large number of people write their own answer in and go for caravans, RVs or motorhomes.
In hindsight, we should have made road trips/campervans their own selection to get a more accurate representation of this number.
BONUS! Use this link to sign up to Airbnb to get $35 off your first stay.
How much would you typically spend on a holiday?
- 18.1% spend less than $1000 on a holiday
- 43% spend between $1001-$3000 on a holiday
- 20.8% spend between $3001-$5000
- 11.7% spend between $5001-$10,000
- 6.4% spend more than $10,000
Where is your dream travel destination?
There was a whole range of answer for this one, but these were the most prominent dream travel destinations:
Questions about NOMADasaurus
After the questions about you guys, we wanted to know what you thought of us, and how you interacted with our brand.
Here is what we found.
How long have you been reading or following NOMADasaurus?
- 17.4% less than 6 months (welcome!)
- 23.4% for between 6-12 months
- 23.8% for between 1-2 years
- 18.9% for between 2-3 years
- 8.3% for between 3-5 years
- Which means 8.3% of you guys have been following us for more than 5 years! That is unbelievable!
What platforms do you follow us on?
- 67.5% read our newsletter
- 54.7% follow our website
- 36.6% follow our Facebook page
- 29.8% follow our Instagram account
- 10.6% subscribe to our YouTube channel
Have you ever made travel plans or purchases based on information or posts you found on NOMADasaurus?
- 68.7% said no
- 31.3% said yes
Of the people who have made travel plans or purchases, these were the most common things that came up:
- Travel insurance
- Travelling to Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia
- Buying SunGod sunglasses
- Travelling to Antarctica
- New Zealand travel planning
- Japan destinations
- Using Kathmandu clothing and gear
Will you make travel plans or purchases in the future based on information or posts you found on NOMADasaurus?
97.7% of you said you will most likely plan or purchase something based on the content we share! So stoked about that.
Here’s what you are most interested in:
- Central Asia, both independently, and joining one of our NOMADasaurus Tours.
- Following our Japan itineraries
- Travelling to New Zealand
- Visiting Antarctica and South Georgia
Here’s another fun statistic: 76.2% of you said you visit our website, email us or contact us on social media when you are planning a trip, or are in the middle of a trip, for ideas and inspiration.
What do you want to see more of on NOMADasaurus?
- 69.8% would like to see more off-the-beaten-path destinations
- 64.5% would like more destination guides
- 63% are interested in general travel tips
- 50.2% want more adventure!
- 49.1% want to know more about sustainable tourism (so happy to see this high number)
- 44.5% want to read more personal storytelling and narratives
It tapers off from there to include photography tips, budget travel tips, travel videos, gear reviews and how to make money online.
This information is so important to us, and we’re going to use it to plan out our content strategy over the next 12 months.
What do you like the most about NOMADasaurus?
The overwhelming majority said that what they liked most about NOMADasaurus was that we were honest and trustworthy in regards to the content we publish on our channels.
This means the world to us, and we promise to try our best to never lose that trust!
The second biggest takeaway was our photography, so we’ll strive to keep improving on that.
What do you like the least about NOMADasaurus?
This question was one of the things that we were most interested in hearing from you guys, especially as our brand and business has changed so much over the years.
While hearing everything that we’re doing right is always nice, it’s important to know the things that we can improve, and to learn what you guys don’t like.
The three biggest points that were brought up were that we do a lot of commercial work now, that the website has too many ads, and that we now have other writers on the team.
These are actually some of the things we think about a lot as well. We’ll just address them real quick.
We really hate running ads on our website, and put off doing so for the longest time. But they pay the bills, and allow us to invest back into the business and ourselves. We do concede that they are ugly though.
The commercial work also brings in a solid source of income, and while most people don’t follow bloggers or influencers to see the sponsors, working with tourism boards and brands like Kathmandu also allow us to travel to more places and create awesome free content.
We are very strict about who we work with though, and for every one company we agree to partner with, we knock back at least 100.
And finally the reason we decided to hire more writers (as well as two virtual assistants and a head of content) is that the workload was just getting to be too much for the two of us.
With these amazing people on our team we can publish a lot more travel guides, tips and stories on the site to help out readers.
The truth is that 85% of our website traffic comes from people who find us on search engines, visit our website once, and never return.
But our average ‘time on page’ is over 6 minutes, so if these travel guides written by the team are helping somebody make the most of their trip, NOMADasaurus has served its purpose.
We will take this onboard though for the future.
82.3% of you guys are interested in potentially joining one of our NOMADasaurus tours in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Mongolia at some point.
We also have ideas to develop an Uzbekistan tour and are researching trips to Georgia as well, so stay tuned for 2021 plans!
What would you like to watch on our YouTube channel?
Of all our platforms, YouTube is definitely the smallest. But we are trying to get more into video, so will be hopefully focusing more on it in the future.
So what content should we produce?
- 74.6% would like to see more travel vlogs or videos about our personal experiences
- 59% would like to watch videos about our best travel tips
- 37.3% would be interested in videos on travel photography
- 22.4% would like to see some gear reviews
- 22% would like to watch cinematic travel videos
In case you haven’t already subscribed to us on YouTube, make sure you stop by our channel, watch a few videos, leave a comment and smash that subscribe button!
What questions do you have for us?
We also asked if you guys had any specific questions for us, and boy did we get a bunch! We can’t answer them all, but here’ a couple of our favourites that we’ll address:
Can you make a living from your activity in NOMADasaurus? How do you feel about your life and your foreseen future?
Yes, we do make a decent living from NOMADasaurus. This is actually our full-time jobs.
It’s not all cocktails by the beach and hiking adventures though. It took a lot of work to get to this stage of the business, and we still work a lot of hours when we’re not on the road.
We’re absolutely stoked about our lives, and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.
As for the future, who knows what that will look like! One thing is for certain though, we’ll never stop travelling, although we’ll definitely slow down a bit.
Which part of running NOMADasaurus do you like the least?
The admin that happens behind the scenes! Accounting, finances, contracts, emails, etc.
What are your recommendations on travelling during this pandemic, and what do you think travel will look like after COVID-19?
Our recommendations are to not travel. Stay home until governments give official advice that things are ok and ease restrictions.
As for what the future will look like? We envision that these severe restrictions on international travel will last at least until 2021.
That means travel will become predominantly domestic for everybody, once things start to ease in your home country.
Expect there to be a lot more vacations close to home and road trips. We are personally planning on going on some epic road trips around Australia, as soon as we can.
Of course that’s our non-expert thoughts, and are just what we imagine based on research and news. We could be (and hope that we are) wrong and things go back to ‘normal’ much sooner.
How hard is it for you guys to get back to a level of normal after a period on the road?
To be honest we’re not actually sure what ‘normal’ is. Usually when we come back to our temporary home here in Australia, it’s only for a couple of days or a fortnight at most, then we hit the road again.
Now that we’ve been home for a bit over a month, we are definitely getting itchy feet to hit the road again, but of course we can’t.
What we think our new normal will look like in the coming years though is to cut back on the long-term travels, and instead go to places for a couple of weeks at most.
We might buy a campervan to live out of, or look at buying a property with a tiny home somewhere one day.
Unless we travel to Africa, which will of course be an epic adventure!
What would you be doing if not travelling?
Hmm, not sure. We’d probably be living in the mountains of Canada, working normal jobs and spending our free time snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking and climbing.
I’d like to know your favourite colours.
My favourite colour is green, and Alesha’s is purple.
Have you ever found yourself somewhere that no one speaks English, where you could not communicate with anyone, was it uncomfortable?
Many, many, many times! And no, we don’t feel uncomfortable about this, although we do sometimes get embarrassed that we haven’t made more of an effort to learn a local language.
I would love to learn how everything operates for you guys behind the scene. Do you have people working for you? Do you reach out to travel companies and pitch yourselves? How far out do you plan your adventures? What does the business side look like?
We might write a whole post about this, or make a video, if anybody else is interested in it. Let us know in the comments below!
What’re your top 10 countries to visit?
We haven’t visited every country, so take this with a grain of salt as it’s just based on our personal experiences, but here we go:
Vietnam
Kyrgyzstan
Mongolia
Chile
Canada
New Zealand
Georgia
Ireland
Turkey
Antarctica (although it’s not a country)
Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. If you have any questions for us at all, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Happy travels!
1 thought on “The Results of our 2020 Readers’ Survey”
Your Kyrgyzstan video produced a wonderful trip down memory lane for me; I visited this country last September along with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. This is a wonderful, culturally, historically and geographically incredible part of the world. Most of my friends looked blankly at me when I mentioned plans to visit there; either they hadn’t heard of these countries or they couldn’t understand why on earth I would go there! I highly recommend all of these amazingly different areas, especially before they become overrun. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for anything. I have been fortunate to have travelled to over 100 countries since I was young and even in my 70s, regardless of how we have to travel after the pandemic, I will not give it up without a fight!