Search trends in the travel and tourism industry | Need-to-know

Did you know that the most popular destinations and holiday types vary between countries, as well as over time?

In order to be successful and market your travel brand appropriately, you therefore need to understand the behaviours and preferences of your target audience.

We conducted a study examining the online search habits of travellers from five countries: the UK, the US, China, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

We looked at the following search terms: “package holidays”, “luxury holidays”, “cruise holidays”, “adventure holidays” and “city break” in the five target languages.

This video will look at just one of those keywords: “package holidays”.

First of all, let’s look at the UK results.

We found that the majority of the suggested search terms mentioned the words “cheap” or “last minute”.

British holidaymakers seemed to be mostly looking for package holiday deals and were very price-sensitive.

Most of the searches did not specify any destinations. In fact, in the top 200 searches, only eight search terms specified locations.

Looking at the search volume trends over time, we found a seasonal peak in searches every January.

Next, let’s examine the US results.

For this country, we looked at the localised keyword “all-inclusive vacations”.

We found that the majority of the search terms mentioned “cheap” and “affordable”.

We also found quite a lot of queries that focused on “airfare” being included in the price.

Destinations are mentioned more frequently than in the British data, with the Caribbean and Mexico being the most searched-for destinations for US travellers.

Like in the UK, we saw a seasonal peak in searches every January.

Now, let’s look at the results for China.

We used the Chinese search engine Baidu to conduct the keyword research for this country.

We found that the majority of the search terms were for specific attractions, combined with queries related to “tickets” for places to see in China or general tourist tickets for sale.

Local agency tours are very popular with Chinese travellers, which was shown in our research with the biggest number of queries being for “tours” rather than keywords around “package”.

Next, let’s take a look at Russia.

There are two major search engines in Russia – Yandex and Google – so we decided to conduct keyword research on both search engines.

On Google, we found that “tour” and “holidays” came up as very popular searches.

People seemed to search for locations, like Turkey, Egypt, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. The top locations were mostly based around deals that Russian tour operators have and visa-free countries.

There were also quite a few searches for domestic locations in Russia, as many people like to stay within their own country for ease of travel, language and costs.

On Yandex, we found many searches related to price, suggesting that Russian package holidaymakers are very price sensitive.

On both search engines, we found a seasonal peak in searches every July.

And finally, the United Arab Emirates.

The Arabic keyword for “package holidays” was not popular.

Instead, Emirati holidaymakers searched for terms related to flight bookings and specific airlines, looking for “cheapest flight” or “offers” that would show them the cheapest prices.

When it came to destinations, Dubai, Turkey and the Maldives were the top destinations.

There was a slight peak in searches in the summer months.

I hope this video has provided some valuable insights into the differing desires of package holidaymakers around the world.