HOTELMARKETING.COM

Google UK travel whitepaper tries to understand behaviour of British tourists

November 04, 2011 | Online Travel

Using Google’s internal query data, Google's Q3 travel whitepaper compiles the top searched destinations per product, and where possible, the trends in light of other research and publications available.

Looking at the trends in the top ten foreign destinations, we can see that Paris remains the fifth most searched destination in the Hotel category for UK users and has seen a 14% YoY query increase. Amsterdam is the second most popular foreign destination, ranked 7th overall and has seen 18% YoY query volume growth. The “Hotel Rate Parity Trends Study 2011”, identified Amsterdam as the city with the lowest parity in Hotel prices when comparing offers on a Hotel brand’s website and an online aggregator. According to the research, for 80% of bookings it is cheaper to book an Amsterdam Hotel via an online aggregator than via the Hotel brand directly.

The decline in New York queries is surprising as Air Travel related queries for New York have seen 70% growth YoY. It seems that while users are searching for New York flights, the same cannot be said for Hotel queries.4 The strong query growth in Dublin is a likely result of the online and offline efforts of Fáilte Ireland, an organization to promote tourism in Ireland. Even though Dublin’s overall query share has remained roughly the same, it could retain its position within the competitive environment of short-haul destinations.

Las Vegas has seen very healthy growth, which would be expected given the growth it has experienced in terms of Air Travel queries, again discussed later on. Las Vegas is ranked 19th on both the Hotel and Air Travel Destination Analyses, and has seen double digit growth in both areas, although a slight decline in rank in Hotels. Although not listed here, Sharm el Sheikh has dropped by over 50 places to 103rd in our rankings. We can attribute this to the political unrest in Egypt earlier this year. Although the drop in hotel queries is quite dramatic (-45% YoY), this is not quite as severe across other areas such as flights and holidays, which are covered in the next section.

Get the full whitepaper at Google

Visit our sponsors: