Unlocking New Opportunities in U.S. Travel Preferences

In today’s competitive travel landscape, how destinations brand themselves plays a critical role in engaging travelers. While traditional place-based branding emphasizes geography, persona-based branding connects with travelers through lifestyle, emotion, and aspiration. This whitepaper presents findings from a comprehensive national survey of 907 U.S. travelers, analyzing how different demographic and psychographic cohorts respond to these two branding approaches.

The research explores which styles of branding resonate most when viewed independently versus in direct comparison, offering practical insights for tourism marketers, DMOs, and brand strategists seeking to craft more emotionally compelling narratives.

At-a-Glance Takeaways

• Persona brands led overall in test markets, favored by 54.34% of respondents—especially among those preferring suburban (57.26%) and rural (58.33%) destinations.
• Market-level results vary significantly: Persona brands outperformed in 5 of 6 markets; Athens was the lone exception, favoring the place-based brand.
• Abstract preference reversed in forced-choice questions, with 59.98% leaning toward place-based branding—suggesting default trust in geographic names.
• Persona brands closed the gap among rural and suburban audiences, who responded more favorably than urban-focused travelers.
• Forced choice responses:
  – Interest in Visiting: 55.90% preferred place-based
  – Credibility & Trust: 79.16% preferred place-based
  – Recall After One Week: 56.56% preferred place-based
  – Click Likelihood (Ad): 51.71% preferred persona-based
• Only 22.16% of respondents remembered seeing a tourism campaign, despite detailed examples—highlighting a DMO visibility gap.
• Just 13.01% said they were influenced by DMOs in their travel decision-making—far behind personal interests (81.7%) and friends/family (67.14%).
• Strategic takeaway: Persona branding may drive higher digital engagement, while place-based branding still owns trust. DMOs must educate consumers and evolve messaging to stay relevant in an emotionally-driven market.