What Travelers Say They’ll Pay For

A survey of American travelers put some numbers on something I’ve watched happen across hundreds of trips.

Ninety percent of American travelers say the best trip isn’t always the cheapest one.

That’s from a HarrisX survey of 1,332 American travelers, fielded between 6 and 11 August this year and published on 27 August. I’m using it because it’s someone else’s data rather than my own assertion, and because the specific breakdown is more interesting than the headline.

The numbers

Alongside that 90 percent, 87 percent agreed that cheap can end up being expensive. Which is a different claim, and a more precise one. It’s about the cost that shows up later.

When asked what they’d actually pay more for, the answers ranked like this. Avoiding hassles came first at 90 percent. Memorable experiences and relaxing without worry tied at 67 percent.

Two more figures worth sitting with. Eighty four percent described travel as an investment in their quality of life. And 68 percent said they’d cut day-to-day spending in order to travel.

A note on the survey. It’s a sample of 1,332 people, it’s American only, and it asks people what they say they value, which is reliably different from what they do at the moment of booking. Stated preference surveys tend to flatter the respondent. I’d read it as directional.

The gap between first and second place

The thing that stopped me is the distance between the top answer and the rest.

Avoiding hassles sits at 90 percent. The experiential answers, the memorable moments and the relaxing without worry, sit at 67. That’s a 23 point gap, and it runs against how travel is usually sold.

Most travel marketing is built on the second category. The sunset, the meal, the view. What people say they’ll actually pay for is the absence of friction. Not the highlight of the trip, the ordinary hours around it.

I think that’s right, and I think it’s under-discussed because it’s hard to photograph.

What friction actually costs

A trip that goes wrong rarely goes wrong dramatically. It goes wrong in accumulation.

The flight lands at 6am and the room isn’t ready until three, so the first day disappears into a lobby. The connection is 55 minutes in an airport where 55 minutes isn’t enough, and you spend the flight before it doing arithmetic instead of resting. The restaurant that mattered was booked out six weeks ago and nobody said so. The transfer that was meant to be waiting isn’t, and it’s raining, and you’ve been awake for nineteen hours.

None of that ruins a trip. All of it taxes it. And the tax lands hardest on the first two days, which is exactly when your nervous system is deciding whether this is a week you can relax into.

For anyone in midlife managing sleep that’s already unreliable, that first-48-hours tax is not a small thing. Losing a night to a bad arrival can cost you three days of the trip.

Where I spend my attention

This is the part of the job that doesn’t photograph well either, so here’s what it actually looks like from my side of the desk.

We book the first night before anything else, and I request the early check-in. That word matters. Early arrival, late checkout and upgrades are requests rather than purchases, and what I’m doing is asking on your behalf, through people who know me, far enough ahead that the answer is usually yes. An arrival day with a room in it is worth more than an upgrade later in the week.

We book easy connections. If the itinerary needs a 55 minute transfer, we look for another routing, and if there isn’t one I tell you what we’re accepting and why.

I check who’s on the ground. A property where someone will answer the phone at eleven at night is worth more than one with a better spa, and you can’t tell the difference from the listing.

We leave gaps. The instinct when planning is to fill the days, because empty space on an itinerary looks like something’s missing, when the unscheduled afternoon is usually the one people describe when they get home.

What the 68 percent tells you

The figure I keep returning to is that 68 percent would cut everyday spending in order to travel.

That’s people treating a trip as a thing worth protecting, which changes what a good trip has to deliver. If someone has rearranged their year around a week, the week has to work. The margin for a wasted arrival day is smaller.

Ninety percent said they’d pay to avoid hassle. What that buys, when it’s done properly, is a week where nothing needs solving and you get to be present for it.

Debra Orringer, MS, ACE-MES, ACSM-CEP, CIHC, is an independent luxury travel advisor specializing in restorative travel for people in midlife. Restorative Journeys by Debra Orringer.