The Psychology of Planning a Vacation: Why the Best Part Might Happen Before You Leave
By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
ƒAt any given moment, I am planning more than one trip. Usually several. My own, and — because I work with clients as a travel advisor — theirs too. I have spreadsheets open for a September trip I haven't fully committed to, a research folder for a client's honeymoon eight months out, and a running list of towns I want to see someday, most of which I will never book. People sometimes ask if this gets exhausting, holding that many unfinished itineraries in my head at once. It doesn't. It's one of the parts of this work I find most genuinely fun — not the booking, not the logistics for their own sake, but the act of imagining a trip into being before it exists anywhere except on a screen.
For a long time I assumed that was just a personality quirk, a byproduct of loving travel enough to also love the paperwork around it, perhaps my Enneagram 5 on overdrive. Friends have asked, gently, whether I ever get tired of it — whether at some point the spreadsheets stop being fun and start being work. The honest answer is that they haven't yet, not for my own trips and not for the trips I plan on behalf of clients. I get the same lift from mapping out someone else's ten days in Portugal that I get from mapping out my own, and for years I didn't have a good explanation for why, beyond "I just like it." Then, I spent years studying travel psychology formally, and I found something that reframed the whole habit. Planning isn't a chore that precedes the vacation. Depending on how you do it, it can be one of the vacation's richest phases — sometimes, by some measures, its happiest one.
This is the article I wish someone had handed me before I ever booked a trip. It's about why the planning stage produces real, measurable psychological reward. Why that reward is fragile and can collapse under too many options. And, why the people whose job is to help others plan — myself included — exist for a reason that has almost nothing to do with saving time or even money.
Planning Isn't Just a Prelude — It's a Phase
Most people talk about a vacation as if it starts when the plane leaves the ground. Psychologically, that's not how vacations work.
In 1966, resource economist Marion Clawson and economist Jack Knetsch proposed a model of the outdoor recreation experience that has influenced how tourism researchers think about trips ever since. Their model breaks a trip into five distinct phases: anticipation, travel to the destination, the on-site experience, the return trip, and recollection afterward. Anticipation isn't a footnote before the "real" trip. It's the first of five phases, with its own emotional experience and its own capacity to produce satisfaction, separate from whatever happens once you land.
Clawson illustrated the idea with an example that has stuck with tourism researchers for decades. A fly fisherman may get more enjoyment from tying his own flies through the winter than he later gets from the fishing itself. The tying isn't preparation for the pleasure. It is the pleasure, showing up earlier than we might expect.
Later researchers have pushed on this model in different directions. Some, like Rossman and Schlatter, have simplified it to three phases — anticipation, participation, and reflection — arguing that most trip providers focus almost entirely on the middle phase and neglect the two on either side of it. Others, including leisure researcher William Stewart, have challenged the model's simplicity, arguing it works as a useful starting point but doesn't capture the full range of what a leisure experience actually feels like from the inside. A separate strand of critique — from researchers including Borrie, Roggenbuck, and Uriely — has pointed out that the model grew out of an economics textbook, and argued that framing can miss the more personal, less transactional aspects of how people actually experience a trip. The disagreements are worth knowing about if you ever see the five-phase model cited as if it were settled science. But the core claim has held up across decades of leisure and tourism research regardless of how the phases get counted. A trip is not one event with nothingness in front of it. It is a sequence of phases, and the first one belongs entirely to your imagination.
I think this is the piece most people are missing when they feel a flicker of guilt about spending three evenings comparing hotel options for a trip that's still five months away. That's not a delay tactic pretending to be diligence. That's the anticipation phase doing exactly what it does.
The Feeling Has a Name
If Clawson and Knetsch tell us where planning sits inside a trip, psychologist Fred Bryant's work tells us what is actually happening inside you while you do it.
Bryant, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago, spent decades studying what he called savoring — the deliberate effort to notice, sustain, and intensify positive emotion, rather than letting it wash past you unexamined. In his foundational work, Bryant identified three distinct forms savoring can take, organized by when they happen relative to the experience itself. Savoring the moment, reminiscing about the past, and — the one that matters here — anticipating the future.
Anticipatory savoring isn't the same as simple optimism or looking forward to something in a general sense. It sits close to what pulls people toward travel in the first place — I've written more about that pull in The Psychology of Wanderlust. It's an active practice. Imagining a future positive event in enough sensory and emotional detail that the imagining itself generates real pleasure now, before anything has happened. When you pull up a map of a neighborhood you haven't visited yet and start picturing which café you'll sit in on your first morning there, you're not just gathering information. You are savoring.
Bryant's later work went further, describing savoring not as a single skill but as something people regulate in different ways — some amplify the joy of an upcoming trip by talking about it, researching it, letting themselves get excited out loud; others dampen it, downplaying what's ahead to protect themselves in case it falls through. Neither is a character flaw. But it does mean that how much reward you get out of planning a trip is not simply a matter of how excited you are — it's a matter of whether you let yourself be excited in the first place and stay in the anticipation long enough to feel it.
Interestingly, Bryant and later researchers found that dampening tends to be more culturally normative in some places than others — the cognitive habit of downplaying good news to guard against disappointment, sometimes called "kill-joy thinking," shows up more often among some regional cultures than others (i.e., Asians v. North Americans). I find this hard to read as a psychologist who has spent a career thinking about culture, because it echoes a pattern I've written about elsewhere. Culture is not limited to where you are from or where you were born. Culture can differ as much from home to home in one neighborhood than country to country. How much a cultural worldview emphasizes independence versus interdependence tends to color how people regulate almost everything, joy about an upcoming trip included. A traveler raised to downplay her own excitement isn't failing to savor. She may simply be savoring inside a different set of cultural rules about how much personal anticipation is appropriate to display.
This is, I'd argue, part of what makes deep-diving into a client's trip so satisfying for me as a travel advisor, beyond the professional obligation to get their logistics right. I'm not just building an itinerary. I'm doing structured anticipatory savoring on someone else's behalf, and often helping them access more of it than they'd have found alone, simply because I know how to keep the imagining vivid instead of letting it collapse into a checklist.
The Happiness Data
Bryant's framework explains the mechanism. A separate body of research has tried to measure the outcome — and the numbers are, if anything, more striking than the theory.
Tourism researcher Jeroen Nawijn, working out of Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, published a 2010 study examining happiness before, during, and after vacations. Vacationers reported measurably higher happiness in the weeks leading up to a trip compared with people who had no trip planned at all — a pre-trip lift that showed up reliably across the sample. The study measured a pre-trip and post-trip data point only, with nothing captured during the trip itself, so it can't tell us whether the anticipation phase actually outperformed the trip itself — only that anticipation reliably outperforms not having a trip coming at all. It's still a very important finding in the field — the mere presence of a future trip on your calendar appears to do something for your happiness in the present, independent of whether the trip lives up to expectations later.
A separate line of research gets at a related question from a different angle. Psychologists Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth, and Thomas Gilovich compared how people anticipate experiential purchases, like trips, against material purchases, like objects. Their 2014 findings showed that anticipating an experiential purchase produced more pleasure and excitement than anticipating a material one, and comparatively less impatience. Waiting for a trip felt different, psychologically, than waiting for a package to arrive — more pleasant, less like something to simply get through.
Together, these two studies point at the same underlying pattern. The waiting period before a trip is not dead time. It is functioning as a distinct source of wellbeing, well before you've packed a bag.
Where Planning Tips Into Overload
None of this means more research, more open tabs, and more time spent comparing options automatically produces more anticipatory reward. Past a certain point, the opposite happens — and the research on why is almost as well known as the anticipation research itself.
In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published what's become one of the most cited studies in consumer psychology. At an upscale grocery store, they set up a tasting table stocked with jam — on some days a limited selection of six varieties, on others an extensive spread of twenty-four. The larger display drew more browsers. It converted dramatically fewer of them into buyers. People facing more options were significantly less likely to choose anything at all. This is what you may hear many call “analysis paralysis”.
The effect has since been replicated across categories well beyond jam — financial products, retail goods, even speed dating. The mechanism researchers point to isn't laziness. It's the cognitive weight of the decision itself. More options mean more comparison, more effort, and — critically — more opportunity to imagine a version of the choice you didn't make and wonder if it would have been better. That anticipated regret is often enough to stall the decision entirely, or to drain the pleasure out of whichever option eventually gets chosen.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz, writing about this same territory, drew a useful distinction between two decision-making styles. There are maximizers, who try to evaluate every available option before choosing, and satisficers, who stop once they find something that clears their own bar for "good enough." His research found maximizers often do end up with objectively better outcomes — the better hotel, the cheaper flight — but report lower satisfaction with their choice than satisficers do, precisely because they spent the decision comparing rather than anticipating. I see both types constantly in my work. Some clients want three vetted options and a recommendation. Others want to see everything, weigh it themselves, and arrive at the decision on their own terms. Neither approach is wrong, but they carry different risks, and knowing which one a traveler leans toward changes how I plan alongside them.
Trip planning is, structurally, an extreme version of the jam table. There is no upper bound on how many destinations, itineraries, hotels, or day-by-day plans a person can compare before booking anything. And unlike jam, a wrong choice about where to stay for eight nights is expensive to get wrong — money, limited vacation days, a trip that only happens once. The stakes that make travel meaningful are the same stakes that make choice overload worse.
I've watched this happen to clients before they ever call me. Not people who don't care about getting it right, but people who care so much that the research itself becomes the obstacle — forty tabs deep into comparing three towns that would all, honestly, have been wonderful. The anticipatory savoring that should be happening curdles into something closer to a part-time job, and by the time they book, they're relieved more than excited. That relief is a symptom of something bigger happening. It's what happens when the anticipation phase gets hijacked by the volume of the choice instead of the pleasure of imagining it.
What a Travel Advisor Actually Protects
This is where I think the value of working with a travel advisor gets consistently misunderstood — including, for years, by me.
The pitch you usually hear is about time saved and mistakes avoided, which is true. But having sat on both sides of this now — as someone who plans obsessively for herself and as someone who plans professionally for others — I don't think efficiency is the real thing being protected. It's the anticipation phase itself.
A good advisor doesn't hand a client fewer choices because more choices are hard to manage logistically. They narrow the field because Iyengar and Lepper's finding is exactly correct, and past a certain point every additional option works against the goal instead of toward it. A client doesn't need forty hotels to compare. They need three that have already been vetted and filtered through someone who understands what they're actually looking for, so that the imagining — the part that produces the reward Bryant described — can happen inside a field small enough to enjoy rather than survive.
I think of my job, on the days I'm doing it well, as protecting my clients' access to their own anticipatory savoring. If your own planning has started to feel more like the jam table than the anticipation phase, that's usually the moment to give someone like me a call and bring in some help — narrowing the field back down to where the excitement lives. That's the thrill I mentioned at the start of this piece — not the logistics, but getting to do this structured imagining alongside someone else, and watching the excitement in their planning stay excitement instead of curdling into decision fatigue. It's the same reason I keep planning my own trips even when I have no real fixed departure date. The planning is not the means to the vacation. Some of the time, it already is the vacation. It's worth holding onto that on the other end of a trip, too — read more in The Psychology of Post-Travel Blues.
Savoring Your Own Planning
Not everyone wants or needs an advisor, and the research suggests a few things anyone can borrow to keep their own planning in the anticipatory-savoring zone rather than the choice-overload zone.
Researchers Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues, building on Bryant's framework, identified four general strategies people use to sustain positive emotion around an experience. Behavioral display, or letting your excitement show rather than keeping it to yourself; being present with the anticipation instead of rushing past it toward the next task; capitalizing, meaning sharing the good news and talking about the trip with someone who will get excited alongside you; and what they called positive mental time travel — deliberately, vividly imagining the future experience rather than only its logistics.
Applied to trip planning, that translates into something fairly concrete. Talk about the upcoming trip out loud with someone who will meet your excitement instead of managing it. Spend at least some of your planning time picturing sensory detail — a meal, a view, one single hour of one single day — rather than only comparing prices. And, set a rough cap on how many options you'll seriously weigh before deciding, so the comparison itself doesn't gradually take over the whole activity. None of this requires giving up any research you enjoy. Think of it as a set of guardrails — a way of noticing when the tab count has crossed from savoring into something closer to compulsive comparison, and giving yourself permission to stop before the twenty-fourth jam.
The trips I remember planning most fondly weren't the ones I researched the most exhaustively. They were the ones where I let myself stay in the imagining — picturing a single street before I'd ever stood on it — instead of trying to optimize every choice down to the best possible version.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal to enjoy planning a trip more than the trip itself? Yes, and there's real research behind it. Studies on anticipatory happiness and savoring theory both suggest the planning phase can produce genuine, measurable positive emotion independent of how the trip ultimately goes.
Why does trip planning sometimes feel stressful instead of fun? This often points to choice overload. Research on decision-making shows that once the number of options crosses a certain threshold, comparison itself becomes exhausting and can undermine both the decision and the satisfaction with whatever gets chosen.
Does hiring a travel advisor take away the fun of planning? Not necessarily — for many travelers it protects it. A good advisor narrows an overwhelming field down to a manageable one, which research on choice overload suggests preserves the pleasure of the decision rather than removing it.
How far in advance should I start planning to get the psychological benefit? Research on pre-trip happiness has found a measurable lift in wellbeing in many weeks leading up to a trip. There's no single confirmed threshold for how early that benefit begins, but the mechanism — anticipatory savoring — suggests the benefit accrues for as long as you're actively, positively imagining the trip.
Is it okay to plan trips I might never actually take? Psychologically, there's a case for it. If imagining a future positive experience in vivid detail is itself where some of the reward lives, then the act of planning has value independent of whether the trip is ever booked.
What's the difference between choice overload and just being thorough? Thoroughness has a natural stopping point — you gather what you need and decide. Choice overload research suggests the shift happens when comparison stops serving the decision and starts replacing it. More tabs open, less clarity, and a growing sense of relief rather than excitement once a choice is finally made.
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Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the publisher of The Journal of Travel Psychology and the founder of The Postcard Société. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.