Seven in 10 Americans travel during the summer or winter holidays. These trips have varied methods and motivations, whether it is a family piling into the car to visit Grandma at Christmas or married retirees taking a long summer vacation to Hawaii. However, travelers’ attitudes around how they spend their time and money on vacation are changing. In addition, trips are getting shorter and more spread out across the holiday season, forcing a reconsideration in the way travel providers should approach their cycle of ad spending.

For the purposes of this Report, Mintel has used the following definitions:

• Holiday travel: Any leisure travel that occurred in the summer season (eg between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend) or winter season (eg for Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s).

• Holiday traveler: Any traveler taking a leisure trip during the summer or winter season.

• Obligatory travel: A holiday trip where the traveler visited a friend or relative or attended a social function like a wedding or funeral.

• Obligatory Traveler: A holiday traveler who participated in obligatory travel in the last year and agrees that “holiday travel is more of an obligation than something I want to do.”

• Multigenerational travel: Any trip in which the traveling party includes two nonconsecutive generations (eg kids and their grandparents).

Readers of this report may also be interested in Vacation Planning – US, April 2019, which details the planning considerations of vacationers.