There's No Such Thing as a Non-Heritage Visitor

Ask a traveler why they took their last trip and you'll hear about a wedding, a beach week, a ballgame, a few days at their sister's house.

Ask what they actually did while they were there, and the answer looks completely different. They ate at a locally owned restaurant. They walked a historic downtown. They stopped at a marker, toured a house, wandered into a museum on a rainy afternoon.

Those are two different questions, and our field has a habit of treating the first one as though it answers the second.

What the data shows

In January 2026, I surveyed 400 U.S. leisure travelers about their most recent trip. Seventy-two percent had done at least one heritage activity — a museum, a historic site, a festival, a locally owned restaurant, a guided tour, a downtown walk, a folk arts or craft experience.

That number is useful on its own, but becomes even more interesting when you sort those travelers by why they came.

• Travelers whose trip was mainly about arts and culture: 94% did a heritage activity

• Outdoor recreation: 78%

• Food and drink: 78%

• Beach and relaxation: 70%

• Visiting friends and family: 65%

• Theme parks: 64%

• Sporting events: 62%

Across every trip purpose I measured, heritage participation ran between 62% and 94%. The person who drove eight hours for a theme park did heritage at nearly the same rate as the person who came for a beach week. Knowing why someone came to your community tells you remarkably little about whether they'll walk into your site.

Heritage is what visitors do, not why they came

This is the distinction that keeps getting lost. Trip motivation and trip content are two different measurements, and heritage performs very differently on each.

As a reason to travel, heritage is modest. As something people do once they've traveled, it's nearly universal. Both of those things are true at the same time, and only one of them is usually cited.

The practical consequence is that heritage organizations are not competing with the ballgame, the theme park, or the family reunion. Those trips are the delivery mechanism. Almost two-thirds of the people who came for the rides still ended up at a local restaurant, a museum, or a historic site.

Which means the useful question isn't how do we attract heritage travelers. It's what do the visitors already coming here do with the rest of their time.

What heritage participation predicts

This is where the behavior gets economically interesting.

Heritage visitors don't do one thing. Museum visitors averaged 6.2 activities across their trip and historic site visitors averaged 6.4, compared with 3.8 for the sample as a whole. They're not making a single stop and going home — they're filling their day, which means they're eating meals, exploring the community, and buying something on the way back to the car.

The same pattern holds across the whole sample, not just museum- and historic-site-goers: travelers who did at least one heritage-aligned activity — a museum, a historic site, a festival, a locally owned restaurant, a guided tour, a downtown walk, folk arts or crafts — averaged 4.7 different activities on their trip, against 1.7 for travelers who did none of those. Heritage engagement isn't a niche interest; it's the difference between a visitor who does one thing and a visitor who does nearly three times as much.

Distance sharpens that pattern rather than explaining it away. Heritage travelers who traveled 50 or more miles from home averaged 4.95 activities, compared to 3.80 for heritage travelers who stayed closer to home — almost a full activity more. Non-heritage travelers barely moved: 1.70 for the 50+ mile group versus 1.47 for the local group. Distance doesn't create heritage behavior; it amplifies it. The visitor who's already engaging with local history and culture does even more of it the farther they travel, while everyone else's activity level stays roughly flat no matter how far they went.

Heritage travelers spend accordingly: an average of $560 per trip, against $337 for travelers who did no heritage activities. They were also more than twice as likely to pay for tickets or admissions: 51%, compared with 23% of non-heritage travelers.

For historic site managers, this is the number that matters: paying to get in is a habit, and habits cluster. The travelers already engaging with heritage in some form were more than twice as likely to buy an admission somewhere, and most of them came to town for something else entirely.

What this means

I hear it all the time: Our visitors aren't really history people. People think history is boring. Traveler don't do history -- it's too much like learning.

Set aside for a moment whether that's fair. The bigger issue is that it answers a narrower question than the one I asked.

When I measured heritage activity in this survey, I wasn't only counting museums and historic sites. I was counting the locally owned restaurant, the walk through a historic downtown, the festival, the craft demonstration, the brewery in the old mill building. Heritage, as travelers actually encounter it, is the character of a place, and most of it doesn't feel anything like a classroom.

Measured that way, there was no trip type in this survey where heritage participation dropped below 60% — not the sports weekend, not the theme park, not the beach. Whatever your visitors came for, most of them are going to do something you'd recognize as heritage before they leave.

They're already here, and they're already spending more than the visitors who aren't doing it. The work is figuring out what they do with the rest of their time.

I work with museums, DMOs, heritage areas, scenic byways, and Main Streets on exactly that question — what visitors do with the rest of their time, and how a destination gives them more reasons to stay. If you'd like to talk through what that looks like where you are, reach out for a free conversation!

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This post draws from a January 2026 survey of 400 U.S. leisure travelers conducted by Heritage Tourism Studio using the Pollfish consumer research platform. The sample is nationally representative by age and region. Respondents were asked about their most recent leisure trip, including activities participated in, spending, and length of stay. Where noted, findings are compared to the 2009 and 2013 Cultural & Heritage Traveler studies conducted by Mandala Research, which used similar methodology across larger samples (n=1,048 and n=1,523, respectively).