Americans still hold out hope of visiting Florida on holiday

Americans still hold out hope of visiting Florida on holiday – but the state sees 45% drop in intent to visit, as Italy makes gains

With some parts of the world now breaking free of COVID-19-related shackles, many people’s thoughts are turning to a well-earned holiday.

Our new tool, YouGov DestinationIndex, has been tracking the US public’s perceptions of more than 40 destinations every day, allowing us to build up a picture of where people are planning to go on their next trip – and the factors that feed into those holiday choices.

Here are the current top five destinations for US holiday-makers, as per our Intent metric (“When you are next in the market to plan a holiday, which destination are you most likely to visit?”).

As you can see, the most popular destination for Americans’ next holiday remains Florida – with California, New York, Italy and Canada making up the rest of the top five. But the table doesn’t show the full story, with the popularity of Florida in particular having declined considerably over the past week.

Here’s how the top five destinations are tracking since the beginning of June – and you can see how the plans of the public have changed over time.

While Florida remains the most popular destination for Americans, the proportion of people intending to visit it on their next holiday has declined significantly over the last week, almost certainly because of the state’s worsening Coronavirus situation. The proportion of Americans planning to visit the state has almost halved since 23 June, from 20% to 11%.

But aside from Italy, no other top-five destination has made gains in its wake, with Canada, California and New York all flatlining. By contrast intent to visit Italy has steadily climbed since the start of the month, when the country lifted many restrictions on tourism. The same is true of a number of other non-mainland-US destinations outside of our top five, including Hawaii and Mexico.

YouGov DestinationIndex in the US tracks 42 global destinations each day, across 16 metrics, giving tourism marketers the full picture of who wants to go where and why. The data in this blog covers the US, but YouGov DestinationIndex operates in 25 markets across the globe, providing unprecedented access to the world’s travel plans.

Metrics cover the full purchase funnel for tourism and range from awareness of a destination, through perceptions of quality, value, impression and more, right through to intent to visit.

For more information, visit https://today.yougov.com/solutions/sectors/destinationindex.