What can Tour Providers Learn About Travelers by Using Google Trends

Keeping an eye on travel search trends is key for any tour company wanting to make the most of travel rebound.

Understanding travel behavior and the traveler needs in a post-pandemic world is one of the challenges for the next years in the tourism industry.

Luckily, since the world has moved online, those travelers produce tons of useful data that tour operators can use to plan their business and guide their marketing efforts.

In 2020, every person generated 1.7 megabytes in just a second. (Source: IBM)

Valuable information can be scavenged out of this data. However, for that, you need specific tools. Some are paid, but others are free to use like Google Trends.

Learn more about this tool and how you can use it to discover travel search trends in this article.

What is Google Trends?

How do people search for your brand? What about others, your competitors? What are the terms they most search for?

Google Trends is a free web application based on Google search results. It uses real-time search data from Google users and makes it available for anyone to consult.

Google gets over 3.5 billion searches daily. (Source: Internet Live Stats)

This is the perfect tool to gauge consumer search behavior over time. In other words, use it to discover travel search trends.

With Google Trends, you can find out how often a particular term is searched for, and where it is most popular.

It has an intuitive interface. Data is displayed through graphs and maps, which makes it easier to interpret.

Hardly you will find another free tool that is as powerful as Google Trends in terms of search data analysis.

How does studying travel search trends could help tour operators?

We live in the big data era, and that’s great for your business!

Customer behavior is a complex matter. Getting inside the mind of someone planning a trip in order to understand their taste, desires and interests is something an average tour operator could just dream of a few years ago.

Nowadays, we can rely on the data generated by thousands of travelers searching online to predict what they want. Thus, operators can be one step forward in fulfilling their needs.

That is amazing, isn’t it?

Studying travel search trends will help you with:

• Product development: Understand what your ideal customer is looking for and create experiences that atend their needs.
• Market reasearch: Detect the latest trends in specific markets in a selected period of time, use this knowledge to change your target market if necessary.
• Marketing campaigns: Focus your paid campaigns on Google and Facebook on the right audience and region.
• Content marketing: Create pieces of content that answer questions your audience have and share it on social media.

The bottom line is, understand your customers to reduce costs and get more bookings.

Now that you know more about Google Trends, it’s time to incorporate it into your routine. To help you with this, we have prepared a case study based on a safari operator.

Tracking travel search trends in practice

Let’s say you are a tour operator from Kenya and you provide safari tours.

You determined that most of your profitable customers come from the USA and Western Europe. And now you want to explore the interest of Germans in safari tours.

By using Google Trends, you can find out what terms Germans google when they search for safaris. Also, the volume of searches over time and the geographical location inside Germany where people are searching for them.

Let’s see how it works.

Getting ready to search

Exploring travel search trends is all about choosing the right keyword. For our example, the term is “safari”.

To start exploring our target market, we will analyze how often the term “safari” is searched in Germany.

For that, we need to set a time period. For this example, the past 12 months. Now we need to choose the category and data source.

As our category, we’ve picked Specialty Travel, just to exclude a possible confusion with a popular web browser called Safari. And in the end, let’s set up our analysis for only Web Searches on our particular term.

Time analysis

Time is very important when you are analyzing travel search trends. People’s interests change over time depending on a series of factors.

For this query, we got some interesting results.

In the past 12 months, Germans have googled “safari” most in May. By analyzing the graph, we can see that the Germans’ interest in safaris is growing since the beginning of the year.

It’s quite possible that they are looking for opportunities to book a trip if they have a chance to. That is a hint that you should boost your marketing efforts at this time.

Location analysis

Travel search trends can also vary from region to region amongst the same population.

For our example, in addition to the time frame, we can see in which subregions of Germany people googled “safari” the most.

Bremen, Berlin and Hesse are the locations with the highest interest in our searching term.

Knowing target audience location is essential to focus your marketing campaigns. With this information you can create high-converting campaigns on Google Ads or Facebook Ads for example.

Other interests

People interested in “safari” have other similar interests. They are Lodging, Kenya and Tanzania.

The terms that were widely googled by people in Germany in our selected period was tansania safari and big five safari (lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo safari).

By selecting “Rising” on the dropdown menu at the top, we can see which search terms are growing in popularity.

That is extra food for your marketing campaigns.

Definitely, a safari operator targeting German tourists should tailor their offer to supply the demand for big five safaris.

You can repeat the search of this example by clicking here.

Conclusion

With the least effort, Google Trends gives you valuable free data that will bring you consistent results if used properly.

From an effective marketing plan to better business decisions, the benefits are many.

If you want to dive deeper into digital marketing and learn how to turn travel search trends into effective marketing campaigns, check out our eBook “Comprehensive Guide to Online Marketing in Tourism”.

You can download it for free by clicking here.

Originally published at https://www.orioly.com on February 24, 2017.