THE IMPACT OF GENERATION Y ON THE SERVICE OFFER IN TRAVEL AGENCIES IN SLOVAKIA.

Travel agencies and their activities have great potential for developing tourism in Slovakia. Their role is to offer, sell and organize individual tourism services. Travel agencies offer services that meet the needs of customers of all generations. Generation Y gradually gaining in importance in terms of the number of visitors who use the services in tourism. Instead of saving money or establishing family life, the generation Y prefers to travel to different destinations and explore the world. The aim of this paper is to examine the clients of travel agencies in terms of generations and see if the travel agencies in developing service offerings focused on customer included in generation Y. In order to fulfill the aim of the paper we have made survey in the months from January to May 2019 in 65 travel agencies in Slovakia. We used the questionnaire method to meet the aim. Up to 69.2% of travel agencies use social networks to offer their services to customers of generation Y. Up to 80% of surveyed travel agencies do not use mobile apps to sell products to customers. More than half of customers (60%) of travel agencies in Slovakia consists of generation X. The second largest group of customers is generation Y (20%). With the Spearman correlation coefficient, we found that the more travel agencies focus on generation Y, the greater the impact of generation Y on travel agency services. The negative finding was that almost half of the surveyed travel agencies do not offer specialized products for customers of generation Y. The results of the examination enable to take action in practice of travel agencies in order to increase the number of generation Y customers, extend the service offer for generation Y as well as improve the promotion of Slovakia as a target place for generation Y. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]