This new whitepaper from Google UK's Travel team focuses on the challenges and opportunities that travel advertisers in the UK may face during the coming months. It seeks to provide useful and relevant insights as the summer booking season approaches.

Some key insights from the paper:

Political unrest, less disposable income and the good weather slowed holiday bookings

• The British public faces lower disposable income than in previous years. Third party research anticipates a £900 spending shortfall for the average UK holiday maker.

• Political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East has affected core summer holiday destinations.

• The outstanding good weather around the extended Easter holiday period resulted in a query shortfall.

Travel queries and clicks continue to grow in 2011

• Year-on-year travel queries grew 24% year to date, which almost mirrors the growth seen last year.

• Clicks on travel ads grew by 12% year to date.

High query volumes expected before bank holidays and school holidays

• Similar to 2009, this summer is likely to show a two peak seasonality occurring around end of term and the August bank holiday. Based on historic data, travel queries are expected to rise by approximately 12% before these dates.

Mobile is the highest growth channel for travel searches

• Year-to-date, we have seen mobile travel queries increase by an impressive 133% and clicks by 300%, 2011 vs. 2010.

• Mobile accounts for 12% of total travel search traffic in the UK.

To learn more, please download the full report here.

Posted by Selina Rennie, Agency Team

Cross post from the Google UK Travel Blog


2011 is a great year for Easter bank holidays! To help advertisers plan for the coming season, we have analysed trends in 2010 and 2011 (to date) and have written our findings in the latest whitepaper, which you can download here.

Travel query growth year-to-date suggests that demand from the online travel consumer continues to grow (29% year-to-date), and we expect this to carry through the Easter weekend. The upcoming Royal Wedding may increase tourism within the UK. Sweden had the last major European Royal Wedding in July 2010. During this month, queries for hotels in Sweden originating from the USA grew 40% year-on-year. More impressively, hotel queries within Sweden rose 124% year-on-year.

We have also noticed more interest for short haul destinations when compared to long haul, the former growing 20% vs.7% year-on-year in January 2011.

For a more detailed analysis, please download the whitepaper. We hope you find the insights and recommendations helpful.


Posted by Jonny Cranmer, Travel Team

Cross Post from the Google UK Travel Blog


To help you plan for seasonal events, we have written a brief research paper for Valentine's Day 2011.

The study provides insights into how users search for travel products around February 14th; taking into account influencing factors, such as the spring half-term dates and the day of the week on which Valentine's day falls.

We hope you find the recommendations in this paper useful, and are happy to answer any questions you have.

Posted by Jonny Cranmer, Travel Team

This paper focuses on the opportunities in December 2010 and beyond, for the online travel market, in particular:

• Why December is becoming increasingly important for online travel.
  
  
• Why advertisers aren't keeping up with searchers in December.

• The effect of the extended January peak.
  
  
• How early demand picks up for seasonal events.
  
  
• The continued recovery in demand for Euro-zone and US destinations.

To find out more, the paper is available for download here.

Posted by Michael Wicks, Travel Team

As the summer holiday season is now upon us, our Google on the Street Team have been out talking to consumers about their travel plans.

Last year, 1 in 3 Brits spent an entire day trying to find the best holiday deals online (Source: Greenbee.com survey, January 2009). Are consumers still as keen to find the best deals online now that the economy has shown signs of recovery?

Watch our short video to find out what they said in response to the following questions:

• How do you decide where to go on holiday?

• Do you prefer to book your holidays in store, on the phone or online?

• How important is the internet when deciding where to go?

• Do you use online videos to research your holiday?

Posted by Selina Rennie, Agency Team

We're pleased to announce the release of our latest whitepaper, "A Paper Of Two Halves". Throughout the paper, we've highlighted insights on last year's query behaviour and have provided data which will hopefully help Travel advertisers plan for the summer ahead.




Key findings include:

Query and click growth accelerates in 2010:

• Travel queries have grown by 20% YoY in 2010 (YTD)

• Air related queries have increased by 24% YoY

• Clicks on Travel ads have risen by 13% YoY in 2010 (YTD)

CPCs have fallen:

• CPCS on travel ads have fallen by an average of 4% YoY (YTD)

• Hotel and car related CPCs have fallen by an average of 7% YoY YTD

Impact of the World Cup:

• Historical data shows that the World Cup has a direct impact on travel query volumes.

• In 2006, queries dropped by 6% during the World Cup, before strong growth the following month to compensate.

Changes in 2010 search seasonality:

• So far in 2010, travel queries have peaked earlier before public holidays, than observed in 2009.

• In 2010, travel queries peaked 11 days before the May bank holiday. In 2009, they were at their highest 4 days before.

To learn more, please download the full report here.

Posted by Jonny Cranmer, Travel Team

Google's UK travel team have just produced a white paper focusing on Easter Insights 2010. The paper provides insights that will help advertisers take advantage of upcoming seasonal opportunities. Here is an outline of content:


2010: The beginning of the road to recovery?

• Travel query and click growth is much stronger than this time last year.
• CPCs have fallen across travel products year on year.
• Monitor your budgets to allow for increased Search activity this year.
• It is more affordable to increase bids to drive traffic than it was last year.

Query trends in the run up to Easter

• Travel queries peak two weeks before Easter.
• Car Hire has the most positive and prolonged query growth over Easter.
• Flight queries peak earliest - indicating primary purchase consideration when booking a holiday.
• Monitor your bids and budgets in the context of rising demand and competition.

Use Easter modified keywords

• Easter keywords see high query volumes in the run up to the holiday.
• Last year we saw CPCs drop as demand increased on these keywords- an opportunity exists to gain cheaper traffic.

Top Easter Destinations

• Recovery of city break destinations YoY suggests a strengthening in the short breaks market.
• Turkey, Spain and Egypt, New York and Paris among the most popular Easter destinations.
• Demand for holidays to US and Eurozone destinations has seen large YoY increases.

Please download the paper here. You can find this and other white papers on our Google For Advertisers site.

Posted by Rashad Sharif, Industry Analyst, Travel Team

Our 'Google on the Street' team have been busy talking to people about their travel priorities since the recession. How have priorities changed? What are people looking for, when and how. We wanted to get some insights into the following questions.

• How are consumers choosing their holiday destinations, what motivates them?
• What does value mean?
• How is online helping those who are looking for value?
• How has corporate travel been affected since the recession?
• Do some consumers still prefer face to face interaction rather than booking online?

Take a look at this video to see what people said…



Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

The latest in the series of Google Travel whitepapers investigates the opportunities for advertisers over the Christmas period.



Traditionally a slow time of the year for the travel industry, Google travel query data demonstrates that December is becoming increasingly important. Consumers are conducting more research in the build up to Christmas and it is important for advertisers to be present at all stages of the decision making process.

Specifically, the paper discusses:

1. How December is becoming an important month for travel consumers as their search activity increases relative to other months
2. The changing mix of queries over the Christmas and New Year period. The long tail grows in importance in December; consumers are searching across a broader range of queries with additional modifiers
3. Opportunities which arise from drops in Ad Coverage and Ad Depth. December offers advertisers an opportunity to acquire traffic in a less competitive auction.
   

Please download the report here to see our recommended actions.

Posted by Michael Wicks, Travel Team

The aim of our most recent research paper, ‘Surfing this Summer’, is to provide data on travel search trends to help in planning for 2009. Our methodology was simple. We looked back over last Summer and analysed travel query trends. We split the period into three sections: Pre-school Summer holidays, Summer holidays & Back to school.

Our findings are referenced against factors we believe had some effect on people's travel related behaviour. We looked at how major sporting events, public holidays, macroeconomic conditions and weather influenced people's online travel research.

The results are interesting, highlighting opportunities where advertiser exposure to online traffic could be increased. For example the adverse weather in August and September 2008 lead to high travel query volumes throughout September, possibly because people were motivated to find some late sun. As our ad depth study shows, advertisers failed to fully capitalize on these searches.

We welcome all feedback on this paper and, as ever, we hope it proves insightful. Download it here.

Posted by Jonathan Cranmer, Industry Analyst, Travel Team