What the MyIQ Survey Found About Vacation Overplanning

Vacations are supposed to break the rhythm of everyday demands, but a new survey suggests many travelers are bringing their work habits along with them. MyIQ, a digital self-knowledge platform, polled 13,684 adults across the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Latin America. The headline finding: 69% of respondents feel pressure to make every day of a vacation “count.”

The pressure starts before departure. According to the survey, 63% of travelers spend more time planning a vacation than deciding where they actually want to go. MyIQ describes this as the difference between personal preference and optimization — comparing options, organizing each day and trying to reduce the possibility of regret.

Once the trip begins, the urge to keep moving is strong. Some 57% of respondents said they feel guilty when they spend an afternoon doing nothing. Another 42% said they had changed their travel plans because they worried they were spending too long in one place, and 38% said they had chosen activities they were not genuinely interested in because they felt they should experience them.

The result, MyIQ says, is that leisure is increasingly evaluated by how much was seen and how little time was wasted, rather than whether the trip felt restorative. That mindset can leave travelers returning home more tired than when they left — undermining the recovery a getaway is meant to provide.

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Why Leisure Is Being Judged Like Work

A Leisure Model Built on Avoiding Regret

The survey’s findings point to a deeper shift: personal preference is being replaced by an external idea of what a successful vacation should contain. Travelers who spend more time planning than choosing a destination are not simply being thorough — they are trying to eliminate the chance of a “wasted” day. The 38% who booked activities they did not want to do are responding to the same fear, treating an itinerary like a checklist to be completed rather than an experience to be enjoyed.

What the Numbers Do and Don’t Say

The data is useful as a snapshot of traveler sentiment, but it comes with limits. It is based on self-reported responses collected by a commercial self-knowledge platform, and the full methodology — including sampling method and question wording — has not been published. Still, the pattern is consistent with broader cultural trends around productivity, where even rest is expected to deliver a measurable return. Whether this is a genuinely new phenomenon or simply a new way of describing long-standing vacation FOMO, the survey gives the travel industry a clear signal: many customers are arriving on holiday already anxious about time.

How to Put the Rest Back Into Your Getaway

  • If planning eats more time than choosing the destination — as it does for 63% of surveyed travelers — set a hard limit on itinerary building and leave at least the evenings unscheduled.
  • If an afternoon of doing nothing triggers guilt, as it does for 57%, consciously schedule one unplanned afternoon and treat it as part of the vacation rather than a gap in it.
  • If the idea of staying too long in one place feels wrong — 42% have changed plans because of it — remember that a slower stay is a legitimate choice, and extra days in one destination often produce the rest travelers say they need.
  • If FOMO pushes you toward activities you do not actually want, as it does for 38%, skip them; an uninteresting event is the clearest path to the exhaustion the trip was meant to cure.