Despite a chaotic Christmas travel season, partly due to breakdowns in the beleaguered airline industry, winter travel in the U.S. has picked up. With people having been mandatorily locked down for so long during the COVID-19 pandemic, flight occupation has increased. There are issues connected with psychological wellbeing that explain why some people benefit from a wintertime vacation.
While the summer season remains the most popular time for those living in the U.S. to travel internally, the winter season is also popular too due to the sometimes cooler weather conditions and less crowded venues.
Understanding why people elect to holiday in the winter and what this delivers for their personal well-being is the subject of psychological study. For example, in understanding the connections between the primary (the motivations for the visit), the cognitive (attribute-based beliefs describing the destination) and the affective (the emotional reaction) in relation specific destinations.
According to a representative of Wild Bunch Desert Guides, a travel company that specializes in things to do in Phoenix in February 2023 and beyond, if a person is looking for a winter getaway that is warm, Arizona represents one a popular destinations. The company have told Digital Journal that the Phoenix area is especially popular due to a variety of sporting and cultural events.
According to a recent article by the travel writing experts at Travel + Leisure, winter vacations are a panacea for the almost inevitable let-down that follows the holidays.
People have different wants and needs when it comes to vacationing in the winter. Some prefer snow and the opportunity to ski other prefer sunnier climes. This relates to the issue of psychological adaptation: naturalness, expectations, experience (short-/long-term), time of exposure, perceived control and environmental stimulation. Each of these will affect how a person assesses their wants and needs when it comes to climate, rest and the change of scenery triggered by a vacation,
The Travel + Leisure review of the best locations shows:
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
This area receives an average snowfall of around 500 inches every year. The Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and the King Snow Resort allows visitors to access good skiing facilities. Other facilities include ice skating, snowshoeing, tubing, horse-drawn sleigh rides, and snowmobiling.
Nearby is Yellowstone National Park.
St. George, Utah
Just a little more than a four-hour drive from Salt Lake City or a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, St. George is known for its mild winters with comfortable daytime temps of around 10 degrees Celsius. This provides a comfortable alterative to a summer vacation.
St. George’s historic downtown offers up numerous cafes, restaurants, and museums that display lots of artifacts from the Old West.
Key West, Florida
During the Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. government decided to turn the backwater of Key West, Florida, into a money-making tourist attraction that even featured the home of young best-selling novelist Ernest Hemingway.
Located about three and a half hours by car from Miami, the road trip alone is worth the visit with 42 bridges surrounded by crystal-clear blue waters (It used to be accessible only by train, but that was destroyed during a hurricane in the 1930s).
