The best thing you can do for your own wellbeing in the first week back from a holiday is book for next year. Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation Report found that 85% of respondents felt more positive and optimistic simply having a trip planned. 

In his study, Jeroen Nawijn found that before they left, those who booked were happier than those who hadn’t. But when they got back, there was no general difference in happiness compared to those that didn’t go away. Only a very relaxed trip produced an afterglow.

So for brands, it’s really worth thinking about how you maximise the wait. The funnel treats booking as the end of the emotional phase and the start of the practical phase. The months between paying and packing get filled with transport links, opening times and what to bring. But those months are the longest continuous period a destination will occupy someone’s attention.

Martin Tušl of the University of Zurich offers a useful principle in an interview on the psychology of travel. He notes that “anticipation plays a big role in the joy of travel” and that smaller, more frequent things on the horizon do more for wellbeing than one big trip at the end of a long year. Our brains love anticipation; work on prediction and reward showed that dopamine neurons respond to the cues that predict a reward rather than to the reward itself, and go quiet once that reward is fully expected. For a destination brand, that suggests giving visitors who have booked something new to look forward to at intervals to build emotional engagement, rather than one confirmation email and silence. We imagine the future using the same machinery we use to remember the past, placing ourselves inside a story before it happens, and these reminders help us tell these stories to ourselves.

Places have unusually good material for this. Seasons change, festivals recur, harvests and tides and light all shift, and residents have experiences in February that they don’t in July. It’s an easy win – audiences are already invested and receptive. We’ve written before about how emotion moves people from thinking about it to booking it, but after the transaction, there is a missed opportunity to connect on a human level and create an emotional attachment to place.