How perceptual mapping reveals what travelers really think you stand for
Some DMOs know how travelers rate them. Fewer know where they sit in travelers’ minds relative to the competition — or what’s putting them there.
A question worth thinking about: do travelers actually see your destination as different from the places you compete against?
Not better. Not worse. Different.
Many destination organizations can answer a narrower question. You likely know how travelers rate you on food, or outdoors, or family appeal. That tells you about level, not position — and position is what decides whether a traveler weighing four cities has any reason to pick yours.
That’s what perceptual mapping is for. We recently ran one for Minneapolis against eight competing destinations, built with Future Partners AI working across our The State of the American Traveler data. This presents a good illustration of what this analysis tells a leadership team, and how quickly it can now be produced.
What a perceptual map shows you:
Think of it as a seating chart for your category, drawn by travelers rather than by your marketing team.
- Destinations sitting close together are perceived similarly, competing for the same trips, for the same reasons.
- Destinations far from the center have distinctive identities, and the attributes around them show what’s pulling them there.
- A destination near the center is perceived roughly like the category average.
Minneapolis stands in the middle of the room. Denver sits far left, essentially alone, anchored by scenic beauty — 67.4% of travelers rate it good or excellent there, against 33.5% for Minneapolis. Chicago sits far right, owning the big-city bundle: museums (46.4%), food (56.2%), culture, energy. Both mean something specific.
Minneapolis sits near the center, with Louisville almost on top of it.
Being near the center isn’t automatically bad. The sharper question is: does your destination have a distinctive enough idea attached to it to give you an advantage when a traveler is choosing? On this evidence, Minneapolis doesn’t yet. It reads as competent and pleasant rather than as about something.
For a CEO, that reframes the brief: this isn’t a problem of being poorly rated, but of being insufficiently specific.
Where the credit isn’t going:
For absolute strength, look at how Minneapolis scores against the eight-destination average.
Scenic beauty is the one genuinely significant strength, at +4.3 points. Everything else on the positive side — shopping, safety, family appeal — sits within the margin of error: directionally nice, not yet a defensible claim.
The deficits are larger and more numerous: historically interesting −7.2, excitement −6.2, weather −5.9, food and cuisine −5.8, easy to get to −5.5, social-media worthy −5.0, museums −4.9.
A pattern appears. Minneapolis under-indexes almost entirely on the aspirational attributes — the reasons people get excited about a trip — while holding its own on the practical ones. That’s the signature of a destination travelers think is fine to be in rather than compelling to go to.
And here’s the finding any marketer should care about: museums −4.9 and history −7.2 in a city with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker, the Guthrie Theater and Mill City. The assets are real; the perception isn’t following them. A product gap takes investment and years. A perception gap takes better storytelling — which makes it the most correctable item on the list.
Finally, the barriers — what travelers who’ve ruled a destination out say when asked why.
Weather dominates, running 13.4 points above the competitive-set average and cited by roughly one in four travelers who rule Minneapolis out. No campaign argues that away; the move is reframing the calendar rather than defending the climate.
Politics is elevated too, at +7.8 points — worth naming honestly, because it belongs in a communications plan rather than a media plan.
But look at the blue bar. Only 5.3% of travelers who rule Minneapolis out say it’s too expensive — against 19.6% for Denver and 19.3% for Chicago. Its two most aspirational competitors carry nearly four times the cost resistance.
That’s an asset hiding in plain sight: Minneapolis can credibly offer a substantial urban experience without the price penalty attached to the destinations travelers currently find more exciting. Value is rarely a glamorous position — but it is a differentiated one, and differentiation is exactly what this destination lacks.
What would I tell the CEO?
- You don’t have a distinctive position yet. Travelers see Minneapolis as close to the category average rather than strongly about anything — a strategy problem, not a media-weight problem.
- Scenic beauty is a real asset but not a brand. It’s the only defensible strength — and with Denver in the frame, “beautiful” isn’t a claim you win alone.
- Culture is the best available opportunity. World-class institutions aren’t translating into perception — a storytelling failure, which is a far better problem to have than a product failure.
- Weather and politics are the real resistance among those who’ve already said no. One needs reframing; the other needs reputation work.
- Value may be the most underused advantage on the board. Nobody in this set can match it, and nobody is currently claiming it.
Any DMO can now put these questions to research that already exists:
- What do we actually own in travelers’ minds?
- Which destinations are our closest perceptual competitors — and are they the ones we assume?
- Where are we meaningfully stronger or weaker than the set?
- Is our core issue awareness, product, or perception? The answer changes the budget.
- Which brand attributes deserve more marketing weight — and which are we over-investing in?
- What’s genuinely keeping travelers away, and where is the advantage nobody has noticed yet?
One example among many
Perceptual mapping is one analysis. Future Partners AI can bring the same speed to questions about origin markets, traveler segments, brand health, media behavior, barriers and international opportunity — drawing on SATS, SITS and our other proprietary research, curated industry data, and potentially your own studies.
This one began as an off-hand question from a destination marketer about how his city stacked up against its neighbors. Which is rather the point: the possibilities are limited mostly by the questions tourism leaders think to ask.
Method: correspondence analysis of traveler attribute ratings — used rather than classic multidimensional scaling because SATS+ rates destinations on attributes rather than comparing them in pairs, which is what makes each direction on the map nameable.
Source: Future Partners · The State of the American Traveler / SATS+ · U.S. travelers, 12 waves pooled May 2025 – April 2026 · Minneapolis compared against Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Louisville and Denver. Analysis generated with Future Partners AI.
Source: View the original article at Future Partners.