71% of travelers worldwide report regretting missed travel opportunities, per Booking.com’s survey of 20,500 people across 32 countries. On the action side, only 6% of adults regret the money they spent on travel, according to a Claris Finance survey of 2,000 UK adults — one of the lowest action-regret rates for any major spending category. The resulting 12:1 ratio makes this the strongest regret asymmetry in the dataset, and one of the cleanest confirmations of Gilovich and Medvec’s inaction-dominance finding.
The psychological mechanism is well-documented. Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) showed that experiential purchases generate more lasting satisfaction than material ones, partly because experiences become part of identity and are psychologically protected from regret. Travel is the canonical experiential purchase. Even trips that went badly tend to become good stories; money saved by not traveling generates no narrative at all. Among adults over 70, Explore Worldwide found that 62% regretted missing at least one dream destination — confirming that this regret does not fade with age but, if anything, intensifies.
The main caveat is sample bias. Booking.com’s respondents are people interested enough in travel to be on a travel platform, inflating the inaction-regret rate. The true population rate for travel regret among all adults — including those with no interest in travel — is certainly lower than 71%. Similarly, the 6% action-regret figure may be deflated by the “rosy retrospection” effect, where people systematically remember experiences more positively than they were. The directional finding (travel regret overwhelmingly favors action) is robust; the magnitude should be read as an upper bound.