The Best Part of a Trip May Happen Before You Leave — Researchers Measured the Happiness of Anticipation

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Multiple academic studies on the psychology of anticipation and happiness, including widely cited research published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, have found that the period of anticipating and planning a vacation frequently generates measurably higher happiness levels than the trip itself once travelers are actually experiencing it, a counterintuitive finding that has significant implications for how people might think about structuring their relationship with travel and vacation planning.

What the Research Actually Found

A frequently cited 2010 study led by researcher Jeroen Nawijn tracked vacationers’ happiness levels before, during, and after their trips, finding that the pre-trip anticipation period showed the sharpest and most consistent happiness increase, while happiness during the trip itself, though generally positive, showed considerably more variability and, for many travelers, returned close to baseline levels within just a few days after returning home. This pattern has been broadly replicated in subsequent research examining the specific psychological mechanisms behind anticipatory versus experienced positive emotion.

Psychologists studying this phenomenon generally attribute it to the fundamentally unconstrained, idealized nature of anticipation compared to the messier reality of actual travel, which inevitably includes minor disappointments, logistical friction, fatigue, and the simple fact that imagined experiences can be mentally curated to include only their most appealing elements, while lived experience necessarily includes everything, including the parts nobody would choose to imagine in advance.

Why This Happens, According to Researchers

• Anticipation allows the mind to construct an idealized version of an experience unconstrained by weather, crowds, jet lag, or any of the countless small frustrations that inevitably accompany actual travel
• The dopamine response associated with anticipating a reward has been shown in neuroscience research to sometimes exceed the dopamine response generated by actually receiving that reward, a pattern observed across many reward types beyond travel specifically
• Planning itself provides a sustained, low-effort source of positive engagement stretched across weeks or months, compared to the more compressed and intense experience of the trip itself
• Post-trip memory reconstruction tends to smooth over negative moments experienced during travel, meaning the trip is often remembered more fondly afterward than it was actually experienced in the moment, a separate but related psychological phenomenon

This anticipatory happiness effect appears strongest for trips that are planned relatively far in advance, giving the anticipation period more time to build, which is part of why some travel psychologists specifically recommend booking trips well ahead of the actual travel dates as a deliberate strategy for maximizing the total happiness generated by a vacation relative to its cost.

What This Means for How People Plan Travel

Some researchers and travel industry analysts have suggested that this anticipation effect helps explain why people frequently report enjoying frequent small trip planning, even for trips that don’t ultimately happen or get postponed, since the psychological benefit accrues substantially during the planning process itself rather than depending entirely on trip completion. This has led some psychologists to specifically recommend that people considering whether they can afford to travel weigh the pre-trip planning period’s happiness contribution as a genuine, separate benefit worth factoring into the overall value calculation, rather than treating anticipation as merely instrumental to the trip itself.

This research has also informed practical suggestions from travel psychologists, including deliberately spacing out multiple smaller trips throughout a year rather than concentrating all annual travel into a single longer vacation, on the theory that this approach maximizes the total cumulative anticipation period across the year even if total vacation days taken remain the same.

The Limits of the Research

Critics of over-applying this research have pointed out that anticipation’s outsized happiness contribution doesn’t mean the trip itself is unimportant or that travelers should simply stop taking trips and only plan imaginary ones, since actually completing a trip provides other benefits, including memory formation, relationship bonding, and genuine novel experience, that pure anticipation without follow-through cannot replicate. The research is better understood as revealing an underappreciated and currently undervalued source of travel-related happiness, the planning period itself, rather than as evidence that the actual trip experience doesn’t matter.

What this body of research ultimately suggests is that the popular framing of vacations as valuable primarily for their in-the-moment experience misses a substantial share of the actual happiness travel generates, and that deliberately savoring and extending the planning and anticipation phase of a trip may be one of the more accessible, low-cost ways to increase the total psychological return travelers get from any given amount of vacation spending. Travel companies and booking platforms have begun incorporating this research into their own marketing and product design, extending pre-trip communication, personalized itinerary previews, and countdown features specifically to prolong and enhance the anticipation period that research suggests contributes so substantially to overall trip satisfaction, treating anticipation-building as a legitimate part of the product experience rather than simply the administrative period before a trip begins. This same anticipatory happiness research has occasionally been cited in discussions of why some travelers report feeling a distinct, sometimes unexpected letdown shortly after returning from a long-anticipated trip, a documented phenomenon sometimes called post-vacation blues that researchers connect directly to the same psychological mechanism responsible for anticipation’s outsized positive contribution, since the sudden absence of an anticipated future event to look forward to can itself produce a measurable, if temporary, dip in overall mood. Some travel psychologists specifically recommend having a next trip, even a small one, already loosely planned before returning from a current vacation, specifically to maintain some continuity of anticipatory benefit rather than experiencing a complete drop-off in forward-looking travel-related positive emotion immediately after a trip concludes. This recommendation has found particular traction among frequent travel bloggers and travel industry professionals themselves, many of whom describe maintaining an ongoing rotation of upcoming trips specifically as a deliberate strategy for sustaining consistent anticipatory happiness throughout the year rather than experiencing the sharp emotional peaks and valleys that come with concentrating all travel into a single annual vacation. This same logic has also influenced how some travel companies design loyalty and subscription-style travel products, structuring ongoing member benefits specifically to keep customers in a near-continuous state of upcoming-trip anticipation rather than treating each booking as an isolated transaction.