Despite Missing Travel Themselves, Many Americans Don’t Want Visitors in Their Own Communities Yet
The data and findings cited below come from Destination Analysts’ Coronavirus Travel Sentiment Index, a weekly survey of 1,200 American travelers that we have conducted since March 15th, 2020. These findings are from the survey conducted April 24th-26th, 2020.
Although nearly two-thirds of American travelers say they miss travel and “can’t wait to get out and travel again,” this week, 63.5 percent of American travelers still agree they don’t want visitors coming to their community right now. Only one-in-ten disagrees.
Agreement with this sentiment has decreased slightly compared to last week (67.6%), however, and hopefully as curves flatten and there are other gains in humankind’s fight against coronavirus, fear about travelers in our own communities will continue to decline.
Given these feelings towards visitors in their communities at the moment, American travelers’ opinions are also split on whether they would get pleasure from seeing an ad marketing their community as a place to visit when it is safe. While 33.1 percent said they would be happy to see such an advertisement, 36.2 percent said they would be unhappy.
Looking more deeply at who these two groups are, those that would be unhappy with their community being advertised right now—even for when the pandemic is over—are just as frequent travelers, but they are far more fearful right now, with high levels of concern about themselves or their loved ones contracting the virus and they are far more anxious about the overall safety of travel. Interestingly, those who say they would be happy to see travel advertisements for their community are much more frequent convention/conference travelers in their pre-pandemic/”normal” lives.
