How to Maximize Your Vacation Happiness

Science is taking a vacation! Or, let’s say, science is finding out things about vacations, and how you can get more bang for your buck. Findings by Dr. Amit Kumar and Dr. Thomas Gilovich analyzed the amount of happiness a getaway brings us and what facts lead to that happiness. They have some tips about why you should take a trip, what kind to take, and how to schedule your activities for peak return.

The happiness literature also has some important things to say about planning. Kumar said that he’d been wondering for a while whether planning a purchase well in advance “might cause [the purchaser to] derive more utility from their anticipation of the experience” than they would if they planned it at the last minute, he said. “We now have empirical evidence that that's indeed the case,” he said, in the form of a paper he coauthored with Thomas Gilovich that’s in press at the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

This tells me that the trend toward surprising children with a last-minute notice that they’re going to Disney World actually cheats those children out of the anticipation happiness they would have otherwise experienced. Not a great tradeoff for a viral video. Read the other ways you can optimize your vacation happiness at New York magazine. -via Digg


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