Destination marketers: Your new favorite Google site has arrived. Think with Google, the search behemoth’s marketing research team, recently unveiled Google Travel Dashboard. The dashboard is a free online tool that drills down deep into data relating to travel around the United States. The data relates specifically to air travel, hotel bookings and car rentals.
The data, which will be updated every quarter, is meant to reveal trends among U.S. travelers. Want to know which destinations people from Orlando (or 24 other U.S. cities) fly to most often? New York City, turns out.
Maybe even more interesting to CVBs is data on where people are coming from. For example, the dashboard shows that people booking hotels in Atlanta came primarily from NYC, Nashville, Chicago, Birmingham and Charlotte. Data also include year-over-year change for each destination (each section includes some different cities). There’s no specific data on how travelers booked their stays.
Trends in search volume are also big topics on Google Travel Dashboard. Search trends cover queries related to air travel, hotels, car rentals, cruises and vacation rentals. Notes on the graphs show peak times for queries related to travel seasons (summer, Spring Break, etc.) and events, such as how air travel searches spiked after the disappearance of the Malaysian Air flight 370.
The new tool has you covered on overall most popular city-to-city itineraries as well, with Los Angeles to Las Vegas topping the chart, followed by NYC to Chicago, NYC to Miami, LA to NYC and NYC to LA.
Digging deeper, charts reveal insights on brand searches. Marriott, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Holiday Inn and Best Western topped hotel searches, and Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, Allegiant and United were the most-searched airlines.
For mobile marketing needs, Google Travel Dashboard also tracks the most common types of searches performed on mobile devices. Hotel searches made up half of mobile queries, followed by tours and attractions, air travel, car rental and cruises.
Other data provided include top travel-related Google searches (led by “When is the best time to book a flight?”), latest travel news and top travel videos.
The data presented doesn’t give hard numbers, but rather rates the top finding in each group at 100 and all others lower, relative to the leader.
