What Travel Marketers Should Know About People Searching for Experiences

Excerpt from Think with Google
It’s good to be in the travel experience business these days. While the tours and activities market has lagged behind airline and hotel bookings in the digital realm, it’s starting to catch up. In fact, it’s growing faster than the total travel market, according to travel-market research company Phocuswright. Phocuswright has predicted that by next year, the overall tours and activities segment will grow to $183 billion.

That presents a clear opportunity not only for tour and activity operators, but for a number of businesses operating in the travel space. We recently dug into this growing market by partnering with Greenberg, Inc. to better understand traveler behavior across the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany.

How travelers search

Compared to other travel industry segments, the experiences space is still a fragmented market. While travelers generally know what to expect when purchasing an airplane seat or hotel room, tour and activity companies run the gamut from mom-and-pop operations with bare-bones websites to well-known brands that make booking easy.

As is often the case when people want to feel confident about their purchases, they turn to search.

Greenberg research shows that in the 12 weeks leading up to a trip, there are 3X more experiences searches than hotel searches and 8X more experiences searches than air searches.1 And while hotel, air, and car bookings peak six weeks prior to a trip, Greenberg found that experience searches remain stable in volume throughout the 12 weeks leading up to a trip.

Whatever they’re searching for, each one of these moments is an opportunity to engage with travelers. Even if you are selling a room reservation, find opportunities to highlight the experiences that people are seeking out rather than simply the hotel room or flight prices, much like Booking.com has done with its latest campaign.

We also see travelers increasingly turning to videos to research what they’re going to get before they purchase. Savvy brands like Expedia are regularly uploading robust video content — like this video dedicated to Yellowstone National Park — on its YouTube channel for this audience to engage with.



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