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Vacations and Travel - Domestic Travel, The Nature Trail, The Lure Of Sand, Surf, And Ocean Breezes
americans time day trip
Americans love to take vacations. Their destinations may vary from a trip to a national park for camping, fishing, boating, or hiking, to a visit to a theme park such as Disneyland. A vacation can also be a flight to Egypt, a cruise to the Virgin Islands, a romantic three-day weekend in New York, or staying home to read a
book. The way Americans vacation and travel and their expectations of vacation time have been changing as U.S. society has evolved. Unchanged, however, is Americans' conviction that travel and vacationing improve the quality of their lives.
The perception that Americans work more and have less vacation time than people in other countries around the world has its basis in fact. Data gathered on twenty countries by Catherine Valenti in the ABCNEWS.com report "Vacation Deprivation—Americans Get Short-Changed When It Comes to Holiday Time" (June 25, 2003) showed that
Americans, who averaged just 10.2 vacation days per year, took the least vacation time of workers in the countries surveyed. Many European countries, such as Italy, Germany, Spain, and Norway, had an average of thirty days per year, while residents of the United Kingdom averaged twenty-five, and even the hardworking Japanese had 17.5.
Perhaps because of this reduced amount of vacation time, Americans often try to pack as much activity as possible into their trips. This desire to make the most of a vacation can sometimes backfire, however, as a 2002 Gallup poll found. Rather than returning rested and relaxed, 54% of Americans who had taken a vacation trip
during the previous twelve months reported they had gotten back feeling tired, while 19% said they were "very tired" or "exhausted."
In part, this was because many had started their trip with too little sleep—32% reported that the night before their vacation, they got to bed at least two hours later than normal because of a lack of advance planning, while 54% said they got up earlier than normal the next day to get an early start. Although some may have
been awake because they were excited about going away, 46% said they were up late packing things the night before they left, while 10% packed the day they left. Once on vacation, the majority of travelers said they had stayed up too late on at least one night of their trip, and 22% of vacationers on ten-to fourteen-day trips said they went to bed later than normal nearly every night.
Additional Topics
According to a poll of travel agents conducted by Fodor's and the American Society of Travel Agents, published online by TravelSense.org, the top ten domestic vacation destinations for Americans in 2004 were Orlando, Las Vegas, New York City, San Francisco, Honolulu, Los Angeles, the Hawaiian Islands, Miami, New Orleans, and
San Diego. A poll of visitors to the TravelSense Web site revealed…
National parks are one of America's biggest tourist attractions. The United States has set aside more than eighty-three million acres of land for national parks. The National Park System includes parks, monuments, historical and military areas, parkways, recreation areas, nature preserves, rivers, seashores, and lakes. For
additional information on the U.S. National Parks system, see Chapte…
For many travelers, few experiences compare to sailing to exotic destinations on a cruise ship. According to the Cruise Lines International Association, an organization of TABLE 7.5 nineteen member cruise lines, the cruise industry grew by an average of more than 8% each year from 1980 to 2003. In 1980 1.4 million Americans
took cruises. In 2003 about 8.2 million people went on a cruise. (See…
Heritage tourism seeks to draw visitors to historic and cultural sites. Although historic and cultural destinations were not as popular with leisure travelers as cities, visits to friends and family, beaches, and lakes, a significant number of travelers choose educational experiences. According to the TIA/Smithsonian magazine
report The Historic/Cultural Traveler (2003 edition), nearly 118 million…
Many Americans dream about romantic getaways with a spouse or other love interest to ignite or rekindle romantic feelings in the relationship. According to the 2002 TIA Travel Poll, more than forty-two million American adults said they had taken a romantic vacation in the prior year. Many of these romantic vacations consisted
of honeymoons or anniversary celebrations. Not surprisingly, the TIA sur…
Americans love to shop, and for many, shopping means "heading to the mall." According to the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC), in 2003 there were 46,990 shopping centers in the United States, which contained a total of 5.9 billion square feet of leasable retail space. California had the most shopping centers,
with 6,243, and Wyoming the fewest—fifty-five. An es…
Family reunions provided incentive for about one-third of Americans to travel, according to the 2002 TIA Travel Poll. Thirty-four percent of U.S. adults (seventytwo million) had traveled to a family reunion during the three-year period preceding the poll, and one in five had traveled to a family reunion in the year before the
poll. Married people were more likely to take a trip to attend a family …
"Green" (advantageous to the environment) travel is important to many travelers. The 2002 TIA/National Geographic Traveler report Geotourism: The New Trend in Travel classified more than fifty-five million Americans as geotourists. This term was defined as people whose travel was intended to sustain or enhance the geographical
character of the place being visited (including its envir…
According to the TIA, business travel volume in 2003 was 210.5 million person trips, a drop of 2% from 2002. Business travel comprised 18% of total U.S. domestic person trips. The most common purposes for business trips were general business (meetings/consultations/presentations/sales), which accounted for 44% of trips, and
conventions/conferences/seminars (22%). One-third (34%) of business trips …
The TIA's 2004 Travelers'Use of the Internet survey reported that sixty-four million travelers used the Internet in 2003, about the same number as in 2002. Use of the Internet for travel planning had risen dramatically since 1997, when just twelve million Americans planned and researched travel online. The rate of growth in
the online travel planning market slowed in response to the …
Americans like to travel abroad, though many are not able to or can only do so occasionally because of the expense involved. A 2003 Harris poll of countries Americans would choose to visit if cost were not a factor found that the number one choice was Australia, followed by Italy, Great Britain, France, and Ireland. Australia
had topped the poll for seven years running, although Italy moved up fro…
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