PGAV’s Voice of the Visitor. With an International Flair.

The global travel and attractions industry is at an inflection point. Attendance is recovering, competition for visitor time is intensifying, and guest expectations continue to rise. Yet there are fundamental questions shaping how attractions invest, design, and compete that can be further explored. What drives an international traveler to choose a destination? How does anticipation shape the experience? And once a guest is at the attraction, where’s the economic opportunity?

PGAV’s Voice of the Visitor: International research set out to explore those questions. We surveyed international travelers across planning stages, experience types, and spending behaviors to map the full arc of a visit, from the first moment of inspiration to the souvenirs carried home.

The findings speak directly to two audiences.

For international destination and attraction operators, the data reframes the competitive landscape. Most travelers choose their destination before selecting any specific attraction. This means the strategic challenge isn’t destination selection, it’s winning the fight for time and memory once a visitor arrives. Understanding how anticipation is built, how experience either confirms or disappoints it, and how food, retail, and story can turn a single visit into lasting loyalty is the difference between an attraction that fills a day and one that defines a trip.

The same dynamics are in play for clients in the U.S. The emotional mechanics that drive international travel, including the desire for authenticity, the gap between expectation and reality, and the power of a well-designed retail or dining moment to anchor memory, operate just as powerfully at the neighborhood scale. Visitors choosing how to spend an afternoon in their own city are running the same mental calculus as someone crossing an ocean. The lessons here are about desire, design, and the experience that follows.

This research is about what travelers want, remember, and spend, and what that means for building the places they visit.

“This work builds on PGAV’s long-standing commitment to understanding the visitor,” said PGAV Principal Diane Lochner. “For the past 10 years, PGAV’s Voice of the Visitor report has explored visitor motivations and industry trends. Additional reports, such as Transformation, have explored visitor avatars, including Zen Chasers and Escape Voyagers. Destinology, a bi-weekly publication that reaches more than 40,000 subscribers, offers articles on topics ranging from complying with accessibility regulations to navigating changes in federal funding for cultural institutions to rebranding for zoos and aquariums. With this study, we’re expanding that perspective globally, delivering insights more frequently, and deepening our understanding of how attractions compete for time in an increasingly complex experience landscape.”

Now, we’re launching the next evolution: Voice of the Visitor 2.0.

“This new approach is designed to deliver insights more frequently, expand beyond a domestic lens to a global perspective, and deepen our understanding of how attractions compete for time across an increasingly complex experience landscape. It allows us to compare behaviors across audiences, explore new sectors, and uncover broader patterns in how people choose and experience destinations,” Lochner explains.

For this first release of VOV 2.0, we turn our focus to international travelers and what their choices reveal about the future of attractions everywhere.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll dive in further. Watch for Destination First. Attraction Driven coming next!