Using search listening to explore travellers’ favorite destinations
Every travel usually starts with a search on Google to prepare, plan and compare destinations before making any decisions.
Understanding what, how & when consumers seek online is more important than ever for every airline and travel agency.
Of course, not all searches result in trips, but it does provide you with essential and relevant information about appealing areas and developing travel trends – both of which are important to consider in order to secure future benefits.
Search listening is the process of aggregating online searches to reveal consumers’ expectations, fears and desires. When processed at scale, search data reveal reliable market trends and insights.
Here we analyzed with our Trajaan Search Listening Platform more than 1800+ search queries in German related to international destinations searched online by German travellers.
Using AI-based query clustering and analyzing automatically search trends in every German region, Trajaan is capable to detect …
- Where Germans want to travel the most, every month, in every Länder (region)
- What destinations are trending
- Which websites get the most business out of online search
Covid-19 has changed the game in the air travel industry
The travel industry is rapidly changing while influenced by many environmental factors (local economy, politics, climate, events…). In addition, the traveler’s demand depends on the season and weather.
So many variables involved that it is difficult for any professional to get a clear overview of what is going on.
Search interest for flying is higher in 2023 now than pre-Covid
As we all know, the Covid-19 crisis has kept every single plane on the ground for almost 2 years. Hopefully, for travel professionals, this epidemic travel ban has already caused great excitement for the reopening of airlines.
Demand for flights has bounced back strongly, reaching its highest level in Mars 2023 since May 2019.
Spain, remaining thought leader in German travellers wish list
With its convenient climate and beautiful landscapes, Spain is the top destination in German online interest (almost 30% of overall searches). Starring Mallorca as the most searched destination with more than 1,600,000 searches over the last 12 months.
Sevilla became big in Winter 2021, as it was one of the few Spanish cities to allow tourists despite the Covid-19 disease. Surprisingly, Sevilla gained interest from German travelers back in 2022.
Flying to Northern airports: the 2023 trend among German travellers.
Trending cities (comparing full 2023 vs. full 2022) are cities from Northern countries:
- Reykjavik (+1314%)
- Belfast (+67%)
- Edinburgh (+57%)
- Riga (+44%)
Local trends: Southern Ländern have different expectations
Searches are geo-targeted, which means they are a powerful source of insights to detect local specificities and especially local opportunities for your marketing strategy.
Not all German states air travel at the same intensity
City-based Länder tends to consider traveling much more than bigger Länder.
Depending on where you live in Germany, travel destinations strongly differ. While Spain remains the favorite country in all German Länder, preferences for second place are very local.
Take a look at search affinity i.e. search volume for 100k local population, to detect local trends.
- London is big for people living in Bayern (Bavaria)
- Wien is more trending for people in Nord Rhein-Westphalia
As a travel industry professional, you should adapt your campaigns to local trends to achieve maximal gain and conversions.
Rankings: top-20 German websites getting organic search traffic from air travel queries
We used our Trajaan Search Listening platform to estimate the organic search traffic driven to different travel companies’ websites. By derivating organic traffic from search volume & positions in search results for these websites URLs.
Here is the top-5:
- eurowings.com: airline
- fluege.de: aggregator
- skyscanner.de: aggregator
- lufthansa.com: airline
- flug.check24.de: aggregator
