Destination Creep and How to Manage it
I was recently reading an article on Fodor’s about various difficulties someone might run into when planning a trip. Things like indecisive travel companions or figuring out who will care for your pet while you’re away. But one of the items in their list really struck a chord with me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: the problem of Destination Creep.
Now, scope creep is an idea from the project management world. According to Forbes, it occurs “when a project’s completion requirements increase past the planned project requirements. When this happens, the project runs the risk of being completed late, over budget and lacking in quality.” This sounds familiar! Fodor’s has taken the concept of scope creep and applied it to travel planning, an endeavor that can easily go over budget and expand to overwhelming proportions.
“This is called destination creep, where you thought you were set on the parameters, but now, upon researching further, more options have come up. A very likely scenario is that you’re now back to the drawing board—and have not booked the trip at all.”
Destination Creep is what happens when you are planning a trip, let’s say to London. And you open up your map of the UK and you see that Belgium really isn’t that far away from England. And if you are going to fly across the Atlantic Ocean anyway, you might as well visit another country while you are there. And the easiest way to get from England to Europe is the Eurostar train which conveniently goes right to Paris. And since you have to travel into Paris to get to Europe you should honestly just spend a couple of nights there before heading to Belgium.
This is classic Destination Creep. You’ve just added 4 nights of hotel stay, four days of food and expenses, train tickets and probably more expensive airfare to your plans.
I am very guilty of doing this. Which is probably why the article caught my attention in the first place. I now have a name for the thing that I always try to do in my own trips.
In fact, I’m currently in the planning stages of a personal trip to Italy over the Thanksgiving break and I thought, if we’re flying over there anyway, why not fly into Paris and spend a couple of nights? And then we can take a train to Venice or Milan. And from there we can carry on with our original plans. The only thing that stopped me is the fact that there are no direct trains running from Paris to Italy at the moment. What should have stopped me is that we will be on a time crunch due to school vacation schedules and the budget we are trying to stick to. Thankfully, the trains made me come to my senses.
If you are sitting down and planning out a multi-stop trip that includes London, Paris, and Brussels, that isn’t Destination Creep. That’s putting an itinerary together. The creep occurs when you look at that itinerary and think, I have a long layover in Dublin, I should just spend the night and get a hotel room and explore the city instead of sitting in the airport.
Destination Creep is not a bad thing when planning a trip! It just means plotting out those additional stops, working the extra days into your budget, and figuring out the best way to get there and back. It only becomes a problem when the plans you were previously happy with begin to seem overwhelming or are putting you over your approved vacation days or blowing your budget. That’s where creep can lead to the lack of quality that Forbes mentioned as a real consequence of going beyond the scope of your project.
Don’t let Destination Creep get you down. If you’ve put together an itinerary but the idea of traveling it seems overwhelming, don’t be afraid to cut. Cut stops and days until you get back to the original scope of your plans. And if you really need help getting it all together, give us call!
Sources:
https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/how-to-deal-with-trip-planning-difficulties-mishaps-and-hiccups
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/scope-creep/
