The new North Carolina occupancy tax data is here!

I have a friend of mine who only vacations on cruise ships. Obviously, one has to love cruising in order to spend every vacation on the high seas or a navigable river. But his motivations go well beyond a fondness for exotic ports of call, sumptuous buffets, and flashy stage shows.

He likes cruising because for him, it’s easy. Pick a cruise line, find an itinerary that appeals, and go. It’s not always that simple, of course–but compared with planning a week-long vacation trip to a large attraction like the Happiest Place on Earth or a complex domestic or foreign destination, he finds it a relative breeze. The cruise line will arrange shore excursions, the ship offers a relatively limited number of choices for meals, and the question of where to stay is no question at all. My friend is not a planner by nature, and hates the perceived (and often very real) amount of planning that goes into travel in the twenty-first century.

In 2023 Expedia reported that the average traveler visited 277 webpages as part of their travel planning process. While travel advisors and AI are obvious tools for reducing the hassle of travel planning, how many travelers don’t even consider a destination or attraction because of their perception that the experience isn’t worth the trouble of research and planning?

I started my career in consumer packaged goods marketing, promoting apparel and food products sold through the supermarkets and big box retailers of the world. But with the possible exceptions of wine and beer, no category in Walmart or Target comes close to the abundance of choices a consumer faces when considering travel experiences.

That’s why a book published in 2003 (the year before I started my consulting career), The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz, changed my view of the tourism category. Schwartz argues that the side effects of having more choices is that decisions require more effort, mistakes are more likely, and the psychological consequences of those mistakes are more severe–that the very culture of cherished abundance that characterizes America robs us of our satisfaction.

What’s funny to me is that we don’t often assess the perception of how hard an attraction or destination is to visit. We often just assume having “more” is enough. Is the consumer’s consideration set of travel experiences diminished before the traveler even begins to engage with the vacation planning cycle because of a perception that a place is too hard to visit? And what are we doing as a sector to reduce that perception in the event that traveler decides to visit our website or engage on social media?

Here are a few practical ideas for minimizing the traveler’s anxiety over having too many choices:

1. Maybe it’s time to step away from the flashy ad that tries to cram a thousand images into a :30 television spot, something that is characteristic of way too many tourism promotional efforts. That’s not telling a story. It’s taking a box of photos and dumping it on the kitchen table of your target audience and asking them to like you because of it.
2. Include a question in your next market research brand awareness initiative that asks how hard your attraction or destination is to visit, and ask it of both visitors and non-visitors.
3. Do a customer journey mapping research exercise.
4. Take another look at your website. Are you just throwing activities and ideas at your potential guest and asking them to figure it out? I know that destination websites in particular have to be agnostic (or, at the least, reflective of the “coalition of the willing” of partners who return a phone call or respond to an email), but they don’t have to be devoid of consumer insight, either. Itineraries that reflect both destination strengths and traveler interests are one simple solution, but only if they’ve been appropriately curated. (I’ve always thought Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association does a nice job with their Trails of North Alabama.)