Every week Destinations International surveys its membership to get a pulse on how destination organizations are feeling about the present and the future and what are the trends in their operational plans. These are three major takeaways from our latest survey.

1. Community Comfort Level with Travel is Low

One of the most significant data points returned from the survey is regarding a community’s comfort level with visitors/tourists to their destination. One a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘Not Comfortable’, the average response was a ‘3.’ Not a surprise given the recent results from a survey from Kaiser Family Foundation, but no less sobering for our sector. Much like our weaponization of travel insights, safety and security must be felt before comfort and confidence are restored.

2. ‘Not Sure’ When to Begin Marketing

Many are trying to understand when the time is to turn up the dials on our marketing and sales efforts. It seems many of you are unsure just when that is. Regarding when you continue advertisement sales, just as many responded with suspending everything until further notice as they did to simply answering ‘not sure,’ 35% for both. Even marketing beyond your local community still presents pause for when to start, with 31% indicating they are ‘not sure’ when to begin.

3. Drive Market will be King

One definitive marker of confidence is the priority of drive market marketing once we reach recovery. 81% indicated repositioning marketing dollars to ‘drive market’ during recovery, compared to only 42% indicated spending pre-pandemic. Certainly, when we do feel safe and secure to travel again, it might not be by plane, but by car. Road trips might be in all our upcoming travel plans and destination organizations have certainly taken notice.