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Tourist Survey: What It Is + Tips with Examples

A tourist survey mainly allows us to obtain quality information quickly. This data comes directly from tourists or travel enthusiasts. Online surveys for tourism reduce costs and facilitate execution for specialized personnel who carry it out.

What is a Tourist Survey?

A tourist survey is a tool that allows you to collect information about people’s opinions about the place they visited or the services they received. Through a survey, people can provide data that allows us to measure the service quality, the facilities’ safety and hygiene, assess the places they visited, the activities they carried out, etc.

Tourist Survey Uses

Various sources can use tourist surveys for different situations:

• Travel agencies: Travel agencies can use tourist surveys to obtain data on activities, destinations, and applicants’ budgets to create campaigns that attract people to purchase their services. Carry out surveys for travel agencies and evaluate the quality of your service.
• Hotel management: Surveys can be applied to hotels to find out what people think of the service they offer, the activities they carry out for visitors, if they have guides for foreigners and if they have the right knowledge to meet the needs of tourists.
• Government departments: The government can find an extremely important source of data in surveys for tourists. With this information, they can create campaigns to publicize representative areas or zones of the city to attract a more significant number of visitors and income for the town’s benefit.

Tourist Survey Advantages

• Among the benefits of applying survey formats for tourists are:
• Create better strategies that allow the increase of tourists, both for companies and governments.
• Better activities can be created for the interest of tourists.
• Companies and organizations can offer a good experience to customers by knowing their needs.

Doing online surveys for tourists has a significant advantage since the visitor is given the option of being able to respond from any mobile device at the time they want.

Large amounts of information can be obtained about the most visited tourist sites to create better strategies for them to continue generating income. Publicize places that meet the tastes of tourists and give them more publicity.

LEARN ABOUT: Free Travel Surveys: Questions & Templates

Tourist Survey Tips with Examples

If you are going to create a survey for tourists, we recommend:

• Remember that only some people who will respond to the survey speak the same language as you. With QuestionPro, you can create multilingual surveys for travelers to understand and answer appropriately.
• Create short creative surveys that allow you to collect enough information for your goals. Chances are if someone is visiting a city, they want to spend less time answering a questionnaire.
• Consider that there are countries in which internet access is limited or they do not have connectivity. In this case, you can use our tool to create offline surveys and collect data in the field or in ecotourism areas, for example, and when you are connected, download the information collected via Wi-Fi.

Examples of questions for tourists:

• What is your favorite means of transport to travel?
• What type of place do you prefer to visit when you vacation?
• How many times a year do you go on a trip?
• What is the season of the year in which you prefer to travel?
• How many are the approximate days that you go on vacation?
• What kind of activities do you like to do when you travel?
• Where was the last place you went on vacation?
• What factors do you take into account when hiring a travel package?
• Where do you prefer to stay?
• What are the tools you use to find accommodation?
• On average, what is the price you consider appropriate for a travel package?
• When making a trip, do you prefer to do it alone or accompanied by your family?

Travel surveys are a tool that will allow you to increase income and offer visitors the service they want during their trips. Do you want to create surveys for tourists? Schedule a demo right now.

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• Tourist Survey: What It Is, Tips & Examples

Introduction

A tourist survey helps you to gather relevant information quickly. The data gathered in this survey is mainly sourced from tourists and people who have traveled widely for leisure.

Tourist surveys are an effective way to gain insight into the kind of people that visit your location, frequently. This way, you can predict future trends, display the typical visitor behavior and have the right persona of an ideal traveler or tourist. 

In this guide, we will show you what a tourist survey is, ways in which you can put them to use, the benefits some tips, and lots more.

What is a Tourist Survey?

A tourist survey is a research tool, that helps you collect information from people who have traveled frequently for leisure. This set of people are called tourists.

A tourist survey, hence, focuses on collecting information from people on the places they visited, the level of service they received, the hospitality of the locals in the area, the weather, the cost of leisure, entertainment accommodation, etc. It covers any information you want to gather about people’s experiences as it relates to travel. 

With this information or data, you can share information with others that provide relevant information on areas people would want to visit.

Tourist Survey Uses

Tourist surveys can be used for various purposes. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Travel Agencies

Data from tourist surveys can be used to gather insight into choice destinations, the kind of activities that certain tourists enjoy, the number of funds they expend, etc. This information can be used to create custom campaigns to attract people to this destination that are now part of the areas your travel agency cover. 

Hotel Management

In the same way, hotels can use these surveys to discover what people truly think of the services they offer, from the cleanliness of their rooms to the quality of food, the cost, and the overall customer experience. This feedback would help them improve on weak areas and capitalize on their areas of strength as unique selling points. 

Government Agencies

Government establishments can use this data to drive more visitors to their country and generate revenue. With this information, they can create policies that encourage travel to their country and also create campaigns to create awareness about certain choice locations to create new streams of income for their citizens and invariably benefit from it.  

Tourist Survey Advantages

The advantages of tourist surveys are numerous and they include;

• The creation of custom strategies that would increase tourist visits to a particular location.
• Creation of targeted activities that would appeal to tourists based on data gleaned.
• Provision of excellent customer experience, that would speak to the unique needs of the tourist, as expressed in the survey forms.
• Create better strategies that allow the increase of tourists, both for companies and governments.
• Better activities can be created for the interest of tourists.
• Companies and organizations can offer a good experience to customers by knowing their needs.

Doing online surveys for tourists has a significant advantage since the visitor is given the option of being able to respond from any mobile device at the time they want.

Large amounts of information can be obtained about the most visited tourist sites to create better strategies for them to continue generating income.

With tourist surveys, you can create publicity for areas loved by tourists and achieve the following.

• Honest feedback

Tourist surveys are one of the ways to gather objective and honest feedback that can only be gathered from travelers who have truly experienced all that a particular location has to offer. With this information, you can get valuable insights into what their perspectives are, on exhibits, events, and their general visitor experience.

• Your Visitors Know That Their Opinion Counts

Gathering feedback via a survey like this one helps to let your respondents know that their opinion counts for something. Especially when you take actions based on their feedback, this builds trust in whatever brand you represent. 

• Customer Persona

Do you wonder exactly who is coming to visit your attraction? Not only can a survey provide feedback about your destination, but it’s also an opportunity to collect demographic data about your visitors so you can better understand your audience and market to them more effectively. It may even reveal an opportunity to tap into a new market you hadn’t thought of before. 

• Create Actionable Goals.  

Feedback from your visitors can help you can set realistic goals that will lead to impactful change within your organization. Any concerns raised by visitors can be converted into goals to be addressed. Equipped with the knowledge of what your visitors want you can turn your survey into fuel to grow your attraction’s bottom line this summer.

• Track Your Growth

With consistent surveys, you can track your growth and changes made as a result of the feedback from your visitors.

Tourist Survey Tips

A tourist survey is a tool that allows you to collect information about people’s opinions about the place they visited or the services they received. Through a survey, people can provide data that allows us to measure the service quality, the facilities’ safety and hygiene, assess the places they visited, the activities they carried out, etc.

A tourist survey mainly allows us to obtain quality information quickly. This data comes directly from tourists or travel enthusiasts. Online surveys for tourism reduce costs and facilitate execution for specialized personnel who carry it out.

If you are going to create a survey for tourists, these tips would help. Remember that not everyone would respond to the study or speak the same language as you.

Design short surveys that allow you to collect enough information for your goals, especially because when someone is visiting a city, they usually do not plan to use that time to fill out a questionnaire. Outlined below are tips that would help you create your tourist survey.

Tip 1: Brainstorm

The thought of conducting research and getting valuable insight is an intriguing one. Oftentimes, we get caught up in the excitement of it all, and we lose sight of the main objectives.

Before jumping in and writing visitor survey questions, ask yourself what you want to learn.

Are you looking to better understand who is visiting? Or maybe you would rather learn what attractions are the biggest draws.

No matter what you’re looking to get out of the research, it’s essential to have a game plan.

With a clear understanding of what it is you want to learn, you can draft a better, cleaner survey. Having a game plan also keeps you focused when it comes to analyzing the data later on.

Tip 2: Check Your Sample Sources

Many tourism organizations have access to visitor databases, either through opt-in email lists or other databases that collect guest information.

Therefore, it can be helpful to work with other agencies and organizations in your region to see what is available.

Tip 3: Go Online, Go Mobile

Online tourism surveys are one of the best types of market research methodologies . It’s a practical and cost-effective way of gathering high-quality data in a short period. All age groups are conversant with this digital technology.

Tip 4: Keep It Short, Engaging, and Simple

Nobody wants to take a 15 to 20-minute survey. We find the ideal travel and tourism survey to be 15 to 20 questions in length. The 5 minutes mark has been identified as a threshold where many respondents abandon the survey. For this reason, keep the survey short.

Make sure the respondent is engaged throughout the travel survey. Change the scales from question to question using sliders, visual images, or grids. 

No one likes a 1 to 5 scale question rating 20 different rows on a grid. Keep your survey engaging.

Lastly, keep it simple. No need to use big words or confusing phrases. Ensure questions are short, unbiased, and to the point.

Examples of Questions for Tourists

Examples of questions for tourists:

• What is your preferred means of transport to travel?
• What kind of place do you like to visit when you travel for leisure?
• How often do you go on a trip?
• What season of the year is your best time to travel?
• What kind of activities do you enjoy when you travel?
• Where was the last place you visited on vacation?
• What factors do you consider when purchasing a travel package?
• Where do you like to stay?
• How do you find accommodation?
• On average, what price would you consider ideal for a travel package?
• When making a trip, do you prefer company or would you rather go alone?

Tourist surveys are one of the quickest ways to increase your revenue and offer visitors the kind of service they want during their stay.

How To Create a Tourist Survey With Formplus

Formplus is the preferred offline and online data collection tool for creating and administering surveys and questionnaires in research. With Formplus , you can build different types of online tourist surveys with the various tools and features in our form builder. Better still, you can choose from the wide assortment of templates, which are ready to use and can be customized to suit your preference.

 Here’s how to make the most of an Online/Offline Survey with Formplus:

• Log into your Formplus account at www.formpl.us to get started. If you do not have a Formplus account, you can create one on the website via the signup page.

• After signing into your Formplus account, click on the “Get Started ” button to access a tutorial on the form builder.

• The next step is to create a title and use the add form fields, on the left-hand bar that has all the field options. Drag and drop anyone that suits your preference, edit each field to include the questions and options you want, and save the file.

• The next step is to set up all your preferred integrations.

• In the builder’s customization section, you can use various tools to edit the look and feel of your form, in terms of design, theme, font style/size, custom background images, and include your company logo.

• Here, you can personalize your forms further by adding an intro and closing page and also add new pages to capture or share more information. You can decide on other options like storage, privacy, and much more.

• Choose from any of the options available for sharing your survey, from socials to links, QR codes, email, social media, etc, You can now customize your link or use the default link provided.

• View the responses from your respondents and details of who your participants are. Afterward, you click on the analytics button to get your report.

• The final step is to test your form to see how they look before you launch.

Tourist surveys are an effective way of getting insights from visitors and would-be visitors to your location or business on their preferences, dislikes, and any other information you require.

This data can be used to hone your business to fit the need of your target audience.

Connect to Formplus, Get Started Now - It's Free!

• survey research
• survey research method
• tourist surveys
• Angela Kayode-Sanni

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Encyclopedia of Tourism pp 1–2 Cite as

Surveys in Tourism

• Stefano De Cantis 3 &
• Mauro Ferrante 3  
• Living reference work entry
• Latest version View entry history
• First Online: 27 March 2024

A survey is any organized and methodical activity which directly gathers information regarding motivations, opinions, behaviors, and characteristics of a given population. In the field of tourism, this population generally comprises tourists, residents in a given destination , or industry firms. Information can be gathered from some (a sample) or all units (a census) of a population. Survey is probably the single most important source of primary data for tourism analysis (Smith 2014 ). Despite providing information regarding the characteristics and behavior of a large population, the costs and time associated with conducting a survey can be high. Survey results are widely used for developing statistics for marketing and planning purposes and for the evaluation of the impacts of tourism.

Conducting a valid survey is a complex task, involving a systematic and logical sequence of stages. Survey methodology is of relevance to designing, conducting, processing, and analyzing surveys, with...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Groves, R., F. Fowler Jr., M. Couper, J. Lepkowski, E. Singer, and R. Tourangeau. 2011. Survey methodology . London: Wiley.

Google Scholar  

Smith, S. 2014. Tourism analysis: A handbook . Harlow: Longman.

Book   Google Scholar  

UNWTO. 2007. Metadata project: Common glossary . Madrid: World Tourism Organization.

Veal, J. 2018. Research methods for leisure and tourism . London: Pearson Education.

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Stefano De Cantis & Mauro Ferrante

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School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

Honggen Xiao

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School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, SAR, China

University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada

Scott M. Meis

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De Cantis, S., Ferrante, M. (2023). Surveys in Tourism. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_429-2

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_429-2

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Travel and tourism surveys

Whether you are operating a visitor attraction, working in the travel industry, or for a transportation organization, understanding how, why and where people travel is essential in delivering a great customer experience. Snap XMP survey software is used by every type of travel-related organization including:

• Visitor attractions such as Museums and Art Galleries, Resorts and Hotels, Theme Parks, Zoos and Aquariums, and Sports Clubs and Fitness Clubs.
• Transport companies running Rail, Road, Sea and Air travel services including Rail passenger and freight companies, Bus and Coach companies, Airlines and Cruise Operators.
• Travel and transportation organizations such as Airport and Port Authorities, Transit and Transport Authorities, Transport Planning organisations and Tourist Boards.

Capture data whenever and wherever you need

With Snap XMP survey software you can combine data capture options including  online surveys ,  mobile surveys ,  kiosk surveys ,  tablet surveys  or  paper papers  which enables you to publish surveys that reach people on the move wherever they happen to be. Snap XMP survey software has the ability to publish questionnaires in any language –  allowing respondents to select the language they prefer for online and mobile surveys – ensuring that you maximize response rates and capture the widest possible range of opinions.

• Surveys can easily be set up and distributed in the way your customers and visitors find easiest to respond to, including online, paper, smartphones, kiosks and tablets.
• Multi-language surveys are easy to manage.
• Create surveys for unattended use on kiosks to capture time-of-experience comments at key points in your venue.
• Optionally equip teams of interviewers with devices such as iPads or Android tablets running Snap Mobile Anywhere which enables interviewing to be conducted anywhere – even in wi-fi blackspots.
• Personalize questionnaires with data seeding, routing, masking and text substitution and make them engaging with images, videos and audio questions.
• Trigger email alerts from (online) questionnaires when an answer requires an immediate response or follow-up.
• Use form scanning to simplify data entry in situations where only paper questionnaires can be used, or where paper questionnaires are offered as an option.
• Robust reporting and analysis delivers information you can rely on.
• Snap’s Smart Reporting technology enables individualized, benchmarked reports to be produced for each service area, location, or category.

Research Services that can help out just when you need it

Travel and tourism surveys can be outsourced in part or in full to our Research Projects team. With a wealth of experience in this area, Research Projects ensure the objectives identified in the research brief are met, data is collected and managed to the highest levels of accuracy, and results are presented in an intelligible yet comprehensive form.

Whether it is help developing questionnaires,  translating into other languages, developing sophisticated Smart Reports, or just hosting online surveys, Research Projects can assist. Research Services is a professional survey management service with over 25 years’ experience. No matter how small or large the survey task, our Research Projects team can help.

Ready-to-run survey systems built specifically for you

With our expert teams of software developers and survey researchers, we are uniquely placed to build customized, automated ready-to-run survey  solutions specifically for you. Examples of work we have done in this area include:

• A Holiday Park company came to us because they wanted an innovative survey solution to manage performance benchmarking for member holiday parks, and to help improve visitor loyalty and staff motivation. Over 400 BH&HPA member sites already take part.
• A major leisure group asked us to set up an automated solution to deliver benchmarking reports on a quarterly basis to improve management information at all levels. There are 100 different versions of the PowerPoint presentation produced which benchmarks local performance against regional and national benchmarks.

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How to design a Tourism Questionnaire for Sustainable tourism

During my work experience at the Mountain Community of Lario and Ceresio valleys, I had to set up & deliver a survey to understand the importance of sustainability in tourism on the northern side of Lake Como. I am happy to share this work on sustainable tourism. I hope it is helpful to you.

Read more about the meaning of sustainable tourism for STouW  and  how to design sustainable tourism . Scroll down to go to the info about designing a tourism questionnaire!

It is correct to state that the drafting of the questionnaire represents the critical phase of a survey. This phase is a good source of information, mainly the mistakes you can commit during the research.

Anyone preparing a questionnaire should remember the importance of the preliminary/exploratory phase, even more so if the topic to be addressed is complex. The questionnaire tests (pilot phase) allow obtaining a questionnaire that can be used during any repetitions of the investigation, without any modification, as most of the problems were eliminated due to the tests.

In the questionnaire, it is vital to use the correct sequence of questions. The options can be the following:

● “Top-down sequence”: starting from the global aspects and then descending on a more detailed aspect;

● “Down-sequence “: starting from the detailed aspects and then arriving at the global evaluation.

In some cases (when, for example, customers should express a global assessment without being influenced by subsequent questions), it is preferable to adopt the top-down sequence. In contrast, in others, it is more efficient to use a down-top option.

During the preparation phase of the customer satisfaction questionnaire, great attention must also be paid to the choice of assessment scales to be used for the assessment, which must be expressed with quantitative parameters that can be measured and monitored over time. The scales, to be effective, must be complete and well-balanced.

Some people prefer to use stairs with equal steps to avoid the interviewee choosing the central step without expressing a clear positive or negative judgment. Instead, some often adopt the odd scales because even the central answers can be rich in meaning.

I made the questionnaire as a trainee and would make some changes now. I provided great information to Mountain Community using the simple tourism questionnaire (you can download it).

SORRY THE POST IS CURRENTLY WORK IN PROGRESS

Here is an example of the questions I used to check the topic:

• target audience – demographic information
• questions about the destination (down)
• questions about general behaviour (top)
• open and closed questions about the local destination (down)

Please only let me know if you use it for some research. This is easy email me at sustainabletourismworld @ gmail.com. 

  Sara – tourism sector consultant

PS. Do you want to GROW your business with POSITIVE impact… without huge investments? Then, sign up for the email list by clicking on START HERE !

Or click this link https://www.sustainabletourismworld.com/start-here/   to download my INFOGRAPHIC!

2 Responses

Hello. Dear Sustainable Tourism world Team. First of all i`m really appreciated to hear about your organization. I`m Mongolian. But I`m writing all of you from Northern Cyprus where i come almost 3 months ago for Tourism & Hotel management in PhD program to research and develope GLOBAL GREEN BUSINESS CITIZENSHIP: An innovative Model of Social Responsibility and Ethical Behavior for Sustainable Tourism Development the 21st Century: SUSTAINABLE TOURISM INNOVATION ACADEMY for International green business developers and scholars… Because i saw lots of cases we need to develop new models for sustainable tourism development to save world and global citizen. So i would like to ask below questions. Please give me clear answers and directions. 1. Do you have any support for sustainable education program or projects who wants to create and develope a innovation model for sustainable tourism development ? If yes, what kind of support for which categories? How i can apply it? 2. Could you give me detailed information what kind supportive programs do you have for sustainable tourism developer or green business entrepreneur and PhD student who wants to develop and create GLOBAL GREEN BUSINESS CITIZENSHIP NETWORKING in Mongolia & Northern Cyprus: An innovative Model of Social Responsibility and Ethical Behavior for Sustainable Tourism Development the 21st Century in Mongolia & Northern Cyprus: SUSTAINABLE TOURISM INNOVATION PROGRAM for International green business developers and creator who can save world and serve good tourism products for global citizens and global travelers ?! 3. I would like to be professional adviser and developer of Sustainable Tourism. I would like to be part of SUSTAINABLE TOURISM INNOVATION networking for International green business developers and scholars too.

Hope your team will support me and will send me detailed informations.

Have a nice day and Merry Christmas.

Hello Oyuka! Thanks a lot for your comment! I emailed you time ago, did you receive the email? Kind Regards, Sara

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• Published: 23 September 2021

A database of travel-related behaviors and attitudes before, during, and after COVID-19 in the United States

• Rishabh Singh Chauhan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7188-557X 1 ,
• Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1210-2982 2 ,
• Denise Capasso da Silva   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1414-8439 3 ,
• Deborah Salon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2240-8408 2 ,
• Ali Shamshiripour 1 ,
• Ehsan Rahimi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8649-7542 1 ,
• Sara Khoeini 3 ,
• Abolfazl (Kouros) Mohammadian   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3595-3664 1 ,
• Sybil Derrible   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2939-6016 1 &
• Ram Pendyala 3  

Scientific Data volume  8 , Article number:  245 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted billions of people around the world. To capture some of these impacts in the United States, we are conducting a nationwide longitudinal survey collecting information about activity and travel-related behaviors and attitudes before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey questions cover a wide range of topics including commuting, daily travel, air travel, working from home, online learning, shopping, and risk perception, along with attitudinal, socioeconomic, and demographic information. The survey is deployed over multiple waves to the same respondents to monitor how behaviors and attitudes evolve over time. Version 1.0 of the survey contains 8,723 responses that are publicly available. This article details the methodology adopted for the collection, cleaning, and processing of the data. In addition, the data are weighted to be representative of national and regional demographics. This survey dataset can aid researchers, policymakers, businesses, and government agencies in understanding both the extent of behavioral shifts and the likelihood that changes in behaviors will persist after COVID-19.

Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15141945

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Background & Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world, infecting tens of millions and killing over one million people 1 . By March 2021, the United States (U.S.) had recorded the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 related deaths in the world 1 . Since social distancing is one of the most effective measures in containing the spread of the infection 2 , several U.S. states issued various restrictions including stay at home orders. Moreover, numerous restaurants and bars closed for dine-in services, various recreation facilities were shut down, many offices and schools switched from meeting in-person to meeting online, and travel restrictions were imposed. These measures had a profound impact on how people in the U.S. went about their daily lives.

To understand the current and future impacts of the pandemic, we conducted a nationwide online survey. The goal of the survey is to capture attitudes and shifts in travel-related choices of people across the nation both during the pandemic and once COVID-19 is no longer a threat. The data are shared publicly in order to help government agencies and businesses prepare for the future. We are conducting additional survey waves with the same respondents to monitor how people’s choices evolve over the course of the pandemic and beyond.

An early version of the survey took place from April to June 2020, when the stay at home orders were in place in most parts of the country 3 , 4 ; this portion of the data collection is referenced as Wave 1 A . A slightly-modified larger-scale survey, Wave 1B ,was deployed between late June and October 2020. Subsequent survey waves are being conducted as the situation evolves. The collected data are released as they become available and necessary procedures for cleaning, documenting, and weighting the data are completed. This procedures for data processing are detailed in this paper. The present article focuses on data from the first wave of the survey.

In the months following the beginning of the spread of COVID-19, several efforts have been made to collect data related to COVID-19. In fact, many datasets have been compiled, specifically on COVID-19 testing 5 , medical imaging of COVID-19 cases 6 , the timeline of government interventions 7 , policy announcements 8 , implementation and relaxation of public health and social measures 9 , epidemiological data 10 , mobility-related data 11 , and out-of-home activity information 12 , to name a few. Researchers also turned to social media platforms, like Twitter and Instagram, to gather COVID-19-related data 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 . Furthermore, several surveys have been conducted to measure the impacts of the pandemic 17 , 18 , 19 , some of which are now released for public use 20 , 21 .

Our survey data are different from most others in several ways. First, it is comprehensive insofar as it includes data about a wide range of topics including commuting, daily travel, air travel, working from home, online learning, shopping, attitudes, risk perception, and socioeconomic and demographic details. Second, it captures detailed information about behaviors before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the choices that people expect to make when the COVID-19 virus is no longer a threat. Third, it was collected from respondents across the U.S., covering diverse socio-economic backgrounds, professions, education levels, and ages. Fourth, the survey is a true longitudinal panel survey, collecting data in multiple waves from the same individuals at regular intervals. Finally, the data are made publicly available to promote data-driven analysis and research.

The next section describes the data collection methodology, the questions included in the survey, the survey deployment process, and the participant recruitment strategy. Next, the data records section describes the data file types and metadata. Subsequently, the technical validation section explains the procedure for the survey data cleaning and weighting. Lastly, the final section provides additional notes for data users.

Ethical compliance

Our study protocol was approved by both Arizona State University (ASU) and University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Institutional Review Board offices. Participants were informed that their participation is voluntary, and that their responses are shared anonymously. An online informed consent was obtained from everyone who responded to the survey.

Survey questions

The data were collected through an extensive online survey with over 120 questions. The survey questions can be broadly divided into three categories: (1) retrospective questions focusing on the period before COVID-19, (2) questions about the period during COVID-19, and (3) prospective questions on respondent expectations for a future period in which COVID-19 is no longer a threat. The questions cover a wide variety of subjects including commuting habits, discretionary travel choices, work-related questions, study-related questions, shopping, dining, and so on – all before, during, and expected after the pandemic.

The survey questions can be classified into eight categories based on question subject type, namely: demographics, work, study, shopping and dining, transportation, and general attitudes. Table  1 describes each of these categories.

Survey recruitment

From April to mid-June 2020, initial Wave 1A responses were collected from a convenience sample via mailing lists, social media outreach, and mainstream media articles. A total of 1,110 responses were collected during this phase.

From late June onward, Wave 1B, the modified version of the survey, was deployed through survey invitations sent to a random email list purchased from a data marketing company. The list contained 350,000 email addresses belonging to people in 24 metropolitan areas across the U.S., as well as the state of Ohio (see Fig.  1 ). We purchased 100,000 additional email addresses of people randomly selected from across the country, including rural areas and excluding the areas covered by the first 350,000 emails. A total of 1,116 responses were received from the email list. Unfortunately, major email service providers quickly began marking our survey invitations as spam, while some smaller providers did not. While we took several steps to mitigate this issue, including changing the wording of the emails, changing the source of the emails (a uic.edu, asu.edu, or covidfuture.org email address), we were ultimately not able to fully solve this problem and saw a lower response rate from individuals with addresses from major email providers.

Distribution of survey respondents by the state of residence for survey dataset version 1.0. Alaska and Hawai’i are in the same weighting division as California, Oregon, and Washington.

Survey invitation emails were also sent to an additional list of approximately 39,000 email addresses from the Phoenix metropolitan area purchased for a previous survey effort 22 . This list yielded 782 responses. The survey invitation emails were sent using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and through the Qualtrics platform. Every 20 th respondent who was invited through the purchased email addresses received a $10 incentive as a gift card. Respondents also had the option to donate their survey incentive to a charity. Invitees received two reminders as part of efforts to maximize response rates.

An additional 5,250 responses to the Wave 1B survey were collected through a Qualtrics Online Panel. Qualtrics recruits these respondents from a variety of panels maintained by other firms and uses quota sampling to recruit respondents that are demographically representative of the nation. The Qualtrics quotas were set to collect information from 20 U.S. metropolitan areas, mostly consistent with the metropolitan areas sampled from the purchased email list, as well as the states of Ohio, Utah, North Carolina, upstate New York, and rural areas. In order to obtain samples that would represent the population in each of the selected geographies, quotas were imposed in the Qualtrics online panel subsample to guarantee representation based on income, age, race and ethnicity, and education. We requested all respondents to provide their email addresses in order to recontact them for subsequent survey waves. Since the Qualtrics respondents are professional survey takers, we designated most questions as mandatory, and we included attention check questions, which are shown to improve response quality 23 .

The distribution of responses by geography, as well as the targeted metropolitan areas, are shown in Fig.  1 . Figure  2 shows the distribution of responses by recruitment method, available in the “org” variable in the dataset. The geographical targets were chosen based on geographic and metropolitan area size diversity, as well as the state of the virus spread in May 2020.

Distribution of Record by Source (from the survey dataset version 1.0).

Figure  1 shows the distribution of survey respondents across the U.S. (50 states and the District of Columbia). Following our recruitment strategy, a greater number of responses come from larger and more urban states. Arizona is overrepresented due to the oversample of Arizona respondents in the email-based deployment. The respondents from the initial Wave 1A sample are also more likely to hail from Arizona as the Arizona State University survey team’s network is heavily Arizona-based. When the data are weighted, any geographic discrepancies at the census division level are controlled and overrepresentation of Arizona is controlled/corrected separately.

Additional survey waves

To monitor how people’s attitudes and behaviors evolve, survey respondents are contacted again with at least two shorter follow-up surveys, approximately four months apart in spring and fall 2021.

Data Records

The survey dataset 24 can be accessed from the ASU Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.48349/ASU/QO7BTC . The dataset is available in CSV (comma-separated value) format. Since the data will be updated periodically, the data are versioned—in this article, results from the survey dataset version 1.0 are reported. The dataverse also contains the database codebook containing the metadata and explaining the variables. The codebook contains a changelog for each new version.

The respondents to Waves 1A and 1B received similar but not identical surveys. We have merged the responses to these two versions of the survey into the final dataset wherever possible. For some variables, the questions were identical, whereas for other variables, harmonization of similar responses was required. In the dataset, variables ending in ‘_harm’ are harmonized between the two datasets, variables ending in ‘_w1a’ are available only for Wave 1A respondents, variables ending in ‘_w1b’ are available only for respondents from our Qualtrics Online Panel, purchased email lists, and anyone who found the survey via the COVIDFuture web site or email lists after June 19, 2020 (start date of Wave 1B). Variables with no suffix were asked the same way between the two surveys, and no harmonization was necessary. We also provide a file containing only Wave 1B responses and variables, which simplifies analysis of the Wave 1B data.

Technical Validation

Data cleaning.

To monitor respondents’ attention to survey questions in the Qualtrics online panel, attention check questions were included. Respondents were allowed to miss one attention check and be given an opportunity to answer that section again. If they missed an attention check twice, or both attention checks once, their survey was terminated.

We additionally undertook several quality checks to help ensure that the collected data were valid. We removed any respondents who reported that they shop for groceries both in-store and online every day, or expect to after the pandemic, as these are likely to be invalid responses. We also removed respondents who reported strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with all COVID-related attitudes, as some of these were worded positively and some negatively. Several additional quality checks were undertaken in the Qualtrics Online Panel as part of Qualtrics’ data cleaning process, including a check for people finishing the survey too quickly.

Respondents that did not report a state of residence, reported living outside the 50 states and the District of Columbia, or did not provide answers to all of the control variables used in the data weighting process described in the next section were removed from the data. Due to this restriction, 558 records with missing control variable information, 59 records with missing home location, and one response from Puerto Rico were not included in the final dataset encompassing responses received through October 14, 2020. Further steps in data preparation will include imputation of missing data, which will allow for some of these omitted records to be recovered in the next version of the dataset. Among the respondents who were not included in the dataset due to missing control variable information, there are 34 respondents who declared their gender as Other; these respondents could not be included because the Census offers no control marginals to weight these records. Further data weighting procedures will attempt to incorporate non-binary gendered individuals on the dataset. Due to the data cleaning and filtering process applied to responses obtained through October 14, 2020, a total of 618 records were not included in the published dataset.

Data weighting

Because the raw data are not fully representative of the U.S. population, weights were calculated using the following control variables: age, education, gender, Hispanic status, household income, presence of children, and number of household vehicles. The weighting procedure accounts for the true population characteristics at the person level. Household-level variables (i.e., income, presence of children, and number of vehicles) were controlled at the person level as well. For example, the marginal distribution used for presence of children refers to the share of adults aged 18 years and older living in household with children, instead of the share of households that have children as it is usually represented. Those marginal distributions were computed using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample and the American Community Survey (ACS) 2018 1-year data 25 using the sample 18 and older in each of the weighting region boundaries. A noteworthy consequence of this approach is that adjusted household weights are necessary to evaluate household-level characteristics since individuals from larger households are more likely to be represented in the survey (given there are more individuals in these households), and thus have a higher probability of being selected. Weights for household-level analysis can be computed by dividing the person-level weight (provided in the data) by the number of adults in the household.

The national sample was divided into nine regions based on the reported home state (Table  2 ). Each region’s sample was then weighted to match the distributions observed in ACS 2018 1-year estimates 25 , meaning that the survey is demographically representative at the level of each region as well as the entire U.S. The unweighted and weighted survey results are shown in Table  3 ; the weighted results closely replicate population distributions, with inevitable minor deviations on variables that were not controlled in the weighting process.

Weights were calculated using iterative proportional fitting (IPF) procedures embedded within the synthetic population generator PopGen2.0 26 , 27 , 28 . Univariate marginal control distributions were derived from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, American Community Survey (ACS) 2018 1-year data 25 .

Usage Notes

Since the survey will be followed by at least two follow-up survey waves, the database will be updated periodically after the data for each wave is collected, cleaned, and weighted. Each version of the data will be uploaded to the ASU Dataverse and assigned a new DOI number, and all previous versions will remain available to promote reproducibility.

The weights were developed to produce a sample that is representative of the U.S. population, as well as representative of nine divisions within the U.S.: eight census regions (with East and West South Central combined due to small samples in these regions), and a separate category for Arizona due to its large number of respondents. The weights are not guaranteed to produce a representative sample for other (smaller) geographies. When evaluating subsamples at a finer geography (e.g., state or metropolitan area), data users should compare marginal distributions of key demographic variables with the census, and re-weight the data if needed to be representative of the area being analyzed.

Some questions differ between Waves 1A and 1B. Therefore, we have weighted the dataset twice: once including all respondents (Waves 1A and 1B), and once excluding respondents to the Wave 1A sample. Data users should use the Wave 1B weights whenever using variables that are not present in the convenience sample. Since Wave 1A data deviates significantly in terms of population representativeness 4 , there are no weights for questions asked only of Wave 1A respondents. In the file with only Wave 1B responses, only Wave 1B weights are presented.

This unique dataset provides insights on attitudes and behaviors not just before and during pandemic, but also on what might be expected after the pandemic. Possible use cases include modeling of during-pandemic and longer-term changes in mode use, air travel, transit ridership, work from home, and traffic congestion (especially for peak period traffic planning). Published uses of this dataset are documented in Capasso da Silva et al . 29 , Chauhan et al . 30 , Mirtich et al . 31 , and Salon et al . 32 .

Code availability

No codes were developed for this research.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID program under grants no. 2030156 and 2029962 and by the Center for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET), a University Transportation Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation through grant no. 69A3551747116, as well as by the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University. This COVID-19 Working Group effort was also supported by the NSF-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338) and the NSF CAREER award under grant no. 155173. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

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Rishabh Singh Chauhan, Ali Shamshiripour, Ehsan Rahimi, Abolfazl (Kouros) Mohammadian & Sybil Derrible

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R.P., A.M., S.D., D.S. and S.K. planned the project. D.S., M.C., D.C.S., R.C., E.R. and A.M. prepared the survey questions. M.C., D.C.S. and D.S. designed the survey flow logic. R.C., D.C.S., M.C., D.S. and S.D. deployed the survey. M.C. and D.C.S. performed data cleaning and survey data analysis. D.C.S. weighted the dataset. M.C. and D.S. worked on sending out the incentives to the selected respondents. R.C. prepared the first draft. All the authors made significant contributions to manuscript editing and approving the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rishabh Singh Chauhan .

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Chauhan, R.S., Bhagat-Conway, M.W., Capasso da Silva, D. et al. A database of travel-related behaviors and attitudes before, during, and after COVID-19 in the United States. Sci Data 8 , 245 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-01020-8

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