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Traditionally, most overnight vacations have been seen as a way to “get away” from the routine of everyday life, experience fun and excitement, and relax and sightsee. However a recent survey by Ypartnership, a firm headquartered in Orlando specializing in advertising, public relations, marketing, and research for the travel and leisure industry, found more and more people are taking vacations not just to get away, relax, and have fun, but for a very specific purpose: to celebrate milestones in their lives.
 The survey of 4,600 adults—active travelers with at least one overnight trip the previous 12 months—was conducted in June 2008 and revealed 70 percent had taken a vacation to celebrate a special occasion. Respondents said they were increasingly motivated by events of high “personal significance.” Peter Yesawich, CEO of Ypartnership, says, “The motivations revealed in this fascinating piece of work suggest that vacations are increasingly viewed as an appropriate way to either recognize or reward the participants for some event of great significance.” Thus, he refers to them as “celebration vacations.”
Yesawich thinks a couple of study findings are significant: “That people think certain life events are particularly appropriate to celebrate by taking a vacation, and that these vacations appear to be exempt from many of the other constraints that govern the planning of ‘typical’ vacations.”
Some of the life events most often named as the reason for a celebration vacation include a wedding/honeymoon, family reunion, milestone anniversary, birthday, family moon (joining of families), retirement, first vacation with children, graduation, and Quinceanera, which is the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday popular in Latin cultures.
 According to Yesawich, celebration vacations have some significant differences from standard trips. “They tend to be planned much further in advance, are longer in duration, include more people in the traveling party, and are budgeted at a significantly higher amount—on average, 40 percent more,” he says. “Those in which consumers make a more significant investment are far more likely to be taken in recognition of some type of ‘special occasion. ’”More detail on this study can be found at www.ypartnership.com.
Capitalizing on the Trend
One park business that took immediate notice of the Ypartnership findings was The Walt Disney Company. As a result of the survey and corroborating information coming from its own theme parks, the company recently announced a promotion for 2009 called “What Will You Celebrate?” which is built around the celebration vacation trend. Disney’s announcement last September that all guests will be allowed free entry into either a Walt Disney World or Disneyland park on their birthdays is a part of this promotion.
“This is something we saw happening within our parks, and so we spent a lot of time looking at it at a deeper level to really understand what was going on,” says Brewer Lister, marketing manager for Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. “In conjunction with celebrating personal milestones on a vacation, the other aspect is the ability to personalize and customize your experiences—it’s becoming less and less of a one size fits all and more of understanding the particular needs of guests who want to mark their vacations.”
 Dave Herbst, media relations manager for Walt Disney World, notes there are many personal occasions people come to the resort to celebrate but says, “Generally, they fall into the following categories: birthdays, anniversaries, weddings/ engagement/honeymoons, family reunions, and personal triumphs—everything from retirement to finishing a marathon to all As on a report card.”
So Disney has tailored its promotion to these categories. Visitors to the Disney Parks web site (www.disneyparks.com) are offered several different celebration vacations to choose from—Birthdays, True Love, Triumphs, Reunions, and First Visits—each offering a choice of personalized, customized packages. “The site explains who the guest needs to contact at Disney and how to do that,” Lister reveals. “Then they can start digging through the site to find out what specifically they can do. There’s also a vacation planning DVD they can order online.”
He asserts the personalization and customization are what make such vacations special for guests, and Disney’s park operations has to be ready. “We wanted to make sure each of the different areas within our own business was aware they could enhance [guests,] vacations,” he notes. “It’s all about helping people to capture a memory, to mark a big moment in a special way—even more than getting a gift.”
 Lister says one compelling aspect of Disney’s birthday free entry promotion is that on any given day, there will be hundreds, maybe thousands, of guests at the Disney parks with one thing in common—their birth on that very date. “They will all be together celebrating that common special event,” he says.
Disney can certainly capitalize on this trend, but regarding whether smaller parks can take advantage of celebration vacations, Yesawich responds, “Absolutely, as many celebration vacations in the year ahead may well be taken closer to home, given the challenges posed by the current economic environment and the declining length of vacations caused by the work habits of Americans.”
The key for a smaller park with fewer resources is to focus on just a couple types of celebration vacations it is well suited to accommodate, then become adept at attracting and catering to those guests.
Getting the Word Out
Even when guests have decided they are going to go on vacation somewhere to celebrate a special occasion, a park or attraction still has the challenge of attracting those guests— making them aware the facility has something to offer.
Magic Springs and Crystal Falls in Hot Springs, Arkansas, caters to family reunions and gets a lot of visitors from neighboring states. The park must get the word out to attract these celebrants. “We’ve recently joined PARC Management, and they own several other attractions, and we do a lot of mass mailings and bulk mailings to promote them,” says Aundrea Crary, Magic Springs’ marketing manager. “We also work with the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism to get the word out that we’re here and about what we offer.”
 The SanDiego Zoo and its nearby sister facility Wild Animal Park (WAP) use their web site to get the word out on some of their special offerings. “We get 25th, 30th, 40th wedding anniversaries, and they sometimes ask for a special tour with cheetahs at the Wild Animal Park, or koalas, pandas, etc., at the zoo,” says Jenny Mehlow, the zoo’s public relations representative. “It’s sort of a la carte, and we accommodate their request, and all the money goes back to animal conservation.” Mehlow says WAP gets more of these celebrations than the zoo because it is a larger facility and has more scenic areas. The zoo and WAP have their own wedding coordinator to work with guests on such events, and a team of five to seven staff members make the specific arrangements.
Worldwide Trend?
The Ypartnership survey focused on the United States, but Yesawich thinks celebration vacations may be a trend elsewhere as well. “I don’t know for sure, but my suspicion is the trend is essentially the same throughout the developed world,” he surmises.
Ocean Park in Hong Kong certainly attracts guests looking to celebrate significant life events in a special way. “We have wedding packages, eight different ones, and [guests] can actually get married underwater if they have their diving certificates!” says Tom Mehrmann, the park’s CEO. He says Ocean Park “gets a little bit of  everything” when it comes to guests celebrating other milestones; a couple years ago, on the same day the park had its very first underwater wedding booked, there was a couple celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary at the park. “Ocean Park was celebrating our 30th anniversary [that year], and the media actually got greater enjoyment out of the 30th anniversary couple than they did out of the underwater wedding,” Mehrmann recalls.
Also, though Disney is currently making a big splash with its promotion to give free admission to guests on their birthdays, Mehrmann points out Ocean Park has been doing that for quite some time. “We’re the pioneer of ‘if it’s your birthday, you get in free,’” he states, “and we’ve been doing it for almost four years. We’re not doing it for one year—we do it every year—and we are going to do it forever.”
As for how the park works with guests in setting up these celebrations, Mehrmann says there is one person who initially books the event, but that person then works with staff across the entire park to make the arrangements for the celebration.
If guests stray from the park’s standard celebration offerings and make a special or unusual request, the park obliges. “We pride ourselves that we’ll accommodate basically any request—the word ‘no’ is not in our vocabulary,” says Mehrmann. “We really go out of our way to accommodate.”
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