As someone in the travel industry, travel is both a matter of business and an area of personal interest: For more and more professionals, regardless of what industry they work in, the same holds true.

Travelers are increasingly blurring the lines between business and leisure when they take a trip. We wanted to understand more about this audience segment of “bleisure” travelers, as they’re known.

As our research highlighted, this is an attractive audience to marketers for a number of reasons.

Here are three key insights to help you understand �" and connect with �" bleisure travelers:

Fewer vacations mean more bleisure trips

Our new research into American bleisure travelers shows that there’s high reach within this segment. The crossover of business and leisure is becoming more common �" 43% of business trips among U.S. business travelers are bleisure.

Many of those trips are for four or more days too. For 60% of people, bleisure is enticing because they don’t take a lot of regular vacations, so many would be an incremental leisure traveler.

Bleisure travelers spend more

Bleisure travelers also tend to be bigger spenders when they’ve reached their destination. Sixty-six percent say they spend more money on leisure activities because of the cost savings involved with getting to their destination since they’re already there.

Trip length influences bleisure stays

What’s the sweet spot in terms of deciding whether to mix work and play? For 62% of people, the duration of the business trip is a critical factor in whether or not it becomes bleisure. Travelers with business trips that are three days or more are 30% more likely to extend their trip for personal reasons.

Get more insight into what influences bleisure travelers and learn how to engage this enticing (and growing) audience segment by downloading Profile of the American Bleisure Traveler Study.

Monya Mandich is a global senior director at Expedia Media Solutions and oversees all integrated marketing and communications activities for the brand. In her role, she is responsible for raising awareness of digital media opportunities for partners across the Expedia, Inc. suite of leading global travel brands. With nearly two decades of experience, she evangelizes a thought leadership approach both externally and internally centered on data-driven insights, which has resulted in travel and marketing industry recognition and accolades. Monya previously managed strategic partnership development, executing strategies for top-tier partnerships, maximizing traffic and revenue for Expedia.com. She started her career in the travel space at VacationSpot.com, where she ran the B2B marketing and customer acquisition efforts for the vacation rental booking site. Monya currently sits on the advisory committee for the U.S. Travel Association’s Project: Time Off, which aims to shift thinking around the health, business and economic value of personal time off, and was recognized as one of HSMAI’s Top 25 Most Extraordinary Minds in Sales and Marketing. She is a graduate of Western Washington University, and lives in the Seattle area with her family.

Original article