• by Danielle Oster , October 9, 2025

Leisure travelers are taking a leisurely approach to booking their winter holiday trips this year, according to a study by Consumer analytics company CivicScience.  In its report, fielding responses from over 2,000 adult U.S. consumers from Sept. 19-24, CivicScience found that, among the 36% of U.S. adults who intend to travel, 69% of U.S. consumers had yet to finalize all of their travel plans.

Twenty-seven percent said they had yet to book anything, creating an opportunity for brands to reach these travelers before they complete their holiday travel itinerary.

Marketing Daily caught up with CivicScience CEO John Dick about what marketers should know about reaching audiences ahead of the holiday travel season.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marketing Daily: What were some of the most notable findings from this year’s results?

John Dick: The first headline is that holiday travel intent is roughly flat from last year. When you consider the macroeconomic climate compared to this time last year, and the declines hitting the travel industry, and particularly airlines, in the first half of the year --including summer travel being delayed and somewhat down this year -- you would have expected a downturn. So that’s somewhat of a win for the industry.

There’s a large percentage of those who say they plan to travel, but haven’t yet fully booked travel.

Marketing Daily: What might contribute to the delay in finalizing booking that travel compared to previous years?

Dick: We track an emotional well-being index monthly. Overall, emotional well-being has been on a downturn the past several months, and over the course of the last year or so. We measure that by asking questions around things like fear and anxiety. As overall emotional well-being has gone down, emotional investment in the holidays has gone up.

People are waiting longer to book travel to play it safe, but they’re going to do it because it matters to them. There’s this sense of uncertainty, like something could go wrong next week, and people tend to really delay large expenses due to that economic uncertainty. 

Marketing Daily: What are the biggest takeaways for marketers?

Dick: There’s still a lot of people up for grabs; maybe they haven’t decided where they’re going yet, or where they’re going to stay. That window of opportunity to reach these consumers hasn’t gone.

The opportunity now is to understand who these people are who haven’t finalized travel plans, to look at demographic and psychographic info about who booked already and who has not, in order to understand everything they can about this winnable group of travel procrastinators. The data to target those people and track changes to consumer behavior is available.

Marketing Daily: The study also looked into some demographic info about travelers who haven’t finalized plans yet. and which platforms over-index with these groups. What do you find?

Dick: People who booked travel ahead of today are going to over-index as financially secure or optimistic, which is often a proxy for being older. Those who haven’t completely booked their travel are going to skew younger and lower income.

So the finding around such travelers over-indexing on ad-supported streaming platforms relates to that. There are other proxies as well, such as geographical region. Likely travelers tend to skew toward living in urban or suburban areas, and are more likely to live in close proximity to an airport.

Marketing Daily: What do marketers need to know to reach audiences who still haven’t finalized their travel plans?

Dick: Right now, there are still a lot of people up for grabs, but week by week this group is going to get smaller, although they’re likely going to wait as long as they can.

It’s a definable group of people. Marketers need to find the right person, and reach them at the right time, to influence them when they’re ready to make a decision.

Travel is one of those difficult categories, where people are seldom making an impromptu decision about a flight, for example. There’s some branding elements to think about in this, making sure your brand is front of mind in the two to three weeks when people are planning and finalizing their decisions.