Booking Your Vacation At Work? Bad Idea
Study finds that booking a vacation at work tends to lead to purchasing more expensive hotels and being less satisfied with your trip
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Instead of booking a Caribbean getaway from your desk when you just can't stand work any more, you might be better off doing your trip-planning at home. It's not just that you risk your boss getting mad at you for doing personal stuff on company time—if you book a trip at work, you might not even enjoy your vacation that much. A new study found that booking a trip at work tends to lead to purchasing more expensive hotels and being less satisfied with your trip overall.
Marketing researchers at Rice University and Iowa State analyzed 4,825 different people who made hotel reservations in 2008 and 2009. They found that people who planned a trip during work picked nicer hotels to stay in but had a worse experience once they were there than people who'd booked outside of business hours. From their press release:
"We speculate that occurs because people are either more fatigued at work and tend to buy more expensive items or that vacations seem more appealing while people are at work," Kalra said. "This kind of preliminary data indicates that people should not be making purchases when they are working."
So, as appealing as that beach seems right this second, wait to book, and you might be happier with your stay overall. And isn’t that the whole point of a vacation?