Spinned, Booked, No Regrets: How 200 Travelers Let a Counting Rhyme Pick Their Next Vacation

Picture this: It's 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. You have 47 browser tabs open — Bali guesthouses, Airbnbs in Lisbon, a Reddit thread debating whether Nashville is "too touristy now" — and somehow, after three hours of research, you are more confused than when you started. You close your laptop. You eat cereal. You go to bed having booked absolutely nothing.

This is vacation-planning paralysis, and it is very, very real. So we decided to do something about it.

We recruited 200 Eenyakee readers, handed them our counting rhyme algorithm, and told them to submit their top three dream destinations. Then we let Eeny Meeny decide. Not a quiz. Not an algorithm trained on their Netflix history. A counting rhyme — the same chaotic selection method humanity has been using since before GPS existed. And then — here's the beautiful part — we made them actually commit to booking it.

The results? Glorious. Messy. Occasionally terrifying. And genuinely kind of life-changing.

First, the Destinations That Won (Buckle Up)

Let's talk about where our 200 participants are actually headed, because the spread is something else entirely.

The most common "winner" among submitted lists was New Orleans, which honestly makes sense — it's the kind of city that sounds fun in theory but somehow never makes the final cut when people get serious about planning. Eeny Meeny gave 31 participants permission to just go, and not a single one complained afterward.

Coming in hot at number two: Iceland. Eighteen people had Iceland on their list as what they called their "dream but probably not this year" option. Guess what? It's this year now. Several of them have already started panic-researching packing layers.

Other notable winners include Puerto Rico (a crowd favorite that kept getting bumped for "somewhere more exotic," which is honestly disrespectful to Puerto Rico), Montana (yes, the national park crowd is real and they are enthusiastic), Japan (post-pandemic bucket list energy is still very much alive), and — our personal favorite — a cruise to Alaska that one participant had listed almost sarcastically as a joke option. It won. She's going. She is cautiously thrilled.

The wildest outcome? A guy named Derek from Ohio submitted Costa Rica, Portugal, and Memphis. Eeny Meeny picked Memphis. He told us he laughed for a full minute, then booked a hotel near Beale Street. "I've lived three hours from Memphis my whole life and never gone," he said. "That rhyme called me out."

The Anxiety Was Real — Until It Wasn't

Before we unleashed the algorithm, we asked participants to rate their vacation-planning stress on a scale of one to ten. The average score was a staggering 7.8. People described the experience of choosing a destination as "weirdly high-stakes," "somehow more stressful than choosing a college," and one person simply wrote "I hate it here" in the comment box.

After the rhyme picked their destination, we asked them to rate their stress again.

Average post-selection score: 3.1.

That is not a typo. A counting rhyme — one that goes eeny meeny miny moe — cut vacation anxiety by more than half. The reason, according to participants, wasn't that they stopped caring. It's that the decision was done. There was no more optimizing to do. The choice had been made by something outside themselves, which meant they couldn't second-guess it without second-guessing the entire concept of chance, and most people aren't prepared to do that at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Jamila, a 28-year-old marketing coordinator from Atlanta, described it perfectly: "I had been 'planning' a trip for eight months. Eight months of saved Instagram posts and abandoned Expedia carts. The rhyme picked Savannah — which was literally four hours away — and I booked it in eleven minutes. I leave next weekend. I feel like a different person."

Why Our Brains Are Actually Bad at This

Here's the thing nobody tells you about vacation planning: having more options doesn't make the decision easier. It makes it worse. Psychologists call this the paradox of choice, and it hits nowhere harder than travel, where the entire planet is technically available to you and every option comes with a comment section full of conflicting opinions.

When everything is possible, nothing feels right. You end up chasing a perfect trip that exists only in the frictionless fantasy version of your brain — one where flights are cheap, the weather is flawless, and you somehow didn't have to make a single difficult decision to get there.

Eeny Meeny short-circuits that spiral. It doesn't tell you your chosen destination is the best. It just tells you it's yours, and that turns out to be enough. Participants described feeling a sudden sense of ownership over their picked destination — like the rhyme had given them a permission slip to be excited about it without guilt.

"I kept feeling like I was going to pick the wrong place," said Marcus, a 34-year-old teacher from Chicago who got Sedona. "Once it was picked for me, I just... started getting excited? Like, Sedona! I'm going to Sedona! It became an adventure instead of a test."

The People Who Almost Didn't Commit

We should be honest: not everyone was immediately on board with honoring the rhyme's decision. About 22 participants initially pushed back — not because they hated their selected destination, but because they couldn't shake the feeling they were "supposed to" choose differently.

We held firm. The rules were the rules.

Of those 22 reluctant participants, 19 ended up booking anyway. Two said they needed more time (we respect that). One person — we'll call her Karen, because her name is actually Karen and she gave us permission — submitted a formal written argument for why the rhyme should be re-run because she had "new information" about flight prices. We denied the appeal. She went to Portland. She sent us a photo of the best biscuits she'd ever eaten. She is now a believer.

What This Actually Proves

Look, we're not saying you should outsource every life decision to a nursery rhyme. (We're also not not saying that.) But what this experiment made genuinely clear is that for a lot of us, the planning isn't the point — the going is. And if a counting rhyme is what finally gets you out the door and into the world, then Eeny Meeny just did more for your travel life than eight months of saved Instagram posts ever could.

Derek's in Memphis right now. He texted us a photo of ribs. He looks like a man who has been set free.

Maybe it's your turn.

Want to try it yourself? Head to eenyakee.com and let the rhyme pick your next adventure. Destinations, weekend trips, random road trips — we don't discriminate. Neither does Eeny Meeny. That's kind of the whole point. 🎉