The Pleasure of Looking Forward

On anticipation, and the journey that begins long before departure.

There is something rather wonderful about having a journey to look forward to. It begins long before the suitcase comes down from the closet, sometimes months before the first reservation is made. It is the quiet realization, arriving on an ordinary weekday, that you finally have the time to go somewhere you have been thinking about for years.

From that moment, the place begins to occupy a small corner of your everyday life. You find yourself reading about its history late at night and lingering over photographs of streets you have never walked, wondering what it would be like to sit at a café table there in the early morning while the town wakes and begins its day. Nothing has happened yet, and already the trip has started to belong to you.

There is a particular pleasure in imagining something that has yet to happen, especially when it promises to carry you somewhere beyond the routines and rooms of ordinary life.

The journey before the journey

Anticipation is a curious mixture of imagination and expectation. We picture ourselves in places we may know only through books or films, and we imagine the meals we might eat there and the conversations we might fall into with people we have not yet met.

We also begin, almost without noticing, to make choices. We wonder where we might stay and how much time we will need, and which parts of the place we most want to meet once we arrive. Before anything has been booked, an idea of the journey has already started to take shape.

The place we eventually encounter will be different from the one we imagined. A town keeps its own hours and its own weather, the restaurant we pictured may be closed for the season, and the street we meant to wander may be crowded with a festival nobody thought to mention. Often it is a moment we never planned that becomes the one we carry home.

That is part of what makes travel interesting. Anticipation gives us something to look forward to, while the experience itself belongs to the place and to the people who live there, whose days were carrying on long before we arrived and will carry on long after we leave.

Still, I think there is something to be said for giving a journey some thought before we go. Reading a little about a town’s history helps. So does working with a travel designer, someone who knows a place, its customs and pace. And how you might come to feel you belong there, if only for a while. Given this kind of attention, the weeks of looking forward become the first part of being there.

Before a guest arrives

For much of my career, I thought of hospitality as something that began when a guest walked through the door. A warm welcome and genuine attention to someone’s comfort were essential to doing the work well, and I still hold to that.

When I returned to school to study design thinking, my attention moved earlier. I became interested in the guest before she had ever decided to come to us, in the expectations she might be forming as she made her way toward us, and in the way each small encounter, however brief, would shape what she eventually remembered.

I began to see each moment of service as connected to the ones around it, every exchange shaped by what had come before.

I carried that way of thinking into travel design, where the connection became clearer still. While a traveler is imagining a journey and beginning to form expectations, the person designing it has the chance to connect, to learn what she hopes to meet when she arrives and what she would like to bring home with her.

What we cannot anticipate

For all the pleasure anticipation brings, I suspect the most interesting part of travel is often the part we could not have imagined beforehand.

We may arrive with a firm idea of a place and find something else entirely. Imagine a morning with nothing planned, the shops along the main street opening their shutters in the first light, and a woman sweeping the step outside her door who stops to tell you, in a language you only partly understand, that where the old road used to run is where you will find the best market. It is a small thing, and it may be the part of the trip you describe first when you come home.

Moments like this are difficult to write into an itinerary because they have not happened yet. We cannot promise them, and trying too hard to arrange them would probably take away whatever made them worth having. What we can do is prepare with care and remain willing to be surprised.

Looking back on what design thinking taught me, I have come to believe the experience of travel begins in two places at once. For the traveler, it begins with curiosity and the pleasure of looking forward. For those who design and welcome that experience, it begins with listening, and with careful attention to the person who will eventually arrive.

Neither can account for everything that will happen. Nor should it.

Perhaps that is what anticipation gives us most generously, the chance to begin a journey before we know where its most memorable moments will be found. We can arrange things with care and learn something of where we are going, and still leave room for the place itself to have something to say.

Cynthia Baxter

Travel Experience Designer

ANLY

Virtuoso Certified Travel Advisor

ASTA Verified