In this report, Sojern teams up with Google to explore and explain the modern traveler’s path to purchase. The project combines Google’s deep insight into hospitality and hotel search trends with Sojern’s unique data set of 350 million global traveler profiles, including billions of booking and search signals from data partnerships across the travel industry.
The new research report offers a state-of-the-art view of the hotel consumer’s extremely complex path to purchase, including:
- The relationship between hotel and flight searches
- The impact of hotel segments and traveler motivations on the purchase path
- How mobile trends are changing the hotel industry
With these learnings, travel brands and hoteliers can forge strategic campaigns that find and convert travelers with the right message on the right device at the right time.
Upper Funnel Planning Behaviour
As travel planning begins, one in five travelers are destination agnostic.1 Using search engines, like Google, travelers perform upper-funnel searches hoping to be inspired by a great travel brand video, location, or package.
Thanks to data from Sojern and Google, we have new insight into the rising search trends of travelers as they begin their planning.
Hotel Search Trends Year-over-Year
When travelers begin their trip planning, they turn overwhelmingly to Google. The types of brand searches they perform offer a number of surprises: with the rise of home sharing, branded searches for vacation rentals rose dramatically in comparison to traditional branded hotel searches.
Strong searches for casino branded hotels show that as travelers begin their planning many are interested in specialized lodging that promises the convenience of fun with their hotel.
Top 5 Fastest Rising Destinations Year-over-Year
Overall, Sojern and Google see year-over-year growth in searches for hotels. Intent to Europe has increased substantially over the same time period, driven by interest to new and emerging destinations like Portugal and Iceland.
