Destinology: The Lost Passages

 

 – By Ben Cober, director of business development and research

 

Every research endeavor we set sail in, whether it plumbs the brain’s synapses as it reacts to storytelling, investigates the correlations between healthy cities and fantastic science centers, or meticulously follows families as they wander around the nation’s best zoos, one thing’s for certain: they always yield a wealth of fascinating findings.

On one hand, it’s because we ask the right questions that empower our respondents to think deeply and reveal hidden truths they hadn’t even realized about themselves. On the other hand, it’s greatly helped by our often research partner, H2R Market Research, being so excellent and thorough in their data analysis and reporting. They’ve helped us over the years with numerous wonderful studies that we’ve published in Destinology; and among many others, those include The New Destination Visitor, The Art of the Family Vacation, Meet the Millenials, and our most recent study Digitizing Destinations 3.0.

Each report from H2R is hundreds of pages long, chock-full of eyebrow-raising insights, destination guest quotes, and new knowledge that make you lean back in your chair and go “huh!” But then like a fine Laphroaig 25-year on Islay, we begin to carefully distill down the findings into their best, most concentrated form. The lion’s share of the research is passed onto our Destinologists: the 120-strong team of architects, designers, planners, sculptors and more who translate those findings into creating the most fun, educational, iconic places around the planet (we’re hiring, right now, by the way, in case you hadn’t heard…).

As the finer grains pass through the sieve, we always start to see the five or six findings that would be immensely helpful to destination managers: “The Key Insights.” These are the golden nuggets of wisdom that can help these presidents and directors make their guests happier, delight their staff, and improve their destinations on world-class levels.

When we match these Key Insights with our own 50-years of destination strategy and design experience, these become the articles you read in every research-based Destinology. The challenge we always face though is that we’re really excited about these insights: we’ve got a lot to say about them. So in respect of your time, each Destinology goes through the same meticulous review and revision culture that our destination designs go through: write, review, revise, write, review, revise, trim it down a bit, review, revise, review, send it back to H2R to make sure the findings are being accurately communicated, tweak….put it into lay-out, review, shift it around, swap colors, test out dozens of different images, review, consider what’s MOST important for our readers and what images will make the issue jump off their desks, revise, imagine some fun info graphics that make data fun, review, tweak just a tiny bit more, approve!, send to the printers, proof, proof, proof, proof, proof, print, MAIL!

This has been a very roundabout way to tell you that there are lots of iterations, and lots of text, for every edition of Destinology that you never see (unless those insights pop up between PGAV and your organization in the course of a project). Therefore, with our most-recent edition, Digitizing Destinations 3.0, I wanted to share with you just a few little cut tidbits from the sixth article, Experiential Wants. We just couldn’t fit it all on one page!

1. “63% of destination visitors have a travel app on their smartphone, and they’re typically the expected big contenders: Expedia, Kayak, Ortbitz, and Travelocity.”

2. “Unlike the Experiential Technologies, the preferences for Functional Technologies are relatively the same, regardless of whether guests are visiting a zoo, aquarium, theme park, water park, historic site, or museum.” (For reference, that little fact fit snugly in between the 4th and 5th paragraphs)

Going forward, I’ll try and share more insights that didn’t quite make the final Destinology. In the meantime, are there industry questions at the top of your mind? Things you’ve always wondered about zoos, aquariums, theme parks, or museums, but you couldn’t find a study that just perfectly gave you the answers you were looking for? Feel free to put your question in the comments, and we’ll consider it for future studies!