CHAPTER 10

Reducing Travel Habituation I

(or I Used to Love These Kinds of Hotels, but Now They Seem a Little Ho-Hum to Me!)

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In this chapter, the problem of non-responsiveness to our surroundings is discussed using the concepts of habituation and anchor shifting. Habituation occurs when we become less interested in something due to repeated exposure to it, and anchor shifting occurs when a change of standards for making comparisons takes place. Both can cause us to be less impressed by and receptive to situations that previously pleased us. One remedy that travel providers can use to mitigate habituation is to allow us to personalize or put on our unique stamp on our travel spaces. The ways that this can be implemented are discussed.

Nothing Excites Us Anymore

We live in a time in which we can choose among more travel options than ever before. For instance, we can go on safari vacations, work-with-thelocals trips, outdoor adventure outings, and/or on spa wellness tours, to name just a few. While this richness of offerings is a positive development, so much choice can also make us feel a bit weary and burned out, and we can begin to sense that we have just done and seen it all. Below we will take a deeper look at some of the things that produce these ho-hum dynamics in traveling, and then examine how these feelings can be reduced by strategies employed by those in the travel industry.

Anchoring Issues

Let’s start by turning once again to an examination of the importance to our happiness of the kinds of comparisons that we make. As we have seen, we are comparative in nature, and we use feedback from others to judge the merit of our own experiences (Festinger 1954). We also use feedback about our own past encounters to evaluate our present circumstances (Larsen and McKibban 2008), and this can also impact our enjoyment of the present. For instance, if we see a truly spectacular ballet performance by the visiting Bolsoi Ballet, we may become less enthusiastic the next day when we go to see our local college ballet recital that we had previously loved to attend. This is because our anchor for judgment was reset by seeing the best performers in the world. What was once considered excellent now became subpar (Gilbert 2007). Ironically, this means that the ante for finding joy in the present is continually upped with the more exposure we have had in the past to that which is truly first-rate and special.

Habituation

Another way that we can become burned out in travel is simply by repeated exposure to things. This has to do with the phenomena of habituation that is the bane of the seasoned traveler (and the travel industry!). The fact is that we often grow bored with familiar things that we have seen again and again (Frederick and Loewenstein 1999). Although for some of us, routine and predictability are soothing and satisfying, for many it simply creates over time a kind of mindlessness or dulling of our responses to our environment.

I think here of a friend who was lucky enough to become a famous actor in a popular TV series. When he traveled after his show became a hit, he always went first class. Usually, because of his fame, flowers and fruit baskets would be left in his hotel room for him to enjoy, and special perks such as free drinks or snacks would be provided to him. At first, he was very excited and appreciative of all of this extra attention, but over time he grew so used to it that he hardly noticed it anymore. In fact, when my husband and I traveled with him, he would often give us the fruit and flowers to take back to our much humbler accommodations.

This little story represents the dilemma we often face in life. We both thrive on change and yet draw comfort from predictability. The key is to get the balance right between the two.

Helping Travelers Reduce Ho-Hum Been There Feelings

What this suggests in practical terms is that for many of us to be fully appreciative and receptive to where we are, we have to be just a bit jolted out of our automatic pilot way of being. Often to enhance our responsiveness to something, we need some kind of change in our environment or something new to draw our attention. We have to learn to see again and, in a sense, be awakened or re-awakened to our surroundings.

To think more about this, imagine an individual who travels a lot, who has increasingly become aware that different types of commercial travel lodgings are all beginning to look alike. Perhaps after a while, this traveler desperately wants something different. The increased popularity of homestays and other travel accommodations in private dwellings, in fact, attests to the idea that this traveler is not alone in her feelings. What many of us are looking for as we travel nowadays is not always simple convenience or comfortable sameness, but something more remarkable, interesting, and memorable (Pine and Gilmore 2019). But how can we find these remarkable experiences, and what can those in the travel industry do to help us in this process?

Personalizing Our Environments

One way to arouse our attention and reduce our perception of sameness is to give us more ways to personalize or put our own stamps on our travel living spaces. In this way, we can create more customized oases that speak to our own tastes and preferences.

Let’s imagine that we were that business traveler who was staying in a room at a hotel that seemed acceptable but rather unremarkable and hotel-like. The challenge would be how to fashion accommodations in these types of settings to bring them more to life and make them appear more reflective of our own personality and style. A start might be to turn more power and control over to us to enable us to configure our room spaces in ways that we, not the hotel management, find particularly pleasing. For instance, we might be given more ability to precisely control our physical environment’s basic comfort features such as the temperature settings in different parts of our room, the brightness and ambient glow of the various types of lights, or the black-out degree of our window drapes.

In addition to these kinds of simple comfort setting options, we could also be given opportunities to express our more aesthetic and personalized tastes. We might, for example, be offered some choices in such things as the color of the throw pillows we would like placed on our bed in the morning or the scent of the bath oil we would like left out on the bathroom counter. Some hotels offer guests modular furniture that can be rearranged in hotel room living spaces and, if we were in such a room, we might want to change the orientation of the desk or our reading chair to make it more comfortable for us. Maybe we could also select between complementary fuzzy or non-fuzzy slippers to wear, or choose between medium and light comforters or firm or soft pillows for sleeping. These kinds of choices, although rather small in themselves, could contribute to our sense that this was now, indeed, our own special place.

Choice, thus, empowers us and, particularly in western cultures, enables us to express our much valued individuality (Iyengar and Lepper 1999). In doing this, choice provides us with a sense that we and not others are in control, and that we have power over our environments. We also tend to like things more when we have had the chance to select them for ourselves as opposed to having someone else doing the choosing for us (Iyengar 2011). All of this adds to a do-it-my-way feeling of deep rightness in where we are and to an enhanced sense of autonomy and efficacy.

Personalization can be additionally fostered by travel providers using data gathered from our previous visits in order to anticipate what our likes and dislikes are apt to be on any of our repeat stays. This is often a feature of guest loyalty programs, which are designed to motivate us to return to the same places again and again (ReviewPro 2019). Thus, if we joined such a program and returned to the same hotel, or one in the same chain of hotels, a whole trove of data might be available from our first visit to help the hotel staff further customize services for us (Yeldell 2017). For instance, previous patterns of our service and amenity use, special requests, consumption habits, complaints, room service orders, dining practices, and so forth could be examined to predict our current needs and preferences. As just a few examples, if we utilized certain spa services on our last visit, we might be given some discount coupons for some similar spa packages during our current stay; if we previously requested a room with a view of the pool, we might be given a room with a similar pool view again; if we had some special dietary restrictions (e.g., we needed gluten-free food ), items stocked in our room’s complimentary snack baskets might be chosen to fit with these special needs; and if we liked cleaning services in the afternoon and/or late checkouts, arrangements could be made to accommodate these schedules, and so on.

The point is that very individualized guest experiences could be created by using either sophisticated data analysis methods or by simply giving us more freedom to choose to arrange our environments in ways that are especially pleasing to us. In each case, the hotel management would be honoring our unique requirements in order to provide us with experiences that are particularly comfortable and satisfying.

Questions for Discussion

Please work with the following questions in order to think more about factors that can produce non-responsiveness to surroundings when traveling. Also, consider the idea of the importance of personalization of travel spaces. For these questions, draw on your personal experiences as a traveler and/or on any experiences you have had in the travel industry.

Notes