Travel and hospitality marketing has faced an array of challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. From nationwide lockdowns to staff shortages and uncertainty, marketers within this sector are learning how to survive and thrive in a post-pandemic world.
We’ve worked hard alongside our travel and hospitality clients throughout the pandemic to generate awareness and bookings, even becoming finalists in multiple awards. But, like many marketers, we’ve had to forgo the usual insights that historical data provides and instead utilise our industry expertise to navigate the current environment.
You can imagine the excitement in the office, then, when Google decided to help the travel industry recover. Their new “Travel Insights with Google” platform launched in summer 2021 in partnership with Destinations International and Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International.
About ‘Travel Insights with Google’
‘Travel Insights with Google’ offers two free-to-use tools that can predict travel demand based on real-time search data:
These tools are designed to support the travel and tourism industry by offering users powerful insights into travel demand fluctuations. The insights garnered from these tools (especially in combination with other tools like Analytics) can help refine sales and marketing efforts by aligning activity to demand and identifying opportunities.
Gianni Marostica, Managing Director of Global Business Development for Google Travel, recently explained to Forbes the reasoning behind introducing these new tools. He stated, “It’s really difficult to find any anchor of data to forecast the future, and so we felt it was a good time right now to share some of our search data with the industry to help travel companies understand what users are looking for. And here’s the kind of queries they’re doing, and here’s the data and information they’re interested in.”
Destination Insights: An Overview
The Destination Insights tool provides information on the travel demand for your selected location based on real-time and historical search data. In addition, the tool contains search filters allowing its users to review the level of demand and compare it year on year for both domestic and international travel.
Destination Insights offers more than just top-level search results. The tool provides deeper insights through features such as ‘Geographic Demand’ and ‘Demand Growth’. This allows you to discover demand and growth results by destination area, country and city.
This tool also gives you plenty of information on ‘Demand Origin’ from international countries. We imagine this will play an ever-important role in identifying opportunities as the travel industry continues to recover and air travel improves.
Hotel Insights: An Overview
Hotel Insights focuses solely on accommodation and room nights, offering valuable data for large and small hotels, including independent hotels.
The tool uses data from real-time hotel searches for a specified location, identifying the origin of the searchers and allowing hoteliers and marketers to pinpoint areas with high search demand for accommodation.
Similar to the Destination Insights, the Hotel Insights data can be viewed for domestic and international travel. Domestic travel compares searches for room nights over the last 12 weeks to year-on-year trends. International travel data provides information on which countries show an interest in accommodation in your chosen area.
‘Travel Insights with Google’ and Marketing
We believe that in today’s ever-changing environment, marketing professionals need to utilise all tools available to help drive sales revenue and encourage recovery. Insights and trends are going to be vital to the travel and hospitality industry to better inform decisions and understand how consumers are thinking about travel in a post-pandemic world.
As a creative marketing agency with many clients in the travel and tourism sector, we understand first-hand the challenges facing the industry. We, therefore, pride ourselves on keeping up-to-date with all the latest digital developments within the sector.
‘Travel Insights with Google’ is a welcome new tool in our research, as the search volume data can help give an accurate assessment of travel demand in an era when we can’t rely on last year’s trends. This information can help us manage our budgets and paid spend more efficiently, helping us employ a targeted approach and dedicate resources to areas with high demand.
Insights and strategy play a big part in our approach to all our creative marketing activities here at Punch – and the more data we can get our hands on the better! Check out our portfolio here.