Senior Tourism in Europe: Current State and Prospects for Future

Current demographic changes indicate that there is a growing number of older population groups, which brings about serious economic and social issues. Therefore there is ongoing effort to prevent these issues by implementing different approaches. One of the approaches, which may also have a positive impact on older people’s quality of life seems to be travelling. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the current state of senior tourism and suggest its prospects for future. This is done by literature search of available studies on the research topic in the world’s databases. The findings show that senior tourism represents a significant market in tourism industry due to the current demographic changes. For example, in 1999 there were about 590 million senior travellers and by 2050 this number should reach two billion. However, in order to be able to flourish, certain barriers such as low quality of tourist facilities, country/region infrastructure and staff qualifications in senior tourism must be removed and more research must be done in the area of the efficacy of senior tourism on quality of life of this older population group.