Five travel products had dominated this category for the past several years, the ones that consistently have response rates above 30%. New this year to the 30%-plus club is river cruises (31%). From last year's survey to this year's, river cruise moved up 4 percentage points, from 27% to 31%, with its gain seemingly made at ocean cruises' loss: that category declined 4 points, from 62% to 58%.
But the biggest gainer overall this year was vacation packages, which jumped from 47% to 56% among all our respondents, though driven to a slightly greater extent by home-based agencies.
A notable drop this year was luxury travel, which fell to 17% from 22% overall, but for the largest agencies the drop was pronounced: Only 21% said they focused on it this year, down from 30% in 2016.