Luxury destination club Inspirato sent Harris Interactive on a pre-holiday polling binge to determine which cities in North America were planning to spend the most amount of money on their annual holiday escape.
Savvy marketers can use these types of research reports to geo-target online spend, identify priorities among different demographics, and generally help inform a cohesive, successful holiday marketing plan.
Perhaps not surprisingly, New York City came out on top, with respondents in that high-cost-of-living city saying they had set aside nearly $2,000 for their holiday plans. On the opposite side of the holiday spending spectrum is Atlanta, where respondents said they were planning on spending a little over $900 on their holiday plans.
Of the 2,500 polled, 49% plan to travel in some capacity this holiday season, with the mean amount of the travel budget coming in at $1,336.
One interesting thing about the spread between Atlanta and New York City is that respondents from both cities had very similar destinations in mind, meaning that the budgets for similar trips were just going to be lower - or cost of living is lower in the South so the budgets could be more reasonable.
In regards to where they were headed on holiday vacation, 28% of Atlantans were traveling in-state, 53% to another state in region, 40% to another state further away and 12% to another country. New Yorkers, for their part, were very similar: 28% traveling in-state, 41% traveling in-region, 45% to another state further away and 15% to another country.
As far as overall spend year-over-year the biggest ballers are to be found in oil-rich Houston, which had 14% of respondents saying they were "spending a lot more this year." This was double the second most spendy city, Los Angeles, which had 8% say the same. 7% in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia are also planning to spend more - there are definitely some folks not holding back at all this holiday season.
Other revealing data points include the 38% that does not plan for, or have, a yearly budget for travel.
The full report is hefty, with the data broken down across age groups, regions and income levels. This kind of detail is rare for these sorts of promotional reports, especially from a luxury vacation rental company like Inspirato, and is worth a look for the data hungry trend-seekers (download here with tables broken down here).
NB: Travel dreamin' image courtesy Shutterstock.